Ambleside, District of West Vancouver

The purpose of Fraseropolis.com is to describe livable, walkable communities in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, and provide status reports and information links related to public services in the region.

The site has operated since 2011, and had a modest record year in 2015, with just over 18,000 page views and 10,000 unique visitors. July 9, 2015 was a record day, with 338 views, mostly related to a post on possible outcomes from Metro Vancouver’s transit referendum.

The five most-viewed posts through 2015 were:

• 2014 property taxes in Metro Vancouver (June 2014) a post linked to a comprehensive British Columbia Government tax information site;
• “Best places”, taxes and crime in the Lower Mainland (June 2015), a post linked to a flawed survey on livability done by a consumer financial magazine;
• The Arbutus Skytrain extension — a phantom tour (November 2015), a post featuring photos of non-existent transit stations, picked up by Vancouver’s Price Tags site;
• Coquitlam’s waterfront plan (March 2014), looking over a field of rubble that is proposed for conversion to a constricted Yaletown–type development; and
• The seafront at White Rock (September 2012), a “day out” piece that continues to attracts on-line searchers.

This site advocates for mainstream urbanist approaches, meaning hard limits on sprawl, support for transportation alternatives, and human-scale, mixed-use development. We would like to see more transparency in government and a more serious effort to engage citizens. We don’t attack individual politicians or political parties. There’s plenty of nagging, blaming and exaggeration in the B.C. political mix, often on the theme that the bad people in power are ignoring the easy answers. In a 30-municipality, automobile-dependent split region (Metro Vancouver and Fraser Valley) of 2.7 million people, there are no easy answers.