The Mercer 2015 Quality of Living rankings were released today, and Vancouver slotted in at the best place to live in North America, and #5 in the world.
Hooray, Vancouver!
You might be asking yourself how they come up with these rankings. It looks like the exact methodology is secret, but you can get some sense of what makes a city have a high quality of living:
Is your city regionally and globally connected with public infrastructure, transport, and talent flow?
Is your city competitive economically, socially, culturally, and environmentally?
Is your city attractive to foreigners, tourists, and globally mobile talent, for capital investments, and for major multinational companies?
How can you leverage your city’s unique strengths to differentiate it from others?
Look at that first one again:
Is your city regionally and globally connected with public infrastructure, transport, and talent flow?
Put more simply, improving transportation in your city gives it a better quality of living. This allows talent (i.e. workers) to flow better to and from their jobs, making the city more attractive to employees and employers. It also allows goods to flow through your city better, improving on costs to get goods to markets, and improving profits to businesses.
And Vancouver’s doing a bang-up job on this. Vancouver International Aiport is the best airport in North America. Port Metro Vancouver is Canada’s largest port, handling 19% of the value of Canada’s total trade in goods, and TransLink is top of the charts for service efficiency, cost per trip, and cost efficiency when you compare it with its peers.
And here 61% of us want that to change. That’s a shame.