Making Walking* Rock

The asterisk in the title here is intended to indicate that when I say walking, I don't just mean locomotion on two feet. I mean whatever way someone gets around legally on a sidewalk: walking, rolling in a wheelchair, pushing a stroller, jogging, running, etc.

I mean, in other words, not taking transit but also not taking a personal vehicle or hired car.

And the best way to design cities is to make this experience as good as possible and as usable for as much of life as possible. 

Why? Because every other mode requires this too, at some level. The train or bus stop may be a few blocks from your destination or the parking space you find might be distant and the Uber won't take you inside your destination either. So boosting walking boosts it itself but also all other modes.

So the more we make walking attractive, the better transportation outcomes become. And the converse.

So how do we make it attractive?

1. Pedestrianized Areas: A Beautiful Boon

I want more of these, pretty much always. Cities used to be all pretty much like this, if you go far enough back (ie before the car) because the ironclad division of different road uses was less, well, ironclad before cars showed up.

But also we have a lot more people now, so I'm certainly not advocating all cities be all pedestrianized (even if you include spaces for bikes, or even buses/trams, as some cities do). I'm just saying that this:

in Toronto and this

in Croydon are fundamentally appealing to the senses, especially sight as in the above examples that are pictures, but also sound (less car noises!) and smell (less exhaust!). 

Also they produce a situation where walking can get places and do things other modes can't, which also makes it a more attractive way of getting around.

Note that, like the Croydon example, this can be a temporary market: it doesn't need to be a forever pedestrian zone (though I would suggest that you can do a better job of making a real pedestrian-friendly zone if you commit to the bit).

2. Good Sidewalks Make Good Neighbors 

With apologies to Robert Frost's neighbor, it's not fences but sidewalks that make for a good neighborhood feel. By this I mean that not only functional sidewalks (a must!) but also actual elements of the sidewalk environment that actually make it a pleasant place to exist are beneficial. 

This is a very basic example--not like the world's best sidewalk, but a space that Vancouver has that has a good basic sidewalk. Note the following elements: a clear, flat surface with minimal visible points where someone could trip or a wheelchair would catch; enough space (though barely) for both a line to form outside this one shop and people to still navigate past that line; trees providing cover from sun, protection from the street and its cars, and an aesthetic bonus; space between the trees for a newspaper holder (pink, on the left). 

Negative examples abound, so I won't belabor the point, but here we can see a narrow, obstructed sidewalk in Davenport that doesn't have much going for it. Yes, they're improving it by finally putting in a proper curbcut at the corner, but there's no alternate way to get around it in the meantime and the sidewalk is just kind of...minimally there. 

Note how in Toronto there is also a major piece of construction material (the signboard) on the sidewalk, but there's still enough room to get around it and actually walk somewhere.

I'm not advocating explicitly for a massive overhaul of our streetscape so everything is broad and smooth and beautiful (though that would be a great thing), just for something a little more accessible, beautiful, and pleasant to experience.

3. Consider How Much Street Is Street

That might sound tautological, but consider this from Haarlem:

The pedestrian space itself here is fine but basic, like the Vancouver example above: smooth (note the use of tiles or small squares rather than the typical US giant blocks of cement, which I find makes for a more pleasant sidewalk texture), with space for planters and bike parking, and just enough space to pass people. What's key is that there is only one lane of cars to two sidewalks (you can see the other one on the other side just barely in this photo). The narrow street is not used as an excuse to squeeze the pedestrian space, as it would be in the US. Instead, the pedestrians get their space and the remaining space is given to cars. It ends up squeezing the cars, who are all backed up behind that mail vehicle, but there was a lot more pedestrian throughput than cars could have achieved. 

This is not surprising. Good sidewalks get people moving.

What else could we use street width for other than wider cars and more cars? 

Well, this one in Amsterdam has tram tracks (right) and bike path (left) and bike parking/trees (center)--and very little space for cars at all.

(Lest I be accused of overfluffing the Netherlands, here's a Dutch street with plenty of car parking

...though it's still a good sidewalk)

It's not just the Dutch who do this, anyway. Here's a wide Parisian sidewalk, taking up space that in the US would probably be car-centric:

And here's multimodal space that is both pedestrian-friendly and tram-conveying in Paris:

Let's hop across the Channel to London, which can do this too, by Camden Town:

And not to forget North America, here are a couple examples from Vancouver

And DC, where the sidewalk is wide enough to encompass a bikeshare dock easily:

Basically, if we don't assume that the width of the street belongs to the car alone, we can do amazing things for pedestrians. But when we do, we run into the Karl Jilg illustration of our cities, where there is just a massive void where the cars go.

We can do better, and a great place to start is just making pedestrian spaces more attractive--which often translates most effectively to "larger."

Cars and Bikes Have Different Needs

 While biking around the Quad Cities and considering what is wrong with our streets, I have had a lot of thoughts about how bikes and cars have very different needs from the streetscape. This is probably why more bike-friendly countries don't herd them into the same spaces in the first place. But rather than just say "build it Dutch style" I thought it might be helpful to think about why that separation is valuable in the first place.

1. Bikes Need Smoothness

Bikes (at least commuter and road bikes, not BMX) need smooth surfaces in a way that cars don't. 

This, by the way, is why "bike on the sidewalk" is terrible advice, besides hitting pedestrians, since sidewalks often have these kinds of divides between tiles, and a bike will have to go over each and every one of those bumps.

Or this guy, of course. But also look at those horizontal lines across the sidewalk (I was walking, not biking, here for the record).

It's bad in the road, too. Yes, cars do not like giant potholes, and pothole repair is a major expense for many cities, but there's a very different scale to what kind of thing counts as a problem.

Take this, for instance. The main hole in the middle is a problem for everyone. In fact, I think they may have filled it in since I took this a couple weeks ago. But the longer cut across the road is one that cars don't really care about; their tires are big, their bodies are heavy, and they just roll over it. Bikes bump, and in some cases worse, on streets like these.

Then there's this:

No one likes this when they look at it, but bikes like it less. I have actively lost at least one tire tube and literally rattled part of my bike light off the bike on this street. But I also drive a car over it very frequently, and I barely notice this. Some of that is that the streets in the QC are not wonderful, so this doesn't necessarily stand out, but also the car just doesn't care about it in the same way.

The flip side of this, and the thing that sometimes makes me particularly annoyed as someone on a bike, is that my bike is not actually the one causing these issues. The weight of my bike is literally 1/50 of the weight of my car--and I bike a heavy bike (Aventon Abound) and a relatively light car (2013 Nissan Leaf). Sure, some of pothole creation is from thaw/crack cycles, but vehicle weight is the biggest factor we can control. 

And cars crack roads that bikes have to bike on.

Fun times.

2. Bikes Get Ghettoed

This is part of a broader set of symptoms where the edges of streets, where bikes have to operate, are worse than the centers.

Cracks in the road are the start--look at the wrecked edge of the sidewalk in my photos above. But it goes beyond that. Next time you walk or drive or bike down a street, look at how much detritus from cars is in the gutter or on the edge of the street, and realize that that is the part of the road left for the bikes.

Also, when they do bother to fix a road, they often leave the edges unaffected, so you don't actually get an improvement as a bicyclist.

Water, of course, isn't something cars leave on the road, but it's still concentrated by design in the edges of the road. Good luck biking through that--and enjoy the spray when cars pass you!

See: edges.

3. Bikes Need Less Space

Now, that sharrow above is way too small of a space if you're next to cars. That's a big issue, by the way, in discussing this last point. Bikes do and should have the right to take the whole lane if they need it, next to cars, because cars are so dangerous to be next to.

But if you're not next to cars, bikes need less space. 

A two-way cyclepath can take one lane of car traffic, as here (Vancouver)

Or here (Toronto)

A one-way cyclepath can be less than a lane, as it is here in Boston. 

And if you just completely separate them from cars, you can just use a smaller space, as they do on this bridge in Amsterdam.

The basic point is that where cars have to take as much space as will make them vaguely safer than they naturally are, a bike can take up substantially less space due to weight, size, speed, maneuverability, and vision. So a bike lane that  isn't part of a street lane can just adapt to that, and one that is protected (as some of the above examples are) can do so better than an unprotected lane or a lack of a bike lane entirely.

And that's not even mentioning parking.

That forest of bikes is probably 5 or 6 parking spaces for cars. Maybe less for US SUVs.

Basically, bikes are in fact a different kind of vehicle than cars, and have fundamentally different needs--needs that are in some cases literally not compatible with the way cars affect streets and street design. 

Build bike lanes. Separate bikes from cars. And suddenly bikes become a much more viable solution for everyone.

CityBracket: Lessons and Carols

So now that I've written up 15 CityBracket 2025 matchups, what have I learned? What can I (or, if I'm feeling bold, we) take away from this process and from thinking about these cities in this way?

I've organized these around the theme of "Lessons and Carols," ala a Christmas Eve service: one lesson paired with something lighter--in this case, a photo I didn't get to use to illustrate something in the series. And as is traditional at least at my wife's church, we'll be doing 7 of them.

Lesson 1: Consider Scope

Let's start with a lesson about how I did CityBracket itself. While I am glad to have chosen cities that I had such a close personal connection to (not to mention many photos of!), and it was helpful for me to think through the various places I've been and lived, that still produced some major issues with the bracket itself. Limiting to US cities might have been a good start, given that the two pairings of non-US cities produced the two finalists. Or, alternatively, expanding to have more international cities (Montreal, Paris, Amsterdam, to name three that I have particular thoughts about) might have helped with the scope of the bracket, and the sense that some of the matchups were a bit unfair to those involved.

Related to that: to me, the biggest "what ifs" of this bracket are the two losing international cities, both of which went out in round 1 and both of which gave their eventual finalist national brethren a relatively close contest. Where would Oxford have ended up if it had started in a group with Louisville or Milwaukee, rather than wiping out against big brother London? After all, it got as many points against London as Vancouver did in the final, and outdid both Baltimore and Boston. Likewise, how far could Toronto have gone against most American competition, instead of Vancouver in round 1? The groupings make sense to me, based on my personal experiences of the cities, but they did produce some quick exits for some major contenders. Maybe seeding would have helped?

Carol 1:

There really wasn't any reason to provide this picture of street art in Croydon, but I really like it, and it speaks to an element of Lesson 2, as well.

Lesson 2: Culture Matters

This is a lesson I'm deriving largely from Reece Martin's excellent Next Metro blog: urbanism goes beyond transit. While I continue to believe (given my experiences, especially here in the Quad Cities) that transit is the pumping lifeblood of cities, it's undeniable that it's not the only thing that contributes to urban feel and urbanist living--and this bracket was likely over-reliant on it. The "amenities" category ended up stretching too far, to include cultural and other quality of life elements, which weren't my original intention but were so important they ended up taking over anyway. A future version of this contest should include more explicit emphasis on those non-transit (and non-housing) elements of urbanism.

Carol 2:

There wasn't really an opportunity to consider the physical design of transit vehicles, so this accordion fold in the articulated buses in Seattle didn't come to play--hence Lesson 3

Lesson 3: Transit Isn't Just About Schedules

Obviously a key element of urban transit is where it goes, how it gets there, and how frequently. But you can't actually evaluate the entirety of a public transit system, much less a city's urbanism, on schedules, or on where and by what mode its transit moves people. Details of the transit beyond that can matter too: like whether the buses, trams, trains, etc. are kept up, or adequate to the services they run. Does your light metro go in a tunnel? Or do you run a particularly unique or meaningfully iconic service? Or, as above, are the articulated trolleybuses a familiar and beloved part of the transit network? These matter to how we understand city transit and city urban design.

Relatedly, I may have emphasized rail over bus too heavily in this bracket. Now, I am actually a believer in bus-based systems; Seattle when I was living there didn't have Link, so all the commutes I describe in my own experience were via bus, and a solid bus system (with good scheduling and routes) can do pretty much everything a city needs. But that may not have fully come through in my analysis here. Some of that is because my practical experience suggests that buses don't actually provide an equal level of service even if they could in theory -- but not all of it, and I could do better.

Carol 3:

One of my favorite places in Seattle to walk by (on the recreational path from which I took this photo) and therefore a good reminder for Lesson 4.

Lesson 4: I Love These Cities

Yes, even the ones that didn't do well. One of the biggest benefits for me (and I hope for you) of this series was the chance to tap into that love and see the best that each city had to offer in terms of urbanism, even if (like say Louisville or Rochester) it wasn't ever going to go far in the competition. The frame was helpful for me in terms of thinking through the good parts of each city--an important exercise for anyone living in a city that isn't magically going to become London overnight.

Every city has its areas or its elements that are attractive for urbanist living, and while the giant sprawling metropolis of London may have won, that doesn't mean you have to be London to do things right. I enjoy visiting and revisiting all of these cities, and I had a good time living in each of them. The Pokemon Go summer found me in Rochester; it may not have great transit or walkability, but it still had enough to make that summer special.

Carol 4:

I really wish I could have fully explained why I love the Seattle Public Library main branch so much, but there wasn't time or space, which leads us to Lesson 5.

Lesson 5: It's Hard to Explain the Mundane

One thing I struggled with in writing up these descriptions was the extent to which my love for these cities comes through things that may seem ordinary or mundane, or at least not particularly exciting. The above Seattle landmark is a good example--the libraries in almost all the cities are places I love visiting, but they don't necessarily differentiate each city from the other, and when they do it's not always easy to explain how or why. The Dewey Decimal Spiral at the Seattle Public Library is amazing, but even pictures or videos don't do it justice. 

Even in the cities I tourist in, I do so by wandering about on transit. That can make it hard to explain why a city captivates me, or why it feels urbanist, especially if I didn't happen to take a picture of a particular experience. It's not easy to talk through the ordinary miracles of cities, rather than things like the British Museum or Stanley Park.

Carol 5:

There's just something about these tall towers next to an empty park in Toronto that speaks to me--and to Lesson 6.

Lesson 6: Some Terms Are Hard To Define

I am not saying I think I necessarily did a bad job defining the questions, but there are two sets of comparative questions I struggled with at times: the questions about whether you "can" live your life or get to work without a car, and the ones about how people react to density and to not having a car. The reason for this is that while I think these are actually the fundamental questions of a certain kind of urban living--if the answers are "no" or "negatively," you don't have access to a certain way of life that I value--they are also extremely context dependent. The above picture can help visualize why: these towers are super dense and you could totally live there without a car (there's a transit line underneath). But also they stand out from the surrounding area fairly extremely, which implies that a mile away from this spot the apparent answer to the same questions might be no.

This is where maybe another approach might help: thinking more about what the affordances of the city are (there's some $1000 vocab for you--I mean what it is that the city facilitates and what it makes more difficult) and about the cost of the ideal lifestyle there, rather than a binary yes/no. But of course, a bracket lends itself to yeses and nos, so that may be a structural issue there as well.

Carol 6:

This Pride light-up from Toronto's Village (whose branding is visible in the photo too) was meaningful to me when I saw it, and speaks to Lesson 7 as well.

Lesson 7: Wider Culture Matters Too

Again, this edged its way into some categories by sheer force, but I didn't include anything in the comparison about the larger cultural edifices into which these cities are embedded: the states, the countries, the Western civilization. Can you live life there as a trans person? As a gay person? As a Jew? As an atheist? And so on. And would you want to, or would it corrode you to do it?

These are key questions, and this bracket didn't acknowledge them. London is the home of the new Online Safety Act; does that affect urbanist living there? It must, but how?

Finally, I'll leave you with Carol 7, which is just a picture I really like that encapsulates a certain kind of urbanist living to me, and that I really like.

Carol 7:

The shops are open late at night, and you can walk there from the train station. 

Lessons and Carols usually end with Silent Night, and I guess for me, that is the equivalent.

CityBracket 2025: FINAL! London vs. Vancouver

Welcome to the final matchup in this summer's CityBracket 2025: the showdown between two international cities I love to visit, would totally love to live in, and no one can actually afford: London and Vancouver! 

Before we begin, let's remember how these cities got here. Vancouver faced down arguably the single hardest path to the final, certainly harder than London's, taking out its fellow Canadian city, Toronto, the American giant New York, and then the US capital itself, Washington DC in a series of close matchups. London, on the other hand, faced its toughest matchup (yet?) in the first round, where feisty Oxford struggled to a 4-8 loss--after which London wiped the floor with both Baltimore and even the mighty Boston (which had itself ousted Seattle and Chicago, both serious contenders in their own right). Who will win? Which city will get the completely unrecognized honor of being our CityBracket 2025 champion? Let's find out!

Category 1: Visiting Without A Car

a) How can you get to the city? 

Vancouver does well in terms of connecting its main airport to the main metro line, and having a fairly close to downtown terminus for its primary intercity rail, Amtrak Cascades. It also has an active ferry system to the rest of the most heavily populated parts of British Columbia.

London has Eurostar and major intercity services to all of the UK, along with multiple airports all connected by rail, and especially the new Elizabeth Line to Heathrow.

VERDICT: London 1, Vancouver 0

b) How do you get around?

Vancouver's main tourist areas are heavily concentrated downtown, or close to it, and the main downtown area is both compact and walkable. 

Stanley Park is a delight, and incredibly easy to get to.

London has a much wider area to cover for tourists, but a more comprehensive transit system for it as well. 

It's hard to avoid the tourist areas sometimes on a London bus.

VERDICT: London 2, Vancouver 0

c) What are the limits on a visitor without a car?

In Vancouver, it's only whether you can get to UBC and its museums via bus--can you navigate the system to do that?

In London, it's similarly about navigating the system: the whole network is impressive, but also neither the easiest nor the cheapest to find your way around in. And the area to cover (because of how much London has to offer) is much larger.

VERDICT: London 2, Vancouver 1

Category 2: Living Without A Car

a) Can you expect to get to work?

We've run these numbers before: London runs at about a quarter car commuters, while Vancouver is about half. That is reflected in the nature of the transit and active mobility systems: Vancouver's is strong for a fairly simple system, but London's complexity (see above) lends itself to a much easier time getting wherever you work from wherever you live.

Especially if you're willing to take the bus.

VERDICT: London 3, Vancouver 1

b) Can you live the rest of your life?

Here is where we pour one out for how ridiculously expensive the US as a whole is, since two straight US cities have failed to take this from insanely expensive London.

Vancouver is also insanely expensive, famously so. And yet...

The cost of living difference here is, on balance, in favor of Vancouver.

Yes, despite all that: living in London is somehow on average more expensive than living in Vancouver by enough that all the calculators that were showing it close to US cities show it worse than Vancouver. 

Cost of living isn't everything, of course (this is why Baltimore still lost this to London). But Vancouver does have the other things you'll need (groceries, schools, hospitals) accessible without a car--so this goes with the cost.

VERDICT: London 3, Vancouver 2

c) How are the basic amenities?

New Yorkers may want to look away, because although I gave Vancouver the victory here over NYC, I find London more in line with Washington for this: the city just has too many museums, parks, and other amenities (and good enough sidewalks and other basics) for Vancouver to make it up.

Vancouver is great to cycle in, especially along the seawall. It has great views and nature.

Even the built up parts look good to me, as a Pacific Northwestern by birth.

But, well...

London isn't ugly either, and that's without talking about the free museums.

Greece may want the Elgin Marbles back, but until they are repatriated, they are still visible in London

VERDICT: London 4, Vancouver 2

Category 3: Miscellaneous

a) Are there people on the street?

As always, the answer here is yes, but we're going to have to make some tight distinctions.

It's probably not fair to use Chinese New Year as a barometer.

Vancouver is built to put people on the street level:

London is just old, and so people are still there:

Given that one of these is downtown and one is 11 miles out of downtown in Croydon, I'm going to give this to London though.

VERDICT: London 5, Vancouver 2

b) Where is the city's urbanism going?

I am very impressed with both of these cities' trajectories for urbanism. London has completed the Elizabeth Line, modernized cyclepaths, and expanded the emissions zone for cars. I keep reemphasizing the BC upzone for Vancouver, because it is indeed a big deal, and the cycling and other urban infrastructure there also keeps improving.

For me, it comes down to this, which may be a bit simplistic but there you go: the cancellation of HS2--I'm sorry, "rescoping" to remove the point of it--and the current lack of plans to actually get it to Euston station make me doubt the political will in the UK to really make another major step for London's transport. Is it already better than Vancouver's? Yes. But trajectory-wise, this goes to Vancouver.

VERDICT: London 5, Vancouver 3

c) Is it functionally diverse?

I think this one is predictable from last round's results: if London is somewhat more segregated than the UK national average, with a white majority, whereas Vancouver doesn't have a single majority ethnic group, with lower segregation than similar cities, Vancouver tips this category. We do have the confounding variable that most studies of both these cities compare them to the US, not to each other--but I do think that Vancouver pulls slightly ahead in this category.

VERDICT: London 5, Vancouver 4

d) How do people there react to knowing you're not using a car?

It's appropriate that this is the category where London wins, because its congestion zone--and the fact that it reduces car use and car ownership so low, alongside options like public transit--is really a crowning jewel of its urbanism. Vancouverites would, based on averages, expect about a car per person or a car per two people; car ownership in London is maybe half of that.

Of course there are cars--people just don't expect you to actually own one.

VERDICT: London 6, Vancouver 4

e) How do people react to people living close together?

Well, Metro Vancouver has its iconic towers, and that has led to high density--for Canada.

There's no denying that a lot of people can live in towers like that.

London is just denser though: denser in the core, and denser overall. 

It has towers too.

And walkable, street-level density as well.

I love Vancouver, and I think it's utterly appropriate that it came closest of all these cities to knocking off London. But this category and the overall matchup have to go to London: the winner of CityBracket 2025!

VERDICT: London 7, Vancouver 4

CityBracket 2025, Round 3, Matchup 2 (Semifinal 2): Vancouver, BC vs. Washington, DC

On this side of the bracket, two of my favorite cities to visit have emerged victorious: Vancouver surprisingly besting both Toronto and New York on the bracket of pure tourism and Washington, DC coming out much less surprisingly from what may have been the easiest bracket, given my family's tendency to live in less urbanist cities.

Let's see who gets to go up against the European giant in the final! Will it be a battle of national capitals, or will the US be excluded entirely?

Category 1: Visiting Without A Car

a) How can you get to the city? 

Both cities sit at the end of an Amtrak corridor that is the primary train option, have fairly robust intercity bus/coach service, and connected their airports to their subway lines.

Unfortunately for Vancouver, DC has two airports, both on the Metro, and the Acela corridor is a stronger rail link than Amtrak Cascades or anything VIA Rail currently offers.

The SeaBus is a personal favorite (and I love that building), and BC Ferries is nice, but they can't tip the scales against that.

VERDICT: Vancouver 0, DC 1

b) How do you get around?

The Washington Metro is a nice system, and DC is a very walkable area in general. Tourists have no problem getting around the city.

SkyTrain is also pretty straightforward, and Vancouver downtown is just as walkable. 

Ultimately, I think the visitor-oriented parts of Vancouver are more compact, and SkyTrain is a simpler system to navigate.

Price is also a concern--except the costs of their transit systems to ride are pretty much parallel. But note that Vancouver works on a zone system, while DC is distance-based--this means that again, it's just easier to get around on the TransLink system.

VERDICT: Vancouver 1, DC 1

c) What are the limits on a visitor without a car?

On the one hand, it's pretty easy to get everywhere a tourist might be interested in in both cities.

Everyone's Chinatown is easy to get to.

But overall, here I think DC really shines: UBC is on a good bus line and going to be on SkyTrain, but pretty much everything in DC that a tourist needs is right there on Metro.

This meerkat, however, might disagree, since he's kinda stuck in the zoo.

VERDICT: Vancouver 1, DC 2 (unless you're a meerkat)

Category 2: Living Without A Car

a) Can you expect to get to work?

In DC, about 2/3 of commuters use non-auto modes for their commute, compared to a bit over half in Vancouver.  That's not quite as true for the overall metro area, though, which flips the percentage around in DC, and by a little bit it's even worse in Vancouver.

Basically, the answer is yes, but you'll want to live in the main city--and there, DC wins.

VERDICT: Vancouver 1, DC 3

b) Can you live the rest of your life?

Overall, about half of metro Vancouver trips are by transit or active modes. That is not the case in DC; commutes are heavily out of the car, but that does not appear to translate to the rest of life (at least, not in the wider metro area; DC residents may be another matter).

This is reflected in car ownership. Metro DC is at 1.67 cars per capita, and no single part of the Vancouver metro, let alone the overall, is that high.

VERDICT: Vancouver 2, DC 3

c) How are the basic amenities?

I love Vancouver's amenities (witness how I gave it this category last time against NYC). But DC has it all: the Smithsonian (even if they cave to presidential pressure), walkable streets, gorgeous architecture.

VERDICT: Vancouver 2, DC 4

Category 3: Miscellaneous

a) Are there people on the street?

Yes, in both cases. In my experience outside the most downtowny parts of the city, though, DC has fewer eyes on the street than Vancouver. 

That's a subjective measure, of course. There's people here, even if I tend to avoid taking pictures of too many strangers:

Just like there are in this random Vancouver park:

But I can't help my subjective reading--and that is, Vancouver has this more.

VERDICT: Vancouver 3, DC 4

b) Where is the city's urbanism going?

This is a place where DC is doing well--just extended Metro, has plans for more--but Vancouver is just doing better, with the BC upzone, SkyTrain extensions, and the lack of a federal government that wants to take over the city and undo its work.

VERDICT: Vancouver 4, DC 4

c) Is it functionally diverse?

DC and Vancouver are both highly diverse cities, although DC metro is likely more segregated by race, especially given the city/suburb divide. Canada just tends towards lower segregation, even if it's still a potential issue. As is often the case with US cities, racial diversity in DC is more about a Black/White divide, where the city is plurality Black and the metro area is not, whereas there is much more Asian population in Vancouver.

Again, both highly diverse--but I think this goes to Vancouver.

VERDICT: Vancouver 5, DC 4

d) How do people there react to knowing you're not using a car?

I don't think either city would treat that as odd (which is a theme this late in the bracket) but there are still noticeable differences. It really depends whether you were in the inner city, in which case I think DC is less concerned about you than Vancouver is, or in the outer suburbs, where DC residents will actually start looking at you oddly (as US people do on this topic).

But in the land of fine distinctions, I think that matters.

VERDICT: Vancouver 6, DC 4

e) How do people react to people living close together?

DC is a dense city overall, but it has a lot more mid-level and low density, especially in the suburbs. Vancouver has its Vancouverism, pushing people close together even with a visual streetscape that's lower-density-looking. In neither city would you be thought of as odd for being in a dense area, but it's more central to Vancouver culture than DC

North Vancouver is still pretty dense. 

Of course, so is random urban DC:

But the overall population is denser in Vancouver: the metro area by about 3 times compared to the entire DC metro, while the cities themselves are closer but Vancouver is still a bit denser. 

FINAL VERDICT: Vancouver 7, DC 4

Well, this was a much closer matchup, but Vancouver has seen off the last US city in the competition. Next up: the final, a matchup of two of my absolute favorite cities (no surprise there) and the best of Canada against the best of the UK. May the best Commonwealth city win!