Category Archives: vancouver

May Dusk in East Van

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spring dusk, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

The view from my apartment. I actually live in a fairly nice neighbourhood, but it’s a nice neighbourhood that from certain angles (including my front window) looks charmingly dingy. As the weather gets warmer, and the immediate pressure of thesis and paper deadlines has temporarily waned a little, I’ve been doing a lot of walking around the side streets and alleyways of the east side. I like walking. You can see and hear and smell things you’d miss otherwise. Plus, it lets me catch up on my podcasts.

I’ve been an East Vancouverite for almost two years now, though I haven’t explored this side of the city nearly as much as I’d like. Vancouver is not remotely an old city, but wandering through the relatively older neighbourhoods around me is an interesting study. If you look close, you can see the marks left by successive ethnic and demographic waves — an old porno theater just out of sight of some new condo developments, a hidden decades-old sign for Japanese lessons on a clothing boutique, or the Jimi Hendrix shrine between Chinatown and the Skytrain station. It’s also given the neighbourhoods really distinct characters. As a Main Streeter, I’m only a ten-minute walk from Cambie and a ten-minute walk from Fraser, but there’s no mistaking the condos and slick Hong Kong cafes of one for the subdivided Edwardian three-storeys and cramped Vietnamese phở shops of the other.

PANESE LANGUAGE & BOO A Spectoral Apparition
Bao Bei narrow shop
all saints day back of a Chinese restaurant

Olympic Town

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Olympic Town, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

I’ve managed to stay pretty disengaged from the olympics — I have a thesis to write, dammit! Plus, the olympics combine sport and crowds — two things I’m hardly a huge fan of. But hey, if people want to have their olympics, I’m cool with that. Sure, it’s expensive, but it’s resulted in some much-needed infrastructure, like building the new Canada Line, which finally makes it easier to take transit downtown than to walk (at least when the olympics aren’t on).

It *has* resulted in other changes to the city that I’m less happy about — like turning Granville over to the bridge-and-tunnel skanks and assholes — but I’m at least glad I live in a city that is dynamic, and that *is* changing. Vancouver still feels to me like a project that’s not quite done yet. It hasn’t become what it’s going to be. I don’t know, ultimately, what the impact of the olympics will be on the city, but it feels like part of that process.

Walk Score: bringing math to walking

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walkscore.jpg

Janelle’s visit was a great opportunity to get out and explore my new neighbourhood — when I’m by myself, I have a tendency to sit on the sofa surrounded by my laptop, DVDs, books, guitar, Atari 2600, and other amusements. As, for instance, right now. But can you blame me? Those 900-page Nixon exegeses and compilation volumes of Y: The Last Man aren’t going to read themselves, you know. And who will listen to all those Spaced commentary tracks if I don’t? You? My neighbour, who’s name may be Frodo or something that sounds like Frodo? Don’t make me laugh. And yes, I know I’ve plugged Spaced a lot lately. That’s because it’s awesome and I want you to go out and buy or rent or borrow it already, so you can thank me for turning you onto it.

Hmmm… I got a little off-track. What I wanted to say was that even a boring homebody like myself needs to get out of the house and do stuff every once in a while, which was going to lead into a clever segue about this web site: Walk Score. Which is, itself, pretty clever. You give it an address, and it generates a “walkability” score that tries to give an idea of how easy it is to get around the area on foot. It’s based on research that having lots of nearby amenities is the strongest predictor of how much people will walk. Using Google Maps, it computes the distance from the location to each of a checklist of amenities like grocery stores and movie theatres and sums up the score to get a walkability rating from 0-100. Most of Manhattan scores in the high 90s. Sprawls like Charlotte and Jacksonville average in the 30s.

It’s not perfect — of the 12 amenities it checks, I actually have 10 within the “perfect score” distance of 400 meters (everything but a cinema and a bookstore), but it only finds 6 of them. And it ignores things like transit and climate. You can walk 400 meters through January snowdrifts in Regina (and I have, many, many times), but it isn’t really “walkable” in the sense that you feel like you’re enjoying any particular positive quality of life. Which is why most people don’t walks if they can help it. Which is probably why Regina is mostly low-density housing and big box stores. (Well, one of the reasons.)

But this is still a pretty cool tool for someone like me who makes a point — and self-righteously at times, I might add — of not having a car. When I was looking for an apartment back in May, I really started to appreciate just how important it was to me to be somewhere walkable. So important, in fact, that I confined my search to places I knew had everything I needed nearby. It worked out, but to be honest, I still feel like I totally lucked out to land an apartment I like in such a plum location. With this tool, I might have been able to expand my search, instead of just rejecting the entire East Side out of hand.