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The story
When Canadian urbanism YouTuber Not Just Bikes posted a video praising the newly opened light rail in Kelowna, British Columbia — a city of roughly 600,000 — it set off a debate on Lemmy’s c/canada community over whether 600,000 people really counts as a “small town.” Commenters compared Kelowna to major metro areas like Toronto and to actual small towns within Ontario, and some even invoked Tokyo’s population density, arguing that “anyone who lives in Tokyo would definitely call this small.” What started as simple reactions to a video turned into a window onto just how differently “city size” is perceived from country to country.
A post sharing the YouTube channel “Not Just Bikes”‘s new video, “This Small-Town LRT is so Good it Made me Angry.” (Includes an Invidious link and a YouTube link)
Source: inv.nadeko.net / Original post here
What people said
Background and Key Points of This Debate
Not Just Bikes, who posted the video, is a YouTuber known for critiquing car-centric urban design and comparing North American cities to those in the Netherlands and across Europe and Asia — and this LRT video fits that same context. The phrase “small town” here isn’t being used as an absolute population figure, but as a relative term measured against bigger cities, and that’s exactly the difference in standards that split opinion in the thread. Whether 600,000 reads as “small” or “large” depends on whether you’re comparing it to a metro area like Toronto or to actual towns and villages within Ontario. Comment 8’s reference to Tokyo is a somewhat ironic exaggeration, but the figure of a 30-million-strong daytime population on weekdays highlights just how differently city scale is perceived from country to country. What’s easy for readers to miss is that this “small town” label isn’t a statistical definition but a subjective impression of the speaker, and that there’s an unspoken assumption here that only a handful of Canadian cities even exceed a million people.
※This article is an excerpt and loose Japanese translation by our editorial team of the thread “[Not Just Bikes] – This Small-Town LRT is so Good it Made me Angry” from the overseas forum Lemmy c/canada. Our site takes responsibility for the translation’s accuracy.
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