The Genius of Vancouverism

How the SkyTrain driverless metro system turned Vancouver into a diverse, cosmopolitan, and eminently livable city.

Metrotown, in the Vancouver suburbs, as seen from SkyTrain’s “driver’s” seat.

For Americans, and west coast urbanites in particular, Vancouver has an uncanny quality.

Here is a city with dramatic meetings of mountains, water, and infrastructure, quite like San Diego, San Francisco, or Seattle. At street level, the businesses, the cars, and the architecture look much the same as they do stateside. But take in the view from a waterfront or a hilltop, and central Vancouver reveals itself as a dense thicket of skyscrapers — more Hong Kong than Barbary Coast. The skyscraper corridors stretch outward along major boulevards, and form mini-downtowns in suburbs like Burnaby and Surrey.

The urban planning philosophy that produced this landscape is known as Vancouverism. It’s admired the world over for its livability, its eco-consciousness, and the political genius that enabled the city to grow vertically while retaining cherished views. All of this is true. But what I found on a recent visit is that transit is an underrated part of the equation. Without the city’s SkyTrain metro system, Vancouverism wouldn’t be possible.

Vancouverism ought to be the model for transit development, and transit-oriented development, in the U.S. Instead, most American cities are opting for out-of-date transit technologies and planning practices, when a better way is right across the border.

SkyTrain’s technology was the product of government-sponsored research undertaken in Ontario in the 1970s following the cancellation of a major freeway project. Toronto never got around to using the tech, so Vancouver picked it up. When SkyTrain began service in 1986, it was the first automated urban metro system in the world. (It’s amazing what government-funded science can achieve when dedicated to peaceful ends.)

These automated trains might read to Americans as super-sized airport people movers. And that’s, essentially, what they are. But there are a lot of advantages to taking this technology out of the airport and putting it in the city.

Lower labor costs and precise train control enable SkyTrain to run at remarkably high frequencies — as often as every two minutes. High frequencies, in turn, allow the system to move a lot of people on trains that are roughly half as long as those used on BART or the New York City subway. Shorter trains allow for cheaper, less complex station structures, which are one of the key drivers of high transit construction costs. Another cost-saving feature is that the SkyTrain system, as the name suggests, runs mostly on elevated guideways instead of in subway tunnels. These attributes enabled the initial system to be constructed for roughly half the cost of a traditional metro system.

Americans, or at least the ones who show up at planning meetings, have a passionate hatred for elevated rail. Vancouver shows that these fears are unfounded. Modern support structures and smaller, lighter trains keep noise to a minimum — no Brooklyn rattles or Oakland squeals here. As for the “aesthetic impacts” of elevated rail structures criss-crossing the city, the hundreds of thousands of people who have moved into new buildings directly adjacent to the lines seem to think it’s a worthy tradeoff.

The street scene in Metrotown (left) and the lovely Skybridge

Reasonable construction costs allowed planners to go long on ambition. SkyTrain has been continuously expanded since its debut and is now the largest automated metro system in the world. One of those extensions produced the Skybridge, the longest transit-only bridge in North America, and one of the continent’s most striking modern bridges of any kind. Workers are currently extending the Millennium Line in a subway tunnel down Broadway, one of the busiest, most densely populated parts of the city. Eventually, the plan is to extend this line even further west, serving the massive Indigenous-led Jericho Lands development,¹ and the campus of the University of British Columbia.

The urbanism that SkyTrain helped produce holds many lessons for American cities. Instead of a dramatic density gradient falloff in the neighborhoods surrounding the central business district, as seen in many U.S. cities, downtown-adjacent neighborhoods in Vancouver are filled with residential high-rises. This makes downtown walkable, bikable, and more economically resilient in the face of a crisis like COVID-19.

In more peripheral neighborhoods, Vancouver actualizes Peter Calthorpe’s concept of clustering high-density housing along suburban arterials. In America, the high-quality transit necessary to sustain this model remains theoretical. In Vancouver, it’s already there. Boulevards like Kingsway in Burnaby are a chaotic mix of gas stations, strip malls, and 40-story residential high-rises. It’s a vision of Silicon Valley’s El Camino Real a decade or two hence.²

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In Metrotown and downtown Surrey, legacy shopping centers form the commercial cores of new suburban downtowns. These gallerias are now ringed by residential tower clusters, which are well-integrated into the existing street network with pedestrian and bike paths — the opposite of inward-facing tower-in-the-green-style urban renewal projects. Based on the mix of businesses I saw, these new centers are ultra-diverse communal hubs for immigrants from East and South Asia, flying in the face of American stereotypes about whom new high-rise housing is for.  

This landscape illustrates why transit ridership in Vancouver is back to pre-pandemic levels. It explains how Vancouver thrives without any in-town freeways. It shows how the metro area has doubled in population since the 1980s with minimal sprawl development. And it embodies what it looks like for a city to be a welcoming magnet for immigrants.

Some cities in the U.S. are starting to get the picture. Most big cities are now encouraging housing construction downtown. A handful of suburbs, like Bellevue, Washington, and Tysons Corner, Virginia, are developing much like Surrey, with high-density development concentrated around a transit line. Honolulu’s recently-opened Skyline system is the first automated urban metro in the U.S., and once extended to the core of the city will demonstrate the benefits of this technology.

But it’s remarkable that automated metros remain so rare in the U.S., despite their success in Vancouver and numerous other cities around the world. It’s equally mind-boggling that new transit lines continue to be built without significant increases in allowable density near stations.

None of this is to say Vancouver is a perfect example for American cities to emulate. Despite high-profile pockets of density, the majority of the city remains zoned for single-family homes. The city and its suburbs could do a better job encouraging smaller scale “missing middle” housing in more neighborhoods. What’s more, housing in Vancouver is still fantastically expensive. Urban planner Patrick Condon points to this disconnect — lots of towers going up, continually rising housing prices — as proof that YIMBYism doesn’t work, and building more housing will not bring down prices.

While it’s true that building lots of market rate housing will never be sufficient to make housing affordable for everyone — that’s where public and social housing come in — Condon’s argument doesn’t debunk YIMBYism. Those new towers were necessary to absorb Vancouver’s massive population growth and immigration in recent years. But it still hasn’t been enough to keep up with demand. Vancouver, like virtually every other city in the U.S. and Canada, simply needs more housing: more market rate housing, more subsidized housing, more housing near transit.

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At least in Vancouver, there’s a concrete notion of what that looks like. Unlike in most American cities, there’s a sense here that the project of city-building never ended. Iconic infrastructure, like the Skybridge, has been erected in recent memory. The transit system continues to be extended. New and innovative forms of housing tenure, like the Jericho Lands project, are being pursued at an unprecedented scale. In a generation, Vancouver has transformed into an urban, cosmopolitan city, with a diverse population and a car-optional way of life.

Apparently, Vancouver didn’t get the memo that cities were done changing around 1970.

1. Jericho Lands and another high-density Indigenous-led development in Vancouver called Seanakw are fascinating housing policy case studies, where First Nations are creating massive mixed-income housing developments on their ancestral lands. There’s an excellent article in Maclean’s exploring these projects, and their political implications, in depth. These projects would seem to be relevant to community-initiated redevelopment projects at aging public housing complexes in the U.S., like Freedom West in San Francisco and Fulton Houses in New York. In all of these cases, communities that have historically been on the losing end of urban development are leveraging the value of their land to their own benefit, and, it would seem, to the benefit of the wider community.

2. The massive Menlo Park development I wrote about earlier this year would be perfect on El Camino Real, or right next to a Caltrain station. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a ways from quality transit. This is one of the problems with California’s zoning holiday, known as the builder’s remedy: It doesn’t allow for comprehensive urban planning that situates high-density housing exactly where it should be.