The humiliation of it all.
It’s one thing that Toronto is the Centre of the Universe – indisputable to the typical jowly, pink-faced T.O. businessman, tubbiness camouflaged by his $3,500 suit. Let ’em have it. For much of this youngish century, Vancouver held the title of World’s Most Livable City, bestowed by the Intelligence Unit of prestigious London magazine The Economist. Take that, Hogtowners!
The ugly dethroning began last year. Melbourne, inhabited by persons who speak an untranslatable dialect of the English tongue, and Vienna, a shrunken 19th-century imperial capital populated mostly by tuba players, displaced Vancouver at the top (inexplicably just one notch above Toronto, which throws into doubt the Economist Intelligence Unit’s, well, intelligence).
This year Vancouver vanished from the top 10 altogether. Melbourne held on to first place.
Why? Choose any or all:
1. Any respectable mid-sized city can have a riot. Vancouver police (“we also serve who only stand and watch”?) blew the 2011 Stanley Cup orgy. Investigators are blowing the slow-mo investigation. The Crown is blowing the glacial prosecution. The judges don’t get it. The supposedly shuffling U.K. cleared away its coincident riots pronto.
2. Any respectable mid-sized city has public transit hurdles. TransLink hesitates to jump. Suburbanites standing on buses for an hour or two twice a day – that’s a real-life scandal. (Solution: an overseeing body that forces TransLink to perform, like the U.S. Environment Protection Agency forced Detroit, ignoring its piteous whines, to clean up exhaust pipe poisons. It worked.)
3. Any respectable mid-sized city has traffic problems. Look at Vancouver’s arterial choke-points. Check your watch. Hmmm, nothing’s moving, or has the watch battery died?
4. Any respectable mid-sized city has a community intelligence, and knows that mendacious mankind will cheat the ferry (or any) system if invited to. Naïve Vancouver was astounded by this discovery. Also that attacks on bus drivers by fare-evading reptiles require lightning response and very harsh penalties unforgettable even for the reptile brain.
5. Any respectable mid-sized city with nine months of rain, ringed by tall mountains and interrupted by steep hills has no illusion that bicycles have more than a very limited transportation or even exercise function, also restricted by the rider’s age, wellness and ready access to showers at each end of the journey (or sniff-challenged colleagues/customers/family).
6. And then there’s Mayor Gregor Robertson and his Vision dwarfs. Mayor Moonbeam, as he’s kindly referred to by irresistible radio ranter Bruce Allen, isn’t a predictable left-winger in a politically leftist city (bad enough) so much as an unpredictable nostalgic 19th-century reactionary, blunderingly winging it – imagining a simpler and simplistic life, beating cars into bicycles, fighting wraiths of golf-playing robber barons, replacing urban lawns with wheat and chicken coops, and giving the colour green a bad name.
A recent city hall concept drawing saves a thousand words: a re-imagined Granville Bridge dominated by well-used central bicycle and pedestrian lanes. On the flanking roads are four thoroughly ashamed cars, decently obscured by greenery.
“It is absolutely an idea that we could investigate and look at further,” enthuses transportation director Jerry Dobrovolny.
Can Victorian gents on penny-farthings, and demure lady cyclists in bloomers, be far behind?
Or perhaps The Economist (founded 1843) simply noticed Robertson is taxing already pressed mortgage-payers to subsidize housing for the undeserving and deserving poor alike, and, like another famous Victorian, was not amused. •
