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Comment by frosted-flakes | Hacker News Reader

Vancouver. The first section of SkyTrain was built in 1985 (40 years ago) well after cars had dominated the city. I couldn't find historical figures for transit mode share, but today more than 50% of all trips are made by public or active transportation, and 90% of residents live within 10 minutes of a frequent transit line.

For context, in most US cities that figure is 2-3%.

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This is really interesting, thanks! I haven’t found a good summary of the history in a couple of minutes of searching. Do you know if it was just huge government investment that drove the increase? And what drove the public sentiment to want transit vs more highways or whatever?

Another fact you may find interesting because it's unique, I think, for a North American city of its size: Vancouver has no freeways.

Within city limits, there are no roads with speed limits over 50 km/h (30 mi/h), lots of traffic lights, lots of bus/bike lanes, and lots of congestion. The Trans Canada highway skirts along the side of the city but does not enter it. Things get slow, very quickly.

There are complex historic reasons behind this. Politics, activism, lack of federal funding, etc.

This is a decent article:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/09/story-cities-...

Thank you for the link! This potentially helps to explain the relative popularity of public transit. I’m glad at least some places saw the writing on the wall early with freeway-dominated cities.

I think Detroit is an amazing example in the US of how much a sole focus on building our highways can cripple a city for decades.

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