More recently, Vancouver s ambitious efforts to become the greenest city in the world by 2020 have u

Compared to 30 years ago, Vancouver car rental sport car s downtown in particular is certainly denser growing significantly in both residents and jobs but it s also more mixed and diverse, walkable, economically prosperous, green and creative. It s a home for families, a hub for creative jobs and a target of healthy, car rental sport car friendly competition with Seattle s own downtown.
Density tends to be talked about as something developers want, but the list of public values from smartly done density is long: facilitating more affordable housing choices; curbing the negative impacts of sprawl; saving public money on infrastructure and services; mitigating car rental sport car climate change; making walking, biking and transit more inviting; and improving public health. Not bad for something car rental sport car often framed as being all about developer profit.
Vancouver has a long history with successful densification within a livable, increasingly green city-by-design framework. In recent years this culminated in our extremely challenging, highly car rental sport car controversial, but ultimately successful and award-winning EcoDensity Initiative, which brought in the greenest building-design requirements in North America.
More recently, Vancouver s ambitious efforts to become the greenest city in the world by 2020 have upped the ante even further, with big initiatives around urban cycling and transit, food access and urban agriculture, our city s carbon footprint.
Align your land use with how you get around . For decades, most cities in North America have separated their thinking around land use and transportation, and the car-capacity tail has tended to wag the land-use dog.
Car-dependent transportation models create self-fulfilling prophecies car rental sport car of gridlock by pushing land uses apart and densities down, leading to communities that are unwalkable and not viable for transit.
Vancouver illustrates a different and better way. Starting with the refusal of freeways through car rental sport car the city in the late 1960s (which meant we never had to spend the money to bury them) Vancouver continues to design a multimodal city that prioritizes walking, biking and transit and recognizes that the best transportation plan is a great land-use plan.
Seattle s Alaskan Way Viaduct, which lobotomized your downtown and waterfront, says much about Seattle s prioritization of car capacity car rental sport car over better city-building. Although it s a great thing that the viaduct is now coming down, so much more could have been done to build a better city with the money spent burying the highway.
If uses and activities are mixed and compact, car rental sport car with everything proximate and walkable, the power of nearness makes every method of getting around work better, including driving with freedom of choice.
High-design quality emphasizes creating car rental sport car places people love and includes connecting to and embracing assets such as Seattle s waterfront for public use, as the removal of the viaducts will allow Seattle to do.
Perhaps most important, great design focuses on how the buildings meet the street and making the everyday walking experience, at eye level and the 5-mph pace of a real walker, constantly interesting.
Amenities make density enjoyable . If you plan for too many people without the amenities that make high-density living enjoyable, it often fails. Amenities support car rental sport car public life, and the denser it gets, the more such amenities are needed: parks, recreational and people places; child care and schools; and cultural, civic and heritage offerings.