This matchup is a big one for North America: the Canadian champion (since Toronto already lost to it) and a major US contender in New York. Let's get to the competition!
Category 1: Visiting Without A Car
a) How can you get to the city?
New York is the heart of the US East Coast network, in the middle of the Acela corridor and with connections west as well. It also has a strong commuter network, if you're visiting from closer in. It has multiple airports in the region, all of which can connect to the larger transit network with varying degrees of ease.
Vancouver is on the north end of the Amtrak Cascades, has a major ferry network if you're coming from coastal BC, and has one international airport directly on the SkyTrain.
Acela is a strong contender here, but the sheer inconvenience of getting to NYC without a car from the airports (which remain, in the US, the dominant mode of intercity non-automotive travel) tips this to Vancouver for me--especially as Acela only covers a limited range of cities from which one could visit NYC.
VERDICT: Vancouver 1, NYC 0
b) How do you get around?
The MTA is a great resource for visitors to NYC: it covers a huge amount of the city, and has stops directly adjacent to, or often underneath, major destinations.
And of course you can walk a lot of it as well, as these people are doing.
Vancouver is no slouch here: SkyTrain is great, and the bus service is better in Vancouver (NYC has a huge problem with slowdowns).
With that said, I don't think I can quite give this to Vancouver, much as I love traveling there on foot and transit. NYC just has too much of a system.
VERDICT: Vancouver 1, NYC 1
c) What are the limits on a visitor without a car?
Here's where the MTA system, to me, becomes a bit of a hindrance. It's complex (especially when there's construction, but even without it the express trains can be confusing for a visitor) and as I mentioned above, if you end up on a bus instead of a train it's often very slow. This produces a limit on the practical use of the system that I don't think is present in Vancouver.
VERDICT: Vancouver 2, NYC 1
Category 2: Living Without A Car
a) Can you expect to get to work?
The answer in both cities is certainly yes. NYC is a clear winner here: only 30% of people drive to work, compared to something more like 40% in Vancouver. Both cities have multiple job centers and multiple routes to get to them, a strong culture of non-car commuting, and effective transit options. But NYC does better here in practice.
VERDICT: Vancouver 2, NYC 2
b) Can you live the rest of your life?
NYC has a strong bodega culture, which certainly helps with living the rest of your life beyond work. But to live in the parts of the city that have that culture most strongly, you have to pay out the nose. Vancouver famously has a massive cost of living crisis. New York is somehow approximately 70% more expensive than Vancouver, and that's across the whole city, not the most urbanist parts.
c) How are the basic amenities?
Both cities have areas (*cough* Staten Island *cough*) without sidewalks and other pedestrian amenities.
Both also have amazing parks and museums.
Category 3: Miscellaneous
a) Are there people on the street?
Vancouver has a lot of people on the street, especially downtown:
b) Where is the city's urbanism going?
Here's an interesting question. NYC just got congestion pricing and it's massively effective--but the federal government has it in for the program. Vancouver is doing major expansions to SkyTrain, while NYC is finally starting to actually work on that Second Ave Subway at massively inflated cost.
Another key to me here is that Vancouver (and BC more generally) has massively liberalized rules on constructing transit-oriented development. This isn't congestion pricing, but it is a major step forward in urbanist housing, which seems vital given the well-documented issues in housing costs in both regions.
I may regret this if congestion pricing sticks, but the active opposition from the Trump administration to continuing that project makes me tip this ever so slightly to Vancouver.
VERDICT: Vancouver 5, NYC 3
c) Is it functionally diverse?
Both of these cities prize their diversity and multiculturalism. Demographically, NYC has a much higher Black and Hispanic population, while Vancouver has a much higher proportion of Asian ethnic groups: neither city has a single majority ethnic group. Both cities have a history of segregation (as noted last round), but Vancouver is, according to most metrics, much less segregated than US cities in general and NYC in particular.
In other words, both cities are pretty diverse, but in Vancouver there is less functional division between where different ethnic groups are settled.
VERDICT: Vancouver 6, NYC 3
d) How do people there react to knowing you're not using a car?
This is the reverse of the above: both cities do well but I tend towards NYC. Vancouver does very well on metrics of car ownership, with less than a vehicle per person average in most of the metro area, but NYC does even better. Neither city is one in which anyone will be surprised you don't have a car, but there are places in NYC people would be more likely to be surprised you do, especially given the cost of living noted above.
VERDICT: Vancouver 6, NYC 4
e) How do people react to people living close together?
Again, both of these cities are notably dense, and people are very used to encountering people who live close together. But to my shock, Vancouverism appears to have produced similar density to NYC's intense density in the urban core. The NYC metro as a whole is denser, but the urban density is actually higher in Vancouver.
Vancouver's design tends towards these spiky little islands of height.
NYC's is more uniform across the streetscape.
Ultimately, I think that NYC is more used to living cheek by jowl, even if the densities are similar (after all, remember that things used to be denser and less safe).
FINAL VERDICT: Vancouver 6, NYC 5
It's a close one, and honestly could have gone either way (I imagine a fan of NYC's museums and parks would like a word about that amenities ranking). Both of these cities are amazing for urbanism, but only Vancouver is going on to the next round!
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