Scot Hein, architect and urban designer said that once you had a subway system that connected your downtown, you had arrived as a city. The same cosmopolitan factor applies for seamless, carless connections to places connected by water, especially Victoria on Vancouver Island.
The new Vancouver to Victoria service by ferry connecting the downtowns by V2V Vacations will travel from Victoria’s Inner Harbour to Coal Harbour. The service is expected to start in mid-May. Vancouver Courier’s Andrew Duffy reports that the 3.5 hour trip will be made with leather seats, on-board wi-fi and you can order beer and wine. Another firm, Clipper Navigation will join V2V Vacations on this route next year.
“The trip is estimated to take 3.5 hours.When it is up and running, V2V’s Victoria departures will leave from beside the Steamship Terminal Building at 2 p.m. and Vancouver departures from the Vancouver Convention Centre docks leaving at 8 a.m.”
Unfortunately this connection is not cheap. Adults will pay between $120 to $240 one way, and you are asked to check in about one hour prior to departure. You can find out more and make your reservation here.
The last passenger service between the two harbours 14 years ago closed after 19 months, with low ridership. Are there enough tourists and commuting locals for this route to be sustainable?
This is going to be a massive failure. What were they thinking?
3.5 hours and one way tickets start at $120? Cost wise this is pretty much the same as the float planes, but those only take around 45 minutes one way. Time wise this is similar to going downtown to downtown on TransLink, BC Ferries, and BC Transit but at about 3 or 4 times the cost.
Why would anyone take this? Who is the target audience for this? Uninformed tourists?
This service has a couple of flaws, the biggest being that it’s targeted to the private tourist trade and not to the general public via a more diversified and cheaper BC Ferries service.
The ticket prices could kill it, especially when you’ve got Harbour Air offering the same departure and arrival sites with 1/7th the travel time for $207-$242.
In my opinion BC Ferries should start offering this service with higher capacity boats (preferably trimarans for greater stability in winter weather) and lower fares. Waterfront Station would make an ideal docking point on this side of the Salish Sea because of the plethora of transit services that radiate from it. A commuter rail service should eventually service the ferry terminals on the Island. The rail corridor has already been there for ~140 years.
This thing sounds like the Acela “Express” between NY and Boston: it’s an hour faster but costs $100 more. But there’s only one of these things a day.
It hurts my feelings to see business models that are so obviously set up to fail. Compare:
– a 4.5-5.5 hour downtown-to-downtown trip via BC Ferry at about $45 all-in if travelling alone ($30 if you only take public transit the whole way). 4-6 ferries/day.
– $250-$320 each way to fly by either Harbour Flights or helijet at about 35 minutes (+ another 10 from Ogden Point if helijet). 8-10 flights per day.
– $180-$220 each way to take this service at 3.5 hours, with only one sailing per day. And you have to show up an hour early to pre-board. This is about a third of the time astronauts require before lift-off.
It fails on price. It fails on service. It fails on time. I’m looking forward to taking it for the novelty at least once, but this not a recipe for long-term success.
The trouble with downtown to downtown in 3.5 hours is the fuel cost of fast ferries. SOMEONE has to pay . A conventional ferry YVR to Vancouver island would cost a fraction of that. Affordable fares without a subsidy except transit on both sides
You can use modern conventional propulsion, such as pod drives with jet hoods, contra-rotating forward-facing props, and so forth. They are not as fast as the jet drives, but are a few knots faster than traditional rods and props. Some are even electrically powered from diesel generators.
Passenger ferries are a fraction of the weight as “conventional” ferries which are engineered to carry a floating traffic jam weighing hundreds of tonnes across the water, not to mention millions of dollars in car infrastructure at the terminals. A conventional ferry terminal at YVR will not have a direct rapid transit connection, so it will become yet more vast acreage of wind swept tarmac.
The big advantage of passenger ferries is the ease of getting to and through the centrally located downtown terminals and boarding. Without massive car infrastructure and with direct downtown to downtown service and good transit connections at both ends I’d venture to say you’d easily shave 20 minutes off a trip compared to conventional ferries. And you’ll be paying a lot less than conventional or high-speed tourist-oriented services.
I agree. A ferry from YVR makes a lot more sense and is likely more viable at lower cost and faster. They would just need to add a transit connection from the Canada Line to the ferry terminal.
The ideal spot would be near Bridgeport Station.
(1) i was referring to conventional passenger ferries that would use about a liter of fuel per seat per crossing . Which is why I referenced transit (2) The last Waterfront to Nanaimo fast ferry that went broke about 8 years ago did take 1 hour charged about $20. The previous one that shut down about 20 years ago also took an hour (3) Bridgeport station maybe !!! but ferry has to run on a slow bell until out the fraser river
A harbour-to-harbour passenger ferry service to Nanaimo will be a lot less than 3.5 hours.
But then you’re in Nanaimo without a car. I don’t think there’s much demand for that.
As mentioned above, a commuter rail corridor is already in place there. A short stem to the ferry terminal is a no brainer. A ferry-train, walk-off walk-on service in one terminal would have a tremendous advantage of convenience if the trains were timed to the ferries.
It’s hard to imagine today with the population so accustomed to the existing ferry parking lots and high cost of schlepping a car, and with a weed-choked historical Island rail corridor with rusted rails. But the corridor is already connected to the heart of every major town south of Campbell River, and Waterfront Station already has a sea connection.
The dots must be connected by mid-century.
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.