I think what they just mean is that you only have all your searchable fields indexed in ES and then, when you do a search query, the only thing ES returns is PKs which you then do a second roundtrip to the database (or cache) with to get all the actual records from. Which means you don't have to worry too much about all the record information being in sync perfectly.
Love the Shop app. But one major compliant is that there is no email verification. So I get notified of every order that accidentally used my email address (common Indian name @ gmail.com). Wish I could only be notified of orders that I placed.
>> So I get notified of every order that accidentally used my email address (common Indian name @ gmail.com).
Someone needs to solve the (common Indian name @ gmail.com) problem. Preferably, Google/Gmail would solve this. But my email gets signed up on a daily basis to new services.
No it seems like the name is just common, so someone else mistypes their own email and it then becomes common indian [email protected], which is actually OP's email
I actually have people use my gmail.com like this. Someone even signed up for facebook with this. I accidentally clicked 'yes' like an idiot and then it took months before they'd let my email off the bloody account.
Everyone uses my (real first name / not my middle name) email for all sorts of receipts. I've received African tenant agreements, some dude's Intel payroll document, all sorts of shit.
That's pretty funny. Sorry for the trouble. This has literally never happened to me. There are two other Arthur Collé's in the world, hopefully the booby traps work and I become the one true king one of these days
Super sweet. I love Shop app. Tracking shipments is a nice way to get app installs... and you can backdoor a shopping experience as you roll out new versions. Well played!
It's funny, I sent them an email long long long time ago asking if there was some way to source all products on Shopify so I could build just this. Maybe they noted it and turned it into a product.
This reminds me of my number one response when "friends" come to me with startup ideas.
Your company is another company's feature. As in, you are trying to build a business, on something that is an afterthought, tiny feature for an existing company to add.
Shopify has been around for a while—since before Amazon became the everything-retailer that they are now. It started out of frustration at the myriad annoyances in trying to get set up using osCommerce and other tools of that generation.
I think an even better solution would be a curated search. Like Amazon there are plenty of dropshipping low quality stores / products on Shopify. I would like someone to build out a search of the best 500 stores.
I had a look, #1 there doesn't seem to be a search option (maybe not public to all yet?).
#2 I had a look at some of the stores shown in the "search" icon tab, aka explore, but how am I meant to find out if something is just a dropshipping product from ali, marked up at 400% or a genuine, good quality product, worth spending $40 on.
(the one I saw, could well have gone fro $4 on ali)
That, and I hope this arrives on desktop, I dislike shopping on mobile, makes it hard to compare and verify a product isn't cramp from ali.
One main distinction is that Shopify shops have a direct to consumer relationship. They can send you emails, and build up a brand. Amazon keeps the customer relationship, and if you succeed, they'll try to commoditize you. So it isn't that much different for the user (with a unified checkout out cart), but is much better for the store owner.
Edit: you might find this article about the differences between the Shopify and Amazon ecosystems interesting
This is a great point about trying to fix Demand side problems with a Supply solution. This is a recent paper talking about this todo with nutrition (Does access to healthy food actually make people healthier?): https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/134/4/1793/549...
Calling it a demand side problem implies you don't want more people living in desirable areas (I'm guessing you live in one of these areas?). That is blatant NIMBYism mixed with some xenophobia. When you reduce demand people are priced out by high interest rates and have to move to less desirable locations. That has real impacts. People have to commute further to their jobs. People can't get their ideal jobs, not because they're not qualified, but because they can't afford housing. That is not an ideal outcome compared to just building more supply.
Contrasting calorie consumption with the housing market is just disingenuous. One is clearly not a market and the other one clearly is. People like you are just going to have to understand that as population in North America grows cities are going to have to get denser and your lifestyle is no longer a viable one because it comes at the cost of millions of peoples' lives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Incredible map, I've never seen this before and I grew up here.
Zoning decides so much of the vibe of a city/neighbourhood. Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
Having lived in 6 other cities, other things Vancouver does well that aren't obvious on this map:
- Narrow streets (avoids traffic in side streets)
- No highways in the city (loud, dangerous, take up lots of space)
- Grass on both sides of sidewalk and trees on every street.
- Extremely high park density.
- Protected bike lanes everywhere.
- Side streets with random dead ends.
- Commercial streets every ~4-6 blocks that allow more traffic + bus routes.
- Rectangle structured blocks with numbers 1 direction and names the other.
> Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
NIMBYism. I would rather have 6x more houses that people can AFFORD to live than 1/6th the homes owned by the richest people in the city who _really love it._
You can design beautiful neighbourhoods that are much much denser than they are now.
Single family zoning should be abolished in this city if we have any intention of solving the housing crisis.
> Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
NIMBYism.
Name calling as an argument technique.
You can design beautiful neighbourhoods that are much much denser than they are now.
In theory. Sometimes it actually happens in reality, too.
Most of the time though, when developers and their paid servants (aka your elected representatives) get together, something rather different from this glossy vision you seem to have ends up happening. In most cases the end reuslt is not at all beautiful, and (when you actually crunch the numbers) not all that affordable, either.
Not too infrequently it devolves into outright shenanigans, with profound betrayals of trust, and huge swaths of development opportunity more or less handed out to connected donors and/or other political kingpins (in exchange for who knows what votes or other favors they have to offer).
That's how it goes, and like the Leonard Cohen song -- everybody knows.
I agree that zoning has its pros and cons. And just because we did things a certain way 50 year ago, doesn't mean we have to keep doing it that way.
But the attitude you're presented sounds (to these jaded ears) well - saccharine. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be fundamentally circumspect about the promised benefits of many (if not most) proposed zoning changes. There's no need to assume that anyone who doesn't share your own enthusiasm for such changes is (as you imply) just fundamentally self-centered - or filthy rich.
Abolishing mandatory single-unit zoning is different from saying no one can have such a unit. People should have a wide variety of housing options available based on their needs and price points.
It seems like we really should be able to make soundproof apartments today. I’m definitely not an expert but it’s hard to believe that we can’t we make thick walls with the right material between apartments.
A lot of construction and transportation seems like it’s needlessly bad due to underinvestment and old equipment. I think we can make almost noiseless EV cars like Teslas today, no-compromises high density housing, quieter construction equipment and so much more.
We definitely can. The apartment I lived in from 2018-2019 was ghostly quiet. For the first five months, I could easily have been convinced that we were the only people that lived on our floor.
Sound proofing is absolutely trivial to install and its benefits by far exceed its costs... It should be absolutely mandatory on any multi-family building.
As an avid biker in Vancouver, I can unfortunately not confirm that. There's a few strategic ones, but it's far from everywhere. https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/map-cycling-vancouver.pdf has the overview. It unfortunately doesn't cover the extended area, but already shows that outside of downtown only a small amount of fully protected lanes exists - like Arbutus Greenway.
The "local street bikeways" tend to actually be pretty good though. There are plenty of traffic diverters and other calming elements, unlike most North American cities that just paint sharrows and pray for the best.
Fully agreed. I would feel safe on most of the "green" streets on the map.
The intention was definitely not to state that overall Vancouver has a bad infrastructure - it's certainly better than average. But just to clarify that the amount of fully separated lanes is not that high.
Also it gets a bit worse in suburbs like North/West Van, New Westminster, etc.
Yeah anyone who thinks that Vancouver bike infrastructure is bad is delusional - it's not perfect but no city is (especially in north America) and you can get basically anywhere in the city on a safe side street
> Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
This is such an odd statement; it's "not even wrong."
Vancouver zones most of its land for low-density suburban houses that accommodate very few people. It also has many examples of zoning districts that accommodate a lot of people in urban neighbourhoods that people love to live in. You can just change one zoning district to another proven one!
> Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
Well, avoiding changing zoning has created areas that nobody can afford to live in, so they don't really have a choice at this point. Vancouver's affordability crisis is generally considered by economists to be the worst in North America.
Not really. If you don't build more homes, you have to limit how many people can live there. The latter is currently accomplished by money, but could be shifted to lotteries and waitlists if there was strict rent control or all housing was public. Both of those are significantly worse than just building more.
Worse for who, though? The traditional political power base of cities is homeowners, particularly those with enough wealth and free time to get involved with politics.
By owning homes, they don't care about the iniquity caused by wait lists, lotteries, or rising prices. In fact, they benefit greatly from rising prices. And if they can keep people out, they don't have to worry about change causing any discomfort to what they currently enjoy.
> In fact, they benefit greatly from rising prices.
Maybe. If they are able to sell at the peak. A house isn't a share of stock you can sell when the market is up. Typically you hold until the kids move out and you retire and then sell, so the timing is handed to you by life. If housing market is down the year you retire, bad luck.
Meanwhile all those years they are living the house instead of selling, rising prices hurt the homeowner because it means taxes go up.
As a homeowner I sure wish the estimated value never went up. I'd rather be paying the same taxes as when I bought it instead of a lot more.
Compare your financial setting from massive financial gain versus not having it: you are immeasurably better off than the person that did not own a house during the same time period. You are also immensely better off than anybody who was born later and doesn't have massive family resources for the down payment.
The rise in prices is the predictable (and desired) form of demand-side management thay results in market-based pricing of homes.
In another comment you express the desire that people should live places other than Vancouver. That rise in prices gives you both financial power and the displacement of others that you desire. I think it's wrong.
> Compare your financial setting from massive financial gain versus not having it
Again: maybe. If I'd sold in 2006 I could have made a gain. But if I'd retired in 2008 after the housing crash and had to sell while the mortgage was underwater, there would have been no gain at all.
If I sold today I could make a profit but I can't sell today because I'm not at that stage in life so it's meaningless.
I'm still relatively far from retirement so there may or may not be another large housing crash between now and then (I think there will be but I don't have a crystal ball). So nobody can predict whether the paper gains I have on home value today will exist when I retire and sell. Personally I don't care because I don't keep a house as an investment, it's a home to live in and a stable place for my child to grow up in.
> You are also immensely better off than anybody who was born later
False equivalence. I'm better off than most 25 year olds, yes. I'm also far better off than my own 25 year old self who had a net worth deep in the red. This has nothing to do with year of birth. It's about stage in life. At 25 I'd just finished school and owned nothing but debt. Now a couple decades later I have the benefit of a couple decades of savings from my career.
> In another comment you express the desire that people should live places other than Vancouver.
I have not expressed such desire. I didn't desire to not be able to live in Manhattan. Giving up that dream hurt. But pragmatically it was a wise choice. I'm better off having moved to a cheaper place and built a life here instead of staying tilting at the windmills of the Manhattan real estate market that I could never crack.
Same strategy might work for someone tilting at windmills in Vancouver today. That's not a desire, just pragmatism.
> That rise in prices gives you both financial power and the displacement of others that you desire.
I desire no such thing. You keep putting words in my mouth that I never wrote, so I won't be responding tit for tat.
Good luck explaining that nuance to everybody in the neighborhood who thinks their home value is the most important thing.
> rising prices hurt the homeowner because it means taxes go up.
That depends. Idk how other places do it, but where I live there's a fixed amount of total tax for the year and it's distributed to each home based on its value. So if all the homes in the city go up equally you're paying the same tax every year, but if your neighborhood goes up faster than others, then you're paying more.
What sort of demand side solution are you considering? Housing is a basic necessity of life. Perhaps by reducing demand you mean that instead of one family living in a single family home, demand for living space is reduced so that two families live in the same space?
It certainly is and should be a fundamental human right.
However, living in Vancouver specifically isn't a necessity. There are more affortable places.
In my 20s my dream was to live in Manhattan, I wanted it so bad. Never made it, way too expensive. Had to give up that dream. A couple decades later I still occasionally wish it could've been, but never was. I have a nice house and built a nice life elsewhere.
Not to take away from efforts to build more and affordable housing in the big cities, which is good and necessary. But want to point out that the idea that everyone can get to live in NYC/SF/Vancouver on the cheap isn't quite a realistic position to take either. Often the most pragmatic solution is to find a different city to live in.
> But want to point out that the idea that everyone can get to live in NYC/SF/Vancouver on the cheap isn't quite a realistic position to take either.
This is a common NIMBY trope: "everyone" wants to live here and that's impossible, so we shouldn't try.
It's false in that not everyone wants to live in Vancouver/NYC/SF, far from it. But, it's easy to allow everyone who wants to to live in these places. In another comment you expressed the desire to keep your place in the city, without the burden of rising property taxes that go with your massive financial gains. Why should you get that, but not somebody else? On what basis do you privilege your own basic needs over others? That's no way to run a society, saying "got mine, forget all the rest of you."
They also have view cones, which are:
"a policy enforced by the City of Vancouver that limits the heights of the buildings to protect sight lines of the North Shore mountains from a number of arbitrary perspectives"
Seems like view cones are a frequent criticism of certain pro-housing activists, but I think we can see from this Vancouver Zoning Map is the real low hanging fruit for more housing development is the vast swath of land zoned exclusively for single family homes.
Personally I can't understand the hate for the viewcones that I sometimes see. Talk with any newcomer to the city and they absolutely love the mountains. The mountain views are one of the selling points of this city. It would be utterly mad to block them.
Depends on the view cone, I think. I agree that view cones aren't public enemy number 1, but some really are bad.
I live near one in East Van that is utterly useless; it's defined as starting in the middle of a road, and the view is blocked by tree foliage most of the year anyway. And yet because of it, multiple proposed apartment buildings have been cut short.
The one from the top of Queen E Park is also weirdly low. Like you could almost double the height of the towers downtown and you still wouldn't be blocking the view of the mountain from this viewpoint, so the view is really damn odd.
That's the thing - it's the _newcomers_ who absolutely love the mountains. Everyone else are perfectly content with knowing that they exists and don't need (or want) to see them every day from their window. It's a good perk, but it's no more than that.
> Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
This implies that the current zoning was implemented for good reason. That's basically never the case. Most existing zoning was done either to increase property values or to keep out people that the elites don't want to be around.
Are you perhaps being a tad hyperbolic? Is it fair to say that the suburb layout is generally considered ideal to live in? Supply issues aside, I would argue that most people would move to a suburb rather than a dense city all other things equal.
Is there a compromise that you’d be okay with? Maybe sprinkle in some high-density apartments around to supplement the single-family housing? Maybe wipe away rental properties so that you don’t have effectively vacant units for portions of the year?
No need for inferred preference, actual preferences of where Americans would prefer to live are 19% urban, 46% suburban, and 35% rural [1]. 71% of urban residents who would like to move want to move to a suburban or rural area, in contrast, 23% and 20% of suburban and rural residents who would like to move respectively want to move to an urban area [2]. Contrary to what your blog post implies, most people have some idea of what each type of living condition is like, and they are making an educated choice.
There are cheap high-density areas and expensive low-density areas. According to your and that blogpost's logic, Silicon Valley's high housing prices in single-family neighborhoods and the fact that people want to move there are proof that people ACTUALLY want a suburban lifestyle, not an urban one.
Looking at where people live and where they want to live is a better source of their actual preferences than looking at housing prices in a handful of expensive neighborhoods and guessing what the average person wants.
Sure, as long as we also get rid of all urban growth boundaries. Be careful what you wish for, a free market city won't look like what you think it will.
They already do in many places. Toll roads exist, and the gas tax pays for almost all of the highways anyways. Transit is subsidized an order of magnitude more. A world with no subsidies looks more like suburban sprawl than a dense transit focused city.
Not even a little bit. Go read about exclusionary zoning in general or see your sibling comment's link for some reading on Vancouver specifically.
> Is it fair to say that the suburb layout is generally considered ideal to live in?
Is it considered ideal? Maybe. Is it actually ideal? No.
Aside from the huge negative impacts on pricing and equality that we've already discussed there's the environmental impact, isolation, car dependence, etc, etc.
> I would argue that most people would move to a suburb rather than a dense city all other things equal.
This is unfortunately true for Americans and I'd guess Canadians as well. I think this is due to some combination of:
- The absurd "American dream" vision that's been pushed by car manufacturers and other companies for many decades.
- Most American cities aren't actually very good, so most Americans have never experienced the alternative.
- Fox News and other conservative media pushing the narrative that cities are infested with criminals, terrorists, etc.
> Maybe sprinkle in some high-density apartments around to supplement the single-family housing?
Great. This is what would happen if there wasn't zoning.
> > Is it fair to say that the suburb layout is generally considered ideal to live in?
> Is it considered ideal? Maybe. Is it actually ideal? No.
Ideal in what? Ideal has to be measured by some metric, so which one or which ones?
What makes these discussions interminable is that some of the metrics are objective but some are subjective so there can't be any one ideal answer.
An objective measure is housing units per square km. Easy to measure, it's just math. Obviously high-rise apartment buildings maximize that metric. So is that the only metric that should ever be considered? Or the most important one?
Then there are also the subjective metrics of niceness. While many people might be happy living in those high-rises, many people won't do it.
Should the density maximizers be the only people who get a vote in these matters? If so, why is that? Why are they more special citizens than others? That sure doesn't sound fair.
Or should they get no vote? Well that's not fair either.
So clearly there can't be one ideal answer, it's compromises all the way.
Many people will have legitimate preferences that differ from yours, that in no way makes them "absurd".
> Many people will have legitimate preferences that differ from yours
If your preference means that teachers can't afford homes within city limits, emissions won't improve, infrastructure can't be sustained [1], cars are the only viable transportation, etc, etc, then your opinion should really be discarded by decision makers.
A suburb can be significantly denser than another, even just allowing duplexes or front/back lots can double or more the carrying capacity of a suburb.
It’s nice that Vancouver doesn’t have a highway cutting it in half like Seattle, but it also takes longer to drive anywhere.
From my experience, many of its neighborhoods/dining districts feel really cold/loud/unwalkable due to the high speed 4 lane roads everywhere. Traffic noise still seems like a huge issue, trying to parallel park when cars are buzzing by at 50 mph isn’t fun, and the unprotected left turns are pretty gnarly.
> many of its neighborhoods/dining districts feel really cold/loud/unwalkable due to the high speed 4 lane roads everywhere
Yeah, this is an unfortunate aspect of Vancouver's city planning; our zoning forces nearly all shops and restaurants onto busy, loud, polluted arterial roads. Changing this isn't really on the political landscape right now, and I don't think it's going to change anytime soon.
Driving is just one mode of transportation. Buses can take 3 or 4 times as much time to reach any destination, which is far too much to be a viable alternative to people with a choice.
Ask yourself if you would like to spend 45 minutes aboard the bus system as opposed to 15 min. in a car
> Ask yourself if you would like to spend 45 minutes aboard the bus system as opposed to 15 min. in a car
Ask yourself how the options would be different if cities weren't so focused on cars.
Edit: To be less vague - my choices to get to work are 20 minutes on bike basically for free, 25 minutes via metro for ~$100 a month, or 40 minutes by car for about $500 a month in tolls and parking plus thousands a year for the car itself and maintenance. There's no reason this can't be the norm in the US aside from local politicians deciding they don't want it.
Yes I acknowledged this in my previous comment. But it could be normal for every city with some pretty simple changes that no mayor is willing to make.
If a full lane is dedicated to buses instead then that bus would be much faster than the cars stuck in traffic, while moving significantly more people.
In general, I agree with you. In specific, I drive almost everywhere despite being a supporter of public transit, because I can't afford to live near a skytrain station and the 'last mile' adds an hour to a trip. If we had more buses, and most routes had dedicated lanes, sure. But since we're half-assing it all, more gridlock is just more gridlock. Which, among other things, means more pollution.
edit: compare to a city like Seattle, which has similar weather, hills, density, etc. A notable feature of the transit centers there is a Park & Ride: a place where folks can park their cars (for free, when I lived there) and get into transit. Vancouver does not have anything of the sort. If you want to park somewhere and take transit into the downtown core, there are extremely limited options. So you get too many drivers. Disincentivizing cars usage is great when there is a viable alternative -- in the absence of such an alternative, it's just flagellation for its own sake.
Sure, you're making a reasonable choice given the current reality. But it doesn't have to be that way. When I say driving should be difficult, I don't mean just make the roads worse without any other changes. I mean improve active transportation, transit, and housing density/affordability. In the short term, each improvement here will cause some pain in making driving slightly harder, but after sufficient time the other options will be good enough that nobody will miss driving.
I feel like LA and Amsterdam are both evidence that having a big highway cutting a city in half is neither necessary nor sufficient to make journeys (even car journeys) faster.
It's not immediately apparent from the street names; but the Grandview Highway and Georgia St effectively act as parts of a bifurcating through-way, albeit with a congestion nightmware between them.
Not really comparable to a highway. I mean, yes it's a wide street, but you can just walk across Georgia Street as a pedestrian. Can't do that with the sort of highways that scar the landscape of so many North American cities.
That's an interesting one to me, because I'm generally bothered by how wide Vancouver streets are. IIRC most Vancouver residential streets are 33 feet wide, waaaaaaaay wider than in many European and Asian cities.
From the other side of the pond, your list makes me sad. It appears we take a lot of urban design elements for granted here. I grew up in commie blocks, am now in Haussmannian urbanism, and most of those ( i mean there isn't grass and trees on every street, but it's pretty frequent) are just.. basic common sense here.
Like the fact that there's a term, "transit oriented development" used in North America. Here it's just common sense, nobody calls it anything.
Commie blocks in Eastern Europe and Haussmannian buildings in France.
And i didn't say those are better than Vancouver, just that OP's list about why Vancouver is better than most NA cities is common sense which can be said about most cities in Europe.
There are also a few bads, some that can be seen from the map:
- Quite a few stroads[0]: Granville around 70th, Granville around Broadway, Cambie around Broadway, 4th West of Burrard, most of Broadway, many sections of Kingsway, the section of W 41st Ave under the Kerrisdale label, and others.
- In general, getting East-West by vehicle is notably worse than North-South. While I 90% agree with your highway comment, this does make the situation frustrating at times.
- Vancouver is less bad than most of the cities that surround it, but it still has job areas a little too clustered in a few spots.
- Most land is low density in a city that has a huge housing shortage.
- Skytrain doesn't cover the majority of this map.
- Residential neighbourhoods have so much street parking that kids can't play street hockey these days. In general, there are too many cars in residential areas that kids can't play outside with the minimal supervision I had as a child.
I will add one more good:
- Grid designs tend to have a problem where local roads don't remain local roads and instead become side streets for cars. Vancouver has done a good job of using tools to keep these local roads serving just local traffic: narrow streets, tight visibility, forced turns, etc. Besides the benefit this provides to locals, it also helps with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
[0] - Stroad is a portmanteau of street and road. By trying to be both, if fails to do either. Stroads suck no matter what type of user you are:
Car perspective:
- For thru traffic they suck since they are "too busy", traffic usual goes slower than the speed limit.
- For traffic stoping at a local destination they suck because getting to your destination is difficult: the road is busy so you need to focus 110% on driving, but you also gotta find parking, places to turn around, etc. A lot of people put pressure on themselves if they block traffic while parking and that is a necessary aspect of driving to a business that is on a stroad.
- Unprotected left turns usually only allow 1 vehicle per cycle of the lights. There will be a lot of unprotected lefts happening in these areas.
- For locals they suck because your community has congested traffic all the time.
For pedestrians:
- The area is loud due to all the cars. God forbid if people start honking. And this is Vancouver. I've seen people honk at parked cars a few dozen times in the last 5 years.
- If you have to cross the street, it can be a real bother as you will have to wait for a crossing signal that may take a few minutes. When you finally get your turn, you have to deal with drivers who are desperate to make their left turn.
- Walking distances are higher than they'd otherwise be on a proper street.
For cyclists:
- Commuting: Prepare to Die Edition
For business owners:
- While the traffic does get you some amount of visibility, a lot of that traffic will simply never stop at your business. There is also a portion who won't go due to the difficulty in driving in the area.
- You probably get way more business from random people walking by than from random people driving by. The artificially high walking distances mean fewer walkers.
- You have to soundproof your facade to deal with the noise.
- Prior to the lockdown, Vancouver city council was quite against patios and balconies at businesses. These days, they are allowing more of them. These will necessarily be loud and there is nothing you can do. Customers will complain.
>- No highways in the city (loud, dangerous, take up lots of space)
Why doesn't this result in cars simply traveling on regular streets and creating noise and danger in the exact same space as pedestrians, cyclists, and residents?
If you're speaking about the part on the map that is labeled "Grandview highway", it's just a name - it is a regular street interrupted with traffic lights, bordering "The Grandview Cut" which has both train tracks and metro ("Skytrain") tracks: https://goo.gl/maps/B9dTbxg4LhedP9C7A
It doesnt cut through what most people would consider the “city” part of Vancouver which is the denser part of downtown. It’s also not really like a highway that most people refer to. It’s nothing like the 400 series in Toronto, or the I5 in Seattle.
It's interrupted in its path by the viaducts, but the highway begins again to cut through Stanley Park and cross to the North Shore.
Vancouver's not a particularly well-designed city; its lack of a fully through highway is more a circumstance of indecision than design. It's still a city hampered by office districts and bedroom communities, linked with stroads, like many North American cities.
Montreal is nice. Most people, even as far out as Outremont, have a grocery store within walking distance. Metro map could be improved but is decent for the core. Transit runs decently during peak times. Main issue is lack of bike lanes, but there's always a shortage of bixis so apparently people do cycle. Easy access to parks, I've got two within walking distance. Unfortunately the metro does stop at around 1a, so going on a downtown bar until closing means you're taking a night bus back.
There aren't any, really; because we didn't spend the 20th Century thinking of alternatives to commuting via personal automobile from bedrooms to offices.
Yes, just like with communism, to which I alluded in my comment, with urban design we also have a problem of figuring out what people want, where, and how much of it. The “urban design” people often have the similar mindset to communist planners, who knew better what people should want than the people themselves.
The 400 series highways don't go anywhere near Toronto's downtown either. The 401 skirts around Toronto's suburbs, far to the north of what anyone would consider the city.
The urban Toronto road you're probably thinking of is the Gardiner Expressway, which is owned and managed by the city itself, not the provincial government.
For decades, there have been calls to remove the elevated downtown section which cuts Toronto off from its waterfront. Something that would not only remove a source of blight and open up the development potential of some significant tracts of prime land, it would also save the city a fortune in maintenance costs!
It's also slated for removal (at least the upper viaduct), a very large park is meant to be built in its place (the architects that designed the High Line park in NYC were going to be designing the project, at least as of 3 years ago).
Yup, and coincidentally there's basically no plan whatsoever to either move offices out of downtown or significantly improve transit options into downtown.
And it's not going all the way to UBC, which is the reason why the B-line is so crowded. You stop 1/3rd of the way there and then transfer to the B-line again.
It's inevitable. It's really only a matter of time.
There's only so much money that (is politically viable) to spend on this stuff at any given moment. As soon as the line to Langley is done we're gonna see a pivot to building out to UBC or North Shore.
