Vancouver Vs. Warsaw: trains, planes and automobiles edition

It’s hard for me to imagine a city that is harder to get around than Vancouver. Partly this is because I haven’t lived in too many cities and partly it is because some 19th century dolt didn’t foresee the rise of the automobile and the growth of the city and decided to build the city’s core on a hard-to-reach peninsula. If Surrey were the core it would be much easier to get around. But then you’d have to go to Surrey.

Whatever the case, as a trip to Stanley Park yesterday showed, Vancouver traffic is hell. It’s bus system is decent but curbside parking means the buses are slower than a kid who’s been dropped on his head one time too many. They also don’t have the same variety of routes as, say, Warsaw, where nary a street is untouched by the city’s bus system.

Vancouver’s Skytrain system has more stations than Warsaw, but the trains are positively puny by comparison, indicative of a smaller number of users. Unfortunately, the aforementioned geography of Vancouver means that the most used stations are packed at the end of the lines. Ideally, of course, you would like the centre of the line to be the city centre, as in Warsaw.

Of course, Vancouver will soon complete its Canada Line, which will extend Skytrain service to Richmond and the airport. Contrast this with Warsaw, where commuter’s to the city’s Prague district on the other side of the Vistula river cannot take the metro. Drivers must instead navigate clogged bridges (like in Vancouver). Mass transit commuters can take (relatively fast) trams or buses.

To reach Warsaw’s outer limits from the city centre, one should expect to spend about 45 minutes in the metro and/or on the bus. To cross the city north-south would take (I’m really guessing) about 90 minutes. East-west I really have no idea but on a bus, I would guess about 100 minutes.

In Vancouver, to get anywhere from downtown will take you about an hour, if not more. From downtown to Port Coquitlam last week at about 3 p.m. it took about 80 minutes. It usually takes me about 40 minutes on metro and bus to get to my home in Central Vancouver.

An unlimited monthly transit pass in Warsaw costs about 75 zloty (about $30). In Vancouver, a one-zone, limited pass costs about $75 (about $75).

Verdict: Warsaw, but mostly due to Vancouver’s unfortunate (albeit, beautiful) geography.

Vancouver versus Warsaw

I know what you’re thinking. Like millions around the world, you’re wondering whether you want to live in Vancouver or Warsaw. I know, it’s a difficult choice, but with some help, maybe you’ll get through.

Like I posted earlier, every person is liable to like, or dislike, a city based on their own preferences and hobbies. But I’ll take a stab at it.

First up, and because I don’t have much time to write right now, the sun and the sky:

The weather, from my own limited experience, is a draw. Warsaw can be warm in the summer, as can Vancouver. Given that I’ve never experienced a Warsaw summer, I don’t think I can compare the two sunny seasons. But I have seen both cities in the winter and neither one is particularly attractive. Both are rainy, grey and dreary. Warsaw gets a little more snow, which can be good or bad, but Vancouver gets a lot more rain, which is definitely bad. On the other hand, Warsaw is quite a bit further north, which means that even when you can see the sun, it dips before the flat horizon before 4 p.m. in winter.

I was going to give Vancouver the point because you can easily retreat into the interior of B.C. to soak up sun or snow. But then I realized that while Poland itself may not be as climatically diverse as B.C., the good transportation links that link Warsaw with, say, Milan, even the field once again.

So a draw it is.

My nice city

It seems I now live in the most liveabile city in the world.

That’s nice. And although the Economist, which did the study, explains how it categorizes the cities, you have to wonder just how arbatrary such rankings are. After all, different cities are more liveable than others depending on what one is looking for. If you’re looking to get out of the city each weekend, Vancouver is close to mountains and such, but the traffic is killer. Calgary might be better, but there’s less around. Toronto…. Where ya gonna go?

But then, if liveability depends on how many concerts you can get to, well you’ll have a whole other list of cities.

Which isn’t to debunk any ratings of cities, but to kind of emphasize the fact that the appeal of any city can depend on the person doing the rating. Of course, the Economist rates general attributes most people consider universally positive so it is objective. But I’d like it to compare the big cities with smaller more regional cities as well (although that would obviously be too much work for a publication that looks at the whole world).

Richard Florida has a book called Who’s Your City. I’m not sure if he considers this (he’s an urban planner), but his title seems to relate.

Just a thought

Granny ghettos

Wherever you look in Warsaw, you’re liable to spot an elderly man or woman trudging along the sidewalk or sidling onto the subway, cane in one hand, grocery bags in the other.

Observing this, Magda pointed out today that there seem to be a lot of old people out and about in Warsaw, more than back home in Vernon or Kamloops. I’m not so sure but there does seem to be something there. As compared to Warsaw, in Vernon, which has a very healthy (if that is the right word) pacemaker-per-capita ratio, the elderly seem less visible.

Why? I have a couple theories. One, there are simply more pedestrians here, ourselves included, than back home where more people drive. More pedestrians mean more old pedestrians. My second theory, I think, is more interesting and perhaps worthy of further investigation.

In Warsaw, the elderly seem to be rather spread out. The hundreds of apartment blocks provide plenty of housing (some reasonably priced, some not so much) for the elderly all around the city. Those apartment blocks are also home to young families, teenagers, professionals and kindergartents.

In Vernon, however, elderly populations are very much confined to certain neighbourhoods. Granny ghettos, if you will. They live, play and go for walks within their closed communities, in their courtyards and, in downtown Vernon, between their apartment buildings, the Schubert Centre and Safeway. The result is a more age-homogenized population.

It is also, as Tom Lancaster, the man in charge of Vernon’s OCP, told me a couple years ago unhealthy for cities.

“You need the vibrancy of youth, you need the vibrancy of children, you need the whole spectrum and I think for a long time we’ve developed cities where we segregate people of the various age groups,” said Lancaster.

“It doesn’t work. You’ve got to mix all these things together to the point where older folks are no longer walking down the street and are afraid of the youth because they don’t live by them or youth are not going around making jokes at the expense of older folks or you don’t have people complining about the noise of young children bouncing a ball on the street.

“It’s ridiculous,” Lancaster said of gated age-restricted communities. “Part of life is all the different age groups and we need to wrap our minds around that.”

Dom sweet dom

We live in a neighbourhood of Warsaw called Wierzbno, which is large enough, population-wise at least, to warrant its own Wikipedia page (meaning it likely boasts one literate college student somewhere). Wierzbno is part of the borough called Mokotow.

Wierzbno, for what it’s worth, looks, on the map like one big square of residential area surrounded by a less populated area. From the ground the apartment block crowded vistas look about the same.

The area is three metro stops south of the centre of Warsaw and seems quiet enough so far. Mokotow, as a larger area, encompasses that area of Warsaw directly south of the city centre. When we were looking for an apartment, the largest number of listed apartments were in this area (which was handy since it also had an OK reputation.)

It’s interesting, looking at our tourist map, to look at southern Warsaw and wonder how it jams 1.7 million people within its borders (its metro area boasts more than 3 million people). The city seems to be as much a loose conglomeration of parks interspersed by residential areas as compared to a traditional city. There are several huge parks that are smaller than Stanley Park, but larger than anything else Vancouver has to offer. Elsewhere there are large chuncks of greenspace and public gardens.

Of course Warsaw has room for parks because it jams most of its people in Soviet-style apartment blocks but hey, you take the good with the bad, right?