Those quality-of-life lists can get quickly silly when we take them too seriously. Vancouver dropped to third place on the Economist Intelligence Unit?s Most Livable Cities list earlier this year, with Melbourne and Vienna moving up to first and second. That hurt.
How much better is Melbourne than Vancouver? Exactly 0.2% better, said The Economist – with points off for traffic conditions on the Malahat. So, we consoled ourselves, the list needn?t be taken too seriously.
But of course it is, especially when ?livability? becomes a factor in the high-stakes game of location choice by well-paying employers. Given that Melbourne and Vancouver, and no doubt Vienna, are all blessed with high ratings for life expectancy, material well-being, political stability and security – important things we almost take for granted – we look instead for differences on the ground.
How do Melbourne and Vancouver compare when you?re just walking around?
The big difference is size. Melbourne?s population is just over four million, twice Vancouver?s, but spread over a far greater area, and therefore faces far greater transportation challenges. Yet because Melbourne held on to its trams, as we did our trolleys, its traditional core is made up of the Victorian version of our streetcar neighbourhoods. And they too have converted brownfield waterfront sites into new urban districts.
But all this wonderful intensity and mix of uses is surrounded and penetrated by a web of freeways, bridges, tunnels and arterials, built by senior governments to serve the port, but without a commensurate investment in transit to serve the people.
Still, over 80% of people working downtown come by transit, compared with about a third of all commuters here. So the pressure on transit is acute – and here lies the greatest difference in the two regions.
TransLink is considered a vastly superior model over the fragmented ownership and responsibility that has challenged the Melbourne region.
Just as in Vancouver?s core, however, car traffic is declining, even as the population of residents and workers continues to climb. Melbourne, like Vancouver, has attracted thousands into its downtown to live, work, entertain and, with the presence of large universities, educate themselves.
Here?s where you see the increasing similarity between our two cities: Granville Street is becoming more like Melbourne?s main drag, Swanston Street.
Both are transit-ways, where the trams and trolleys have priority. The sidewalks have been widened, the cafés and coffee houses are spilling out from the storefronts and into the lanes, all filled with hundreds of students.
Both streets were once considered failures by those who saw restrictions on cars as a reason for their decline. The most recently elected Lord Mayor ran on a platform of returning cars to Swanston Street – and then became persuaded otherwise. Now Swanston is being rebuilt for trams and, get this, separated bike lanes.
Every day, several thousand cyclists, just as here, commute in and out or among the universities, having discovered that inner Melbourne is nicely scaled for the bike.
At the most important intersection in town – Swanston and Flinders – another analogy: a grand old pile of a train station disgorges thousands of suburban commuters just as our Waterfront Station does. But across the street there?s Federation Square – another pile of angled architecture – with what is surely one of the great public spaces in Australia if not the world. When Melbourne wants to celebrate, there?s no doubt where people will spontaneously assemble.
Sport and culture are two areas where Australia consistently swings above its weight, and Melbourne is in a whole different league than Vancouver, even better than Toronto, in its commitment to and quality of its theatre, museums, galleries, sports stadia and even casinos.
Yes, size matters but also the presence of the state cultural institutions in a city that is also a capital.
High-quality urban design, adventurous public art, street performers and food – Melbourne and Vancouver are both experiencing the great urban revival of our centres.
These differences and similarities only illustrate how much we can learn from each other, given that we both get excited about a competition we can afford to be silly about because we?re so seriously well off. ?
