Inside Vancouver
Off the Rails
By John Burns published Apr 1, 2009
What’s wrong with our city? Plenty, says SFU’s Anthony Perl, starting with our ass-backwards transportation plan
If “sustainability” was the buzzword of the 2000s, “peak oil” may define the coming decade. The notion that global petroleum reserves are nearing depletion has divided the academic world and the energy industries, with skeptics dismissing the notion even as pessimists assert that resource decline is already under way. Anthony Perl, director of SFU’s urban-studies program, argues in his new book, Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil, that we’re moving inexorably toward life after oil. A New Yorker, Perl began his academic career in the renowned government program at Harvard University (“during the patchy years,” he says wryly), then studied public administration and political science at the University of Toronto. His research interests touch on transportation, city planning, and the environment, subjects on which he’s persuasively outspoken. Perl recently turned his attention to his adopted hometown and its troubled relationship with transportation, education, and self-esteem.
Q: You’ve been here for three years now. As a student of cities, how does Vancouver strike you?
A: It seems like Toronto in the ’80s, especially the “world-class” stuff. When people there started saying “world-class,” alarms should have been going off in city planning and governance minds. They thought they’d invented the answer; if something was done in Toronto, it must be successful. We risk that here in Vancouver—our megaproject mania for highways, SkyTrains to UBC, stuff like that.
Q: The Olympics drive much of this monumentalism. What do you see as the legacy of 2010?
A: As well as security, there’s a broader crypto-fascistic tendency of the Olympics to manage whatever society they’re in and to have everyone stand and cheer at the same time. Now, you can do that in a city of less than a million, and Winter Games cities tend to not be cities, really. Vancouver will be the first Winter Olympics city with well over a million people, and that will have some consequences. If a thousand people decide to march from the Downtown Eastside to the broadcast centre, well, they may only get to within a block or two, but they will be noticed.
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