What makes a livable city? Vancouver has it all figured out.

What makes a livable city? It isn’t traffic congestion, that’s for sure. Gordon Price, former Vancouver city council member, offered a look at an alternative.

Using historic photographs of several American cities, he showed the differences in street use 100 years ago and today. “Streets had a lot of pedestrians who could use it when they wanted to,” he said, showing a photo of Detroit. The image included people walking freely among the few cars and a horse-drawn wagon. “Now streets are dominated by cars,” he said, switching to a photo of the same location today. “It’s all because of ‘Motordom’ – an alliance of auto clubs, dealerships, and manufacturers that created a socially reconstructed purpose for streets.”

Rather than allow streets to be convenient for people, the alliance repurposed them for vehicles. To do that, they began a campaign to publicize the number of people that could be killed, the number of accidents, the number of jaywalkers, and other statistics designed to worry the population. By the 1920s, streets were transformed as roadways for cars, and the cities were accommodating them.

Then in 1942, a Transportation Planning Handbook was published for transportation engineers. It laid out the standards for “designing an efficient, free, rapid flow of traffic.” It was all about allowing vehicles to move faster, without pedestrians in the way. This was the Utopian vision for the future.

A decade later, the Eisenhower Interstate System became the world’s biggest public works project. These highways were promoted by stating that a driver could go X number of miles without ever encountering a traffic light. In fact, he said, today you can drive from Tijuana up to the Canadian border without hitting light. “The first one is probably when you come into Vancouver,” he said.

With the car came suburbia, which was supported by a network of arterials, cheap energy, abundant service land, continuous safe water, low-cost insured money, and the technology to make it all work. Today, there’s only one real choice for moving around – cars. Urban planning is now automobile dependent, and urban form follows parking! Now, he said, we do sprawl big time.

Gordon challenged the audience to name one urban area where a multitude of cars can exist and still have free-flowing traffic. Have we ever reached that Utopia envisioned in 1942? The fact remains that creating car-dependent communities still has not produced one livable city.

But the city of Vancouver handled it differently. No freeways traverse its urban core, even though they were proposed many times and in multiple configurations. “But not having arterials running through Vancouver has not affected the city’s livability,” Gordon said. “Instead, we induced congestion and made it our friend. It’s not easy to drive around the city. People can do it if they wish, but it becomes so inconvenient that they prefer transit. Pedestrians, bikes, blades, and transit have a higher priority than the single-occupant vehicle.”

Vancouver wants to be pedestrian friendly. Streets move at a walking speed. There’s a transit network of streetcars. Along those trunk lines are jobs and housing. A few cities in the US have had similar success by building along streetcar lines, such as parts of Washington DC and Arlington VA.

To be successful in this endeavor, cities must incorporate sufficient density, a good mixed use with proximity, good design, and transportation choices. In the last five years, Vancouver saw a 13% drop in car use and a 55% increase in alternatives. Counter to what one would expect, commute times have actually dropped.

“We’ve bucked the national trend,” Gordon said. “And we did it without taking away people’s cars. We just gave them more choices.”

In fact, with the 2010 Olympics, Vancouver had a great controlled traffic experiment. Through efficient use of transit and discouraging car traffic in the central district, the city reduced that traffic by 30%, SkyTrain had 290,000 passengers (nearly three times more than the expected 100,000), and other transit systems saw similar spikes. “We blew everything away,” Gordon said. “We proved that Vancouver can be a successful post-Motordom city.”

The concept of Motordom drove out other choices and made cities vulnerable to the vagaries of fuel prices and other factors beyond their control. After the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the ensuing environmental disaster, where can we go? How much more will we sacrifice just to keep our cars running? That’s a question only we can answer as we make our personal transportation choices, as we vote for transportation policies, and as we make use of our public funds.

For more insight into Gordon Price’s ideas, go here