Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

kelownanow.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 477 posts

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#301

Post by earleybird »

jacquesm wrote: post #198
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #25

People really overestimate how resilient infrastructure is to natural disasters, and such disasters will become more common as the earth warms.

Canada is a special case: small population, huge area to cover. The infrastructure budget in Canada per square kilometer is very low.

With BC there's a substantial geography component. When a highway washes out it's often 100s of km detour. In contrast, for substantial portions of Alberta, a highway washout often means just a jump over to the next township road . . . which are about every mile (cuz those were the units of measure at the time they were laid out).

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#302

Post by deanCommie »

Symbiote wrote: post #145
btilly wrote: post #137

It looks like rail lines are also cut off. This is kind of a big deal for shipping. Approximately $200 billion goods/year travel through Vancouver, including millions of (metric) tonnes of grain bound for Asia, and imports of Chinese goods bound for the rest of Canada. Most of that traffic now needs to find another route until repairs are made.

Are all of them cut off? There seem to be four, one north, two along the river, and one south. https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?style=standard&lat=49.346598...

Two are cut - the washout is on the eastern-most line heading to Kamloops about halfway up from Chilliwack. That's the most direct rail line to the rest of Canada.

Going through the US and via Spokane is quite a detour.

Also not all rail lines are created equal. The northern-orientated line that heads to Prince George can't carry the same capacity.

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#303

Post by bialpio »

iso1631 wrote: post #213
bialpio wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's effectively become a Canadian version of Port Roberts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington

Except Point Roberts (not Port) is just a residential area that isn't self sufficient in any way, and doesn't have thousands of containers arriving for shipping inland

Sigh, brain lag. At least the wiki link I pasted was correct.

Nothing to add to your point about self-sufficiency, my intent was to draw parallels to the comment I was responding to. ("It's [Vancouver] essentially a peninsula, it still has road and rail links to Washington State." "It's [Point Roberts] a peninsula, it still has road links to British Columbia.").

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#304

Post by deanCommie »

ttul wrote: post #18

The other day, I was in Whistler and tried to use Google Maps to route back to Vancouver. It wanted me to take logging roads through the back country.. roads that are actually deactivated and impossible to traverse unless you have a trail bike perhaps. That’s Canada for you…

While Google does do this all-too-often, last summer I drove from Pemberton to the lower mainland over the backroads by Lilllooet Lake and Harrison Lake.

I have an AWD Subaru, but other than a couple spots the road would have been fine in any FWD sedan.

That's probably not the road you mentioned but nonetheless.

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#305

Post by lhorie »

iainctduncan wrote: post #281
curmudgeon22 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Burnaby. It was really rainy and windy for a couple days, but I haven't been meaningfully impacted so far. For sure it was a major storm with some major impacts, but I think most people in the lower mainland weren't severely impacted.

I guess they haven't read yet on how damaged the supply chain is going to be then. This is not "we'll fix it up in a few weeks" road damage, it's more like major shipping roads in BC are going to be affected for through the worst of the winter here.

To be fair, I just found out about this literally from the link at the top of this page, a couple of hours ago. Not exactly enough time to become an expert in supply chain logistics in a province I don't even live in.

I'm reading now that there's already some stress due to displacements from the Lytton fire earlier this year, and displacements from Abbotsford, Merritt, etc are not gonna help the situation. I'm still trying to piece together the wider scope of the incident and don't yet have a good sense of what the overall damage looks like (though it increasingly looks like it isn't merely "a few key bridges happened to have flooded, it'll be fine once the water recedes" and it's more like "there are several landslides blocking roads along the route to Calgary and we're gonna be scrambling to staff the clean up efforts in time for winter").

On the one hand, you just need enough room for a truck to pass through, dirt road carved by a tractor as it might be, in order to establish a supply line. On the other hand, given that some communities barely only ever had that in the first place, I imagine many might need to figure out plan B arrangements.

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#306

Post by soupbowl »

Dedime wrote: post #7

I surprised you didn't link Kelowna's finest newspaper, Castanet: https://www.castanet.net/news/BC/351544/Mudslides-close-all-... I love them because their reporting is terrible and the site itself is straight out of the 90's. They used to run polls that were easy to manipulate, according to a ex-coworker of mine. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Nonetheless, everybody in Kelowna acts like Castanet is…

I can confirm that the poll is still easy to manipulate. I enjoyed and agree with all your comments about castanet.

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#307

Post by jacquesm »

earleybird wrote: post #301
jacquesm wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada is a special case: small population, huge area to cover. The infrastructure budget in Canada per square kilometer is very low.

With BC there's a substantial geography component. When a highway washes out it's often 100s of km detour. In contrast, for substantial portions of Alberta, a highway washout often means just a jump over to the next township road . . . which are about every mile (cuz those were the units of measure at the time they were laid out).

Yes, there are quite a number of choke points that are unavoidable in BC. Alberta is pretty much flat with some mild elevation changes and lots of parallel roads. In BC it is the opposite, the z-axis dominates everything.

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#308

Post by deanCommie »

rubylark wrote: post #29

A different article[1] I read with a similar headline has this claim: > To leave the Lower Mainland of BC, you would have to use Highway 99, Highway 1, or the Coquihalla. I'm not at all familiar with the area. Are there really only 3 roads between Vancouver and the rest of Canada without going through Washington? That seems like such a low number. [1] https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/highway-closures-flooding-mu...

It's actually worse than that - it's only Highway 1 and Highway 99

Highway 1 splits into the #1, the #5 (The Coquihalla), and the #3 after Hope, which is after Abbostsford.

https://www.google.com/maps/@49.4275117,-121.4567432,10.54z

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#309

Post by csel »

lhorie wrote: post #100

For just a bit of context/anecdata, I'm talking to my brother who lives in Vancouver and he wasn't even aware this was a problem. The road closure[0] on hwy 1 near Abbotsford/Chilliwack is a good one hour drive away from Vancouver core[1]. So while it sounds noteworthy for an entire city be technically flooded in, unless you were driving to the boonies, you're probably not actually impacted in any meaningful way. He…

Son has a hockey tournament next week in Vernon, BC. Due to road closure, Google Maps is sending me to Washington State and back into Canada. Absolutely wild.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Surrey,+BC/Vernon,+BC/@48.86...

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#310

Post by arduinomancer »

myohmy wrote: post #192
Scoundreller wrote: post #168

I think this event is going to lead to Canada dropping or reducing its PCR test requirement for (re-)entry into Canada. The US is still well connected while Canada has just broken itself in 2.

Nah, that won't happen. International affairs are handled by Ottawa, which is 4000 km away and completely unaffected by this crisis.

Really?

https://twitter.com/peterjontheair/status/146071735654868992...

Post reply on HN