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

kelownanow.com

181–190 of 477 posts

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

#181

Related: https://globalnews.ca/news/2445052/bridge-closure-blocks-tra... In January 2016, the cable-stayed bridge over the Nipigon River in northern Ontario that is the only road link between eastern and western Canada was closed when it began to buckle at an expansion joint.

There are quite a few single-points-of-failure on the road from Halifax to Vancouver, each of which would cause at least a few 100 to maybe even more than 1000 km detours through country that really isn't ready to deal with any kind of extra traffic. Especially North of Sault ste. Marie all the way to Thunder bay and between Vancouver and Calgary.

Any problem there and you're going to be driving 100's of km on logging roads, unpaved, no facilities (gas, food).

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

#182
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key with 90s web design is the relative absence of Javascript. There's virtually no asynchronous requests; and Castanet works fine with NoScript, most modern sites do not.

I understand where you're coming from, but I came from 90s webdev. The gift of aysnc requests was the one true credit I give MS for their contribution to moving the web forward (even if it might have been self-serving). The fact that we no longer had to do full screen refreshes to update one part of the page was glorious. It helped allow the deprecation of frames. However, just like all good things, people decided if…

This goes back to the distinction between web pages/documents (deliver immutable server-side content once, up front) and web apps (lots of back and forth with mutable data on the server). A news website should never be anything except pages, even with interactive content, but it seems almost nobody can resist the urge to treat everything like an app.

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

#183
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…

"The boonies", does that include Calgary? There is quite a bit of road traffic between Vancouver and Calgary via Kamloops and Banff. Or did you mean just West of the Rockies?

Heh, I think they meant everywhere between Vancouver and Toronto

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, more people are in the back woods these days for recreational purposes rather than pure necessity, which also confounds the numbers. The relationship between safety gear and risk taking attitudes seems to be relatively complicated, and none of the sources I’ve read have managed to pin down whether or not safety equipment reliably produced more risk taking behavior. Still, if I was in the habit of going further…

Compared to when? It's not like hiking is some new fad.

Pre-COVID many outdoor recreational activities as measured by stats like national park visits were up. (Some others like skiing I believe were down.) But without digging up a lot numbers, the parent's basic point squares with my understanding.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big issue is that the port in Vancouver is now essentially an island. Rail is impacted by this as well.

It's essentially a peninsula, it still has road and rail links to Washington State.

Northbound I5 is flooded in Washington, however, so still not a great route for the next day or so: https://twitter.com/wspd7pio/status/1460623860944932864

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big issue is that the port in Vancouver is now essentially an island. Rail is impacted by this as well.

It's essentially a peninsula, it still has road and rail links to Washington State.

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

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CBs are good for the forest service roads so you know when logging trucks are coming or going.

You'll need a special VHF radio for that kind of traffic tracking on Forest Service Roads in BC, and there are specific usage patterns you must follow: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/natural-resource... A CB radio doesn't help much with that, but it is just another means of possibly getting contact with others.

Ahhh, I remember it being possible on one of the Baofeng’s that can do almost anything.

Transmitting may require licensing, but listening should be fine.

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

#189
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…

It’s not just Kelowna, it’s the entire Okanagan valley. My mother-in-law lives in Summerland and she swears by Castanet as the one true news source.

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

#190

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...

Depends on how you count.

Vancouver is on the mouth of Fraser River on basically a combination of glacial scouring and sandy infill. The coast immediately adjacent to Vancouver (and indeed, even somewhat inland) is basically your typical fjord system. Thus, Vancouver is surrounded by the west by the Salish Sea, and mountains on all other sides, asides from the sandy coast that stretches south towards Seattle.

Crossing from Vancouver to the Canadian plains requires crossing two main mountain ranges--the Pacific range and the Rocky Mountains. The main river systems here are oriented primarily in a north-south direction, which means they aren't a great help in finding water gaps in the mountains. However, the next major cities to the east in Canada are Edmonton and Calgary, which means any natural highway route is going to want to generally veer north out of Vancouver anyways.

There are basically three crossings of the Continental Divide worth mentioning in lower British Columbia: Highway 16 (the road to Edmonton), Highway 1 (the road to Calgary), and Highway 3 (which hugs the border). In the Pacific Range, these dwindle down to three highways leaving Vancouver itself, Highway 7 and Highway 1 that leave on the north and south banks of the Fraser respectively, and Highway 99 that jumps over to the next fjord north before making its way inland. Somewhat upstream of Vancouver, at Hope, Highway 1 crosses the river and meets up with Highway 7 to continue following the Fraser River due north, while Highway 5 heads vaguely northeast along the Coquihalla, and Highway 3 splits off from Highway 5 shortly thereafter to continue primarily east near the border. Between the two mountain ranges, the connections of roads is rather more complicated, but either way, you're going to filter down to the same bottlenecks when crossing one of the mountains.

And all of those roads I described crossing the Pacific Range? Every single one of them spend substantial portions of its time in a narrow river valley and is currently severed in several places because of washouts. However many roads you want to count it--they are all cut right now.

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