Travellers between downtown Vancouver and Victoria may have more choices if these two services come into operation. Both seem to be aimed at high-end tourist trade (not insignificant) and have yet to identify where the ships will dock in Vancouver — just “downtown”.
Clipper is now owned by a German firm, and says only that their Vancouver dock will be near Canada Place. Their Victoria-Seattle service already has dock space in Victoria. The ships are catamarans, waterjet-propelled, which reach 30 knots, and hold 300+ passengers. Service frequency looks to be 2-3 per day each way in the peak of tourist season, with fares in the range of $US 95 – 105.
Meanwhile, Riverside Marine of Australia has proposed a similar service. Riverside is a large diversified marine company that, among many other watery things, supplies ships to Sydney Harbour ferries. The proposed Vancouver-Victoria ships, oddly enough, are also used for logistical purposes on the Australian LNG plant at Curtis Island, Queensland.
I’m always a fan of competition in such things, but I wonder if the Victoria-Vancouver tourist traffic will be enough to sustain both these proposed passenger ferry services. The Riverside V2V outfit is said to be setting their fares at ~$80 one way for a three-hour cruise and maybe three trips daily in the high season. I wonder what the Clipper will charge, given that that the other guy has a substantial jump on the planning and public announcements and is offering at least two additional daily trips? Three hours is a long time to spend in a relatively small boat that will no doubt get tossed around in the Salish Sea even in mildly stormy weather.
BC Ferries was supposed to be undertaking a future planning process and passenger ferries were on the agenda. I don’t know what became of that exercise, but it makes eminent sense to offer a passenger service to parallel their car transport function. The beauty is that the service would be downtown-to-downtown, like the private companies, but the fare structure would obviously be more utilitarian for ordinary citizens.
I think there could be a lot of potential in a harbour-to-harbour Vancouver-Nanaimo passenger service. You’re looking at less than 90 minutes if the vessels achieve speeds well above the existing ferries, and you won’t be spending a lot of time driving and waiting in a parking lot. The ships would be smaller, lighter and cheaper to build when you aren’t engineering them to carry hundreds of tonnes of trucks, cars and buses, and the cost to BC Ferries would be orders of magnitude less without the associated massive infrastructure for vehicles. I suggest this one run alone would quickly generate demand for 500-1,000+ passenger vessels when the travel times and fares are a lot lower. It could even be quite profitable.
With an online reservation system you could time your transit or taxi trip to walk directly onto a ferry at Waterfront Station. Providing good transit service from the terminal on the Island side would be essential. In that regard, it’s so obvious that renewing and enhancing a commuter rail service in the E&N rail corridor would be very dynamic if it was directly connected to the ferry terminals. The E&N touches the heart of every major city on the Island south of Courtney, and coupled with modern, fast commuter rail you could outcompete transporting a car across the water on the Nanaimo run.
I’ve read a couple of studies comparing large catamarans to trimarans on the open ocean and the trimarans are superior in fuel efficiency and passenger comfort in stormy weather, and they leave a much calmer wake behind them. They claimed the trimarans recouped their additional construction cost in fuel savings over a few years. Both of the studies related to vehicle-carrying welded aluminum vessels (the Glen Clark Navy used catamarans to move vehicles and passengers). A passenger-only service would require smaller ships, but larger than the private ferries which will have a maximum capacity of less than 500 passengers.
Seafood for thought.
Three hours is indeed a long time to get tossed around, but on a relatively calm day it will be a fantastic trip and very time competitive with the current drive-wait-ferry-unload-drive routine.
What’s happened to bus service aboard the ferry? I heard PCL lost the contract, but couldn’t find information on who, if anyone, replaced them.
Proper rail on the Nanaimo side is obvious to people with good vision and logical minds. Too bad people like that almost never hold public office.
We were just on the ferries the weeks after New Years and I believe I saw a PCL bus.