This week, Spacing presents five excerpts from Straphanger, the new book by Montreal-based author Taras Grescoe. The book examines the success stories, challenges, and future hurdles of 14 transit systems from across the world, including Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.   TODAY: Los Angeles In spite of heroic efforts at revival, downtown Los Angeles can be a pretty forlorn place, filled as it is with polo-shirted security guards on Smith & Wesson mountain bikes fruitlessly trying to herd panhandlers back to the “Nickel,” the city’s skid row. If you know where to look, though, you can catch glimpses of the future Los Angeles once imagined for itself, of enduring architecture and walkable public places, stitched together by rail rather than roads. My favorite piece of Southern California retro-tech is Angel’s Flight, a funicular railway whose two slant-floored cars still haul passengers 300 or so feet up to Bunker Hill, the skyscraper, museum, and concert hall — topped incline that is traditionally considered the heart of Downtown. On Broadway, a plaque in the sumptuously restored Bradbury Building, whose sky-lit interior is all lacquered filigree and exposed cog-works, informs visitors that its architecture was inspired by the 1888 novel Looking Backward, whose author imagined a future in which densely settled American cities would be full of colossal public buildings. One block away, on Hill Street, the words Subway Terminal Building are engraved in the pavement outside an old commercial building that has been converted into upscale condos and lofts. This was where the now-condemned Hollywood subway used to emerge from underground, a mile of tunnel completed in the 1920s in an attempt to solve the congestion problem once and for all by channeling streetcars beneath the pavement and out of the way of cars. It is a reminder that Los Angeles was supposed to turn out a lot differently. Even as engineers were planning the freeway system that would blow the metropolis apart, ambitious rail schemes were being devised to reassert the hegemony of downtown. After the war, hundreds of business owners campaigned under the slogan “Rail Rapid Transit — Now!” to have mass transit rights-of-way built alongside freeways. In 1963, the Alweg Monorail company of Germany even offered to build Los Angeles a 43-mile monorail operation, for free. “Between 1948 and 1980,” writes transportation historian Martin Wachs, “at least six different plans that included some form of rail transit were placed before the citizens, and all failed to be enacted.”

This week, Spacing presents five excerpts from Straphanger, the new book by Montreal-based author Taras Grescoe. The book examines the success stories, challenges, and future hurdles of 14 transit systems from across the world, including Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.   TODAY: Copenhagen I was prepared to admire Copenhagen, grudgingly, as you might a doughty Lutheran aunt who prides herself on her strong opinions and sensible shoes. I didn’t expect to become infatuated with the place, jealous of those who got to live there year-round, and, to my wife’s annoyance, an advocate for an eventual emigration to Scandinavian climes. I’ve been to more striking cities. Copenhagen is like a greatest hits of more glamorous destinations: it has the canals of Amsterdam, the squares of Florence, and the Baroque architecture of Vienna; there is even a single, New York– style modernist skyscraper (the SAS building, all of twenty stories). I’ve been to more exciting cities. Copenhagen’s biggest attraction is the Tivoli Gardens, a nineteenth-century amusement park complete with Ferris wheel and carousel, though the Lego Store and the Bodum Hus, where you can splurge on interlocking plastic bricks and functional coffeepots, are close runner-ups. And I’ve definitely been to balmier cities. Copenhagen is windblown and rainy, and because it is at the same latitude as Ketchikan, Alaska, the winter sunset — when the sun deigns to appear at all — tends to come at mid-afternoon. Yet the scale of the place is perfect: Copenhagen is big enough to keep you interested, but small enough that you feel comfortable. In truth, though, the depth of my affection probably comes from the way I discovered Copenhagen. During my first couple of days in the city, I walked and rode the two-line Metro. The brand-new system has state-of-the-art platform doors in its deep underground stations, and gleaming automated Italian-made trains, the kind that allow kids to sit in the front and watch the lights in the tunnel rush by. This being Northern Europe, there are no turnstiles, and passengers board on the honor system. (When I blundered on ticket-free on my first day, a platform attendant smiled indulgently and rode the escalators back to street level to give me a lesson on the proper use of the ticket machines.) From the central train station, eleven commuter train lines, run by Danish State Railways, extend deep into the suburbs. Cheerful orange buses, with low floors to allow easy entry for strollers and wheelchairs, run along most major streets. In fact, Copenhagen is the only city I’ve been where people complain there is too much public transport. When the Cityringen, a circle line that will add fifteen new stations, is completed in 2018, only the residents of the city’s most isolated districts will be more than a 600-yard walk from a Metro station.

This week, Spacing presents five excerpts from Straphanger, the new book by Montreal-based author Taras Grescoe. The book examines the success stories, challenges, and future hurdles of 14 transit systems from across the world, including Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.   TODAY: Vancouver It’s hard not to see Vancouver, British Columbia, and Portland, Oregon, as the long-lost twins of Cascadia, separated when they were still young. Both were born as Gold Rush boomtowns, and both grew up as Pacific Northwest regional centers with thriving ports and economies based on logging and resource extraction. Both developed streetcar and interurban networks, and count smaller areas of postwar suburban sprawl than similar-size North American cities. Both opted for regional governance in the 1970s, Portland with Metro, Vancouver with the Greater Vancouver Regional District (now Metro Vancouver). Vancouver doesn’t have a growth boundary, but it has de facto limits to growth, both geographical — the Pacific Ocean to the west, steep mountains to the north and east, and the United States border to the south — and legal, in the form of a large stock of agricultural land forever protected from development. Both have central city populations of 600,000 in regions of just over two million. It is only now, in their early adulthood, that the twins are showing signs of following distinct life paths. Portland remains a regional center, a city comfortable with incremental growth. Vancouver has lately become an international hub, a model for its own brand of urbanism, and a futuristic city of glass towers bound together by the soaring elevated tracks of streamlined rapid transit. I grew up in Vancouver. It was here, working as a courier, that I witnessed one too many accidents, and developed a lifelong aversion to traffic and cars. My family arrived in the ’70s, settling in a neighborhood of single family homes near the university. Streamlined Brill trolley buses, drawing power from overhead wires, ran down the nearest major artery, Dunbar Street, where only recently streetcars had run. The local housing ran from Tudor-style manses in Shaughnessy Heights, a neighborhood built on an eccentric garden city street plan, to stucco-coated Vancouver Specials, boxy working-class homes with low-pitched roofs and second-floor balconies. Coming from Toronto, Vancouver felt like the edge of the world, an outpost of the British empire experiencing a few timid blooms of alternative culture. This was the place I became a pre-adolescent urbanist, pacing out our block and building a model showing how, if you removed the cars, city streets could be made into parks. When I visit these days — my parents and sister still call Vancouver home — I barely recognize the place. The shock begins when I get off the plane, walk among the totem poles of the coolly West Coast–themed airport, and wheel my bags to the elevated SkyTrain station. The Canada Line, completed for the 2010 Winter Olympics, whisks passengers in Koreanmade electric trains at 50 miles an hour toward the West End. As the driverless light-rail train crosses the Fraser River, I marvel at how thickets of office and condo towers, each cluster corresponding to a SkyTrain station, have cropped up at intervals of about a mile and a half, where once there was only low-rise suburbia. The single-family homes on small lots, which make Vancouver’s west side so reminiscent of East Portland, still exist, but they are now bordered by slickly designed, European-inspired condo blocks with names like City Square and Arbutus Walk. Arriving at the station in Yaletown, once a downtown district of forlorn ware houses, I’m surrounded by “see-throughs,” the slender condominium towers of pale green glass that rise against the snow-dusted coast mountains. After Manhattan, Vancouver’s downtown is now the second densest in North America. In my absence, the backwater of my youth seems to have morphed into a temperate-zone Singapore, a transformation that has spawned a new buzzword among urbanists: “Vancouverism.”

This week, Spacing presents five excerpts from Straphanger, the new book by Montreal-based author Taras Grescoe. The book examines the success stories, challenges, and future hurdles of 14 transit systems from across the world, including Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. TODAY: Shanghai, China For first-time car buyers on the floor of the Shanghai Auto Show, the future looks bright, if not downright dazzling. Throughout the cavernous showrooms, lithe motor-show girls in shimmering nylon evening gowns and leatherette mini skirts drape themselves over aerodynamic fenders, like molten watches drizzled over branches in a Dalí landscape. On rotating platforms, surrealistic concept cars languidly pirouette: the Geely McCar, a tiny hybrid with an outsized hatchback that pops up to release a three-wheeled electric motorcycle, and the chrome-grilled Engrand GE, which features a V-8 engine, rear seat massagers, and a built-in refrigerator that, according to the brochure, “gives access to mobile joy.” Caught in the crush, a visitor is torn between amusement and awe; it’s hard not to chuckle at cars with names like the Great Wall Wingle Pick Up, the Jiangling Landwind, or the Book of Songs. At the same time, the audacity of China’s carmakers is impressive: the Noble is a near replica of Daimler’s Smart, the Lifan 320 appears to be a clone of a Mini Cooper, and the Dongfeng Crazy Soldier looks like the love child of a Humvee and a Tonka truck. Every few minutes, cameras flash and applause ripples through the showrooms as another “delivery ceremony” is completed: a proud owner is presented with flowers, a framed photo, and a bag of gift s as he is handed the keys to his brand-new Lavida, Cowin, or Beauty Leopard. The lust to buy is almost palpable. Fourteen million cars were sold in China last year, which means the country has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest automobile market. Over eight days, three-quarters of a million people will pass through the seventeen hangar-like halls of the Shanghai Auto Show — which has now surpassed New York’s to become the world’s largest — lining up for their chance to caress vinyl, shift gears, and slam doors, publicly dreaming of owning modernity’s ultimate consumer item: the private automobile. The big news at this year’s auto show is that subcompacts are no longer at center stage, and major manufacturers have relegated hybrids and electrics to the sidelines as they promote old-fashioned gasoline-powered sedans. For years, the Chery QQ, a fuel-efficient, jellybean-shaped bumper car that retailed for less than $5,000, was the nation’s most popular automobile. Lately, though, the aspiring middle class has set its sights higher. China’s best-selling car is now the BYD F3, a four-door sedan that bears more than a passing resemblance to a Toyota Corolla, with a sticker price of $9,300. The popularity of the F3, which sold over a quarter of a million units in 2010, is a sign that Chinese consumers have made the Great Leap Forward from economy to midsize.

 Ce billet est contribué par Olivier Légaré, co-fondateur de Lire Montréal. Cet évenement, présentement dans sa 2e édition, propose d’explorer le quartier Saint-Michel à travers une dizaine d’activités qui auront lieu le samedi 28 avril 2012. Cette journée sera l’occasion de faire le trait d’union entre l’espace urbain et son imaginaire et de révéler la ville à la fois comme source d’inspiration et comme lieu d’expression. Un des romans marquants de l’imaginaire minier français est Germinal. L’histoire de cette révolte des mineurs d’une localité du nord de la France est probablement le roman le plus célèbre d’Émile Zola et un symbole de la lutte des classes au 19e siècle. Les mines offrent un prétexte idéal pour raconter les malheurs de la classe ouvrière. Plus près de nous, un conflit minier a aussi marqué l’imaginaire collectif et a, en quelque sorte, lancé la carrière politique de Pierre Elliott Trudeau. La grève de l’amiante de 1949 à Asbestos, sous le gouvernement Duplessis peu enclin à prêter l’oreille aux revendications syndicales, a permis aux Québécois de découvrir celui qui allait devenir Premier ministre du Canada quelques décennies plus tard. Le territoire de Montréal renferme aussi un grand nombre de mines et de carrières puisque l’extraction de la pierre fut une industrie florissante au 19e siècle. Aujourd’hui une seule est identifiée au plan d’urbanisme comme étant encore en exploitation, soit celle de Lafarge à Montréal-Est. Le quartier Saint-Michel est l’un des plus marqués physiquement par ce type d’activité : les deux immenses carrières, Francon et Miron, façonnent son paysage. Étonnamment, il existe très peu de fictions qui abordent le thème minier à Montréal, et encore moins dans Saint-Michel. On trouve ça et là des représentations de carriers au travail, telles celles publiées dans L’Opinion publique du 22 mars 1877, ou encore un couplet paillard de la Chanson du métier à propos des carriers :