Vancouver - ra ra ra - five times a goodie

[OpenMike]

Vancouver selected world's most livable city
Updated Thu. Aug. 23 2007 9:38 AM ET

Canadian Press

LONDON -- Vancouver has been selected as the world's most "livable city'' and Toronto the fifth most livable in a survey of 132 cities by the Economist magazine.



The Economist Intelligence Unit says Vancouver was chosen number-one due to a low crime rate, little threat from instability or terrorism and a highly developed transport and communications infrastructure.

Vancouver scored a livability index of 1.3 per cent, with zero per cent indicating exceptional and 100 per cent indicating intolerable.

It's the fifth straight time Vancouver has garnered the honour.

The list published on the Economist.com website shows four Australian cities -- Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Sydney -- in the top 10, which also included Vienna, Copenhagen, Geneva and Zurich.

The magazine says traffic and crime rates caused such cities as New York, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong and Paris to score lower.

Large centres like London and New York also lost marks by fears of terror attacks.

Algiers was the least livable city on the list.

[segueking2]

Low Crime Rate?
We have the highest auto theft rates in the English speaking world.
We have the highest rate of HIV and Hep C and A on the planet.

This has supposedly been a decade of good times, but you wouldn't know it here in the West End.

People defecate in our stair wells....people are shooting drugs and tweaking in the streets, and the bums wheel their carts full of filthy bottles through the byways, day and night.

Mark my words = this place is NOT the bucolic place the schmucks write about. Try living here.

I feel safer in Chiapas or Guerrero - in 'lawless' Mexico, than I do here.

[Neumann Sennheiser]

I don't know what it is about Vancouver; probably an amalgam of subjective factors. It's just too damn sterile. No real legacy nor long-term history (150 years tops, that's pretty short time in anyone's books). No drive, no grit. It often feels like a manufactured theme park (with emphasis on the "manufactured" as re-construction continues as if it always has been and always will be).
It's too easy to ease into a comfort zone state of living here whereas, in other cities, I feel more stimulated.
Seattle's got that something that Vancouver lacks; call it "soul" or something intangible but something you can "feel". I got the same sense when I visited Glasgow. Now there's a town with plenty of violence and crime (not like it once was and getting better in that sense all the time) but it felt far more "real" and connected to the hearts and souls of it's people than Vancouver does. Also, they smartly avoided the mega freeway system as Vancouver did.
Really, the Scottish part of the M class road system is nothing like the 8 lanes at a standstill experience you'd get on the I-5 through Snohomish, King and Pierce counties.

[Steve Sanderson]

They obviously hadn't gone 1 block south of Gastown and
through the Downtown Eastside.

[Destro]

I used to always be a pro-Vancouver over Seattle.. I personally think Vancouver has so much more grit than Seattle... but on my most recent journey to the Emerald City... I reliezed that the "grit" was just dirt.

Given the chance to earn my living in Seattle or Vancouver, unfortunatly, it would be Seattle at this time. Gorgeous city. much cleaner, better buidlings, more public space... but I was also on holiday... so I was wearing the rose coloured glasses.