Why not commute by water?
There are obvious benefits, but also serious challenges, to expanding marine transit around Metro
By Don Cayo, Vancouver Sun August 13, 2010 9:00 PM
The Harbour Lynx passenger ferry arrives in Vancouver from Nanaimo.
Photograph by: Ward Perrin, Vancouver Sun file
VANCOUVER — The inlets and rivers slicing through our city create a traffic nightmare on land — a series of more or less chronic bottlenecks that lengthen commutes and shorten tempers.
Our communities and our neighbourhoods are, indeed, divided by our waterways.
But what if Metro Vancouver began using water to unify, not amplify, its divisions? Could we go beyond the SeaBus and take a page from places like Sydney, Australia, or Hong Kong, where ferries play a much greater role in moving citizens around?
The possibilities for greatly expanded water transit here seem almost endless. The experts — at least those TransLink has consulted — are wary (for some good, although not insurmountable, reasons). And the region’s track record of experiments to date is mixed.
The best success story, and it is dramatic, is the SeaBus. Since 1977, it has built a customer volume of nearly six million a year. Revenue from its 543 passengers per hour substantially exceeds its operating cost of about $900 an hour. And, I would argue, it was the driving force behind development of the charming high-density residential and commercial area around North Van’s Lonsdale Quay, as well as a big contributor to the growth and character of downtown Vancouver.
Not bad for two small boats, recently bolstered to three.
On a lesser scale — although not as small as I’d have guessed — the little False Creek ferry fleet, run by two competing companies, have carved out a worthwhile niche. They move about a million people a year, roughly one-sixth the SeaBus volume.
Rounding out the Metro water links is BC Ferries’ Bowen Island run, a handful of on-again, off-again private water taxis that quietly sprang up and then folded over the years, and a 100-year history of other ferries, the last one crossing the Fraser River at Albion, that quit running one by one as road-bridge networks came to provide cheaper alternatives.
Potential routes
In 1995 and again in 2003, TransLink studied other possibilities for ferry routes, four of them seriously:
• Snug Cove on Bowen Island to Ambleside in West Vancouver to the West End to Jericho/Kitsilano, with UBC bus links.
• Lonsdale Quay to
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