The Carrall Street Greenway is quiet and leafy in some stretches, heavy with unpredictable traffic and ongoing construction in others. On Sundays through August and September of this year, a full city block of it was given over to a farmers market. The Greenway has space for pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles alike, and the materials used to delineate these spaces are both thoughtful and beautiful. The Greenway is a $5-million community development and transportation corridor project that, once finished, will connect False Creek to the south with the Burrard Inlet to the north, linking the historic neighborhoods of Chinatown, the Downtown Eastside and Gastown through six short blocks.

As Arno Schortinghuis put it, “It’s Vancouver’s only complete street. But what a lovely street it is.”

Schortinghuis is president of the volunteer-run Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition (VACC) whose mission is to make cycling an integral part of the local transportation culture. A two-hour ride with Schortinghuis through some of the city’s best and worst efforts at this integration begins at a project he would file in the latter category: the Millennium Development site of the 2010 Olympic Village on the south side of False Creek.

“This was a real missed opportunity to create a public space where people can interact on roads built for non-motorized use,” Schortinghuis said. “This is meant to be the greenest development in BC, but we got only one bike lane. It’s typical car-centric planning.”

According to former City Councilor Gordon Price, pushed to its extreme, this car-centric planning could very well mean civilization suicide. The great irony about Vancouver, he said, “is that it made the key decision not to build freeways and plow through the fabric of generations of human experience. Today’s urban design is looking at the streetscape as public space and moving aggressively forward on this. So it’s astonishing that now that we’re at this time of extreme high risk, about the only thing we do is commit money to building the Sea-to-Sky Highway, the Golden Ears Bridge and a future dependent on the price of oil.”

Suburban development aside, Price – now director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University – argues that when people speak of “Vancouverism,” they’re really talking about what happens when people are offered the right mix of transportation choices.

“After World War II,” he said, “cities began designing their urban regions for the motor vehicle. But Vancouver chose not to re-build around the motor vehicle, which might have driven out all other transportation choices.” Instead, Vancouver opted to build on the fabric of the streetcar corridors and not to go the way of what Price calls “motordom.”

“This was a very powerful decision,” he said. “Because of it, by and large, the city today is what it’s always been. We still live in what were traditional streetcar villages. What has changed is the sophistication of transportation and this is what makes cycling so interesting. There is a cultural aspect to it. This era of contesting space that we have entered is fascinating.”