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Comment by cameronpm | Hacker News Reader

In Vancouver, you'll usually have a few grocery stores in <10min walk because of the zoning. Commercial is usually every 4-6 blocks. It takes 10 mins to walk 4 blocks, as they are small in comparison to other cities I've lived in.

Most American cities were designed to do everything by car.

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Vancouver is also notable for having mostly resisted the "urban interstate highway addiction" that incentivizes longer (distance) car trips in a lot of American cities.

Going to Toronto and seeing their highway along the water makes me sick. I can't believe they are cool with that. Boston at least realized their mistake and reversed it.

Thank you Tip O'Neill.[1] It's nice to get the rest of the country to pay for your urban planning mistakes. The Big Dig was sort of awful to live through. But getting rid of the elevated highway that cut off the North End was a huge win for Boston.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_O%27Neill

The eternal sadness is that in part due to that reliance on federal money, we were unable to put real rail infrastructure in as part of the project and could only get Bus-'Rapid'-Transit which led to the mediocre Silver Line.

In some parallel universe Boston is yukking it up with a high frequency train from Roxbury to the South End (along the original elevated Orange line route) to South Station to Seaport to the Airport and I hate them for it. I just know they demolished Central Parking at Logan and built a gleaming rail terminal in its place.

Yeah, the mediocre Silver Line (which has only become a more obvious "compromise" as the Seaport area has developed). As I understand it, there was also "supposed" to be a new better connection between North Station and South Station which never happened.

Though I shouldn't complain too much. Not that I go into the city a lot but the public transit system, including commuter rail, is pretty good by US standards overall for all its problems.

And parking at Logan is such a mess that I just get driven, expensive as it is. Even economy parking is expensive and it's practically in another state.

The city amalgamated with near inner-suburbs, which gave a lot of power to city councillors that are living in more car-centric neighborhood. So while people downtown couldn't give two shit about the highway and would like it destroyed, suburbans councillors voted to keep it because of course, that's the highway they use to drive to city hall. There was a decent plan to transform it into an urban boulevard (still large, but less ugly than elevated highway) and that lost.

And before anyone mentions people going to work that need the highway, majority of commuting to downtown business is not cars, but a combo of transit + cycling + walking.

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