To folks saying "Vancouver will be fine, everything comes in on boats", here is an info sheet from the city of Vancouver detailing exactly where the food comes from. As you can see, meat, grain, and dairy will be heavily affected if trucks can't get from the Fraser Valley on east into town. http://www.metrovancouver.org/services/regional-planning/Pla... Aaaand it sounds like we're going into a provincial state of eme…
Where are you reading about the state of emergency?
There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada
461–470 of 477 posts
Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean I live in the lower mainland and I know exactly 0 people who have personally experienced any damage or loss. Given that I have friends all over the Lower Mainland and Interior BC and family up and down Vancouver Island it’s a decent sample size. I have empathy for those who are going through hell right now but I’m just pointing out that your assessment of “nearly everyone” is way off base.
Meanwhile I’ve got relatives evacuated from Merritt, classmates who won’t be able to attend class for a week, and almost everyone I know lost power over the weekend. Facebook is full of people asking for fans and pumps to dry out their basements (including people I know personally). You say look at the bigger picture but you’re counting your personal experience as the best indicator of it. I’d suggest the news is sho…
Yes some areas are devastated and cut off and have a long, hard road ahead but that still doesn’t mean “nearly everyone” in the province had issues. Again; vast majority of people were fine; some areas were hit incredibly hard and other areas had minor issues but the majority watched it come and go with zero consequences.
The news is a bad example because they are clearly going to focus on the places that were hit the hardest. It’s not a very good story to say “everything in X area is absolutely fine”.
Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m a Vancouverite, and this is a pretty narrow, short sighted view. Sure, some people aren’t very impacted, but a tonne of people are. Lots of people who need to travel around the province but can’t, who were travelling and can’t return home, who can’t ship things in or out, whose basements are flooded, etc. For just one story, my wife’s boss was travelling in the interior (drove there). Doesn’t have his passport be…
They might be able to get the car shipped (train or transfer service), even if that takes a while. If the closure is longer than X (based on work, hotel, etc) then it might be cheaper to fly and also have the car shipped; or even sold if they have extras.
Yeah, I’m sure they’ll figure it out - it’s a tricky situation, but not an impossible one. Many, many people are in far worse situations with this flooding, e.g. having their homes or businesses flooded.
Just wanted to share a personal example of why I strongly disagreed with this comment:
> 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.
Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big issue is that the port in Vancouver is now essentially an island. Rail is impacted by this as well.
The big issue is that half of Abbotsford may well turn into a lake, and Chilliwack will become completely cut off from the world (because of damage to the highways further east, and the flooding in Abbotsford.) And unlike Vancouver, it can't just get food and animal feed brought in by ship/from the Peace Arch border crossing.
It was originally a lake, so... probably shouldn't have built there.
Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t have to be particularly intense to find value in a full fledged GPS. We just do a lot of day hikes and a few overnighters, and the 64st ($300-400) has been immensely valuable. Considering that the inreach eliminates the need for a separate rescue beacon, that’s a cost and weight savings. If you’re even more marginally intense than I, one of these is less a toy and more a life saving necessity. Dedicated GPS…
Not saying dedicated units are not useful, but there are local-only mapping applications for smartphones, too. OsmAnd is a good example, it uses OpenStreetMap data which can be downloaded to local storage (by region). It supports local-only driving/walking/transit directions, too.
I’ve generally found the GPS only resolution of my phone to be greatly inferior to my Garmin. In cities cell phones depend heavily on cell towers to boost GPS resolution. Out in the back woods this difference becomes more stark.
I can also keep a GPS running longer with less power. My 64st will last an entire day on two NiMH batteries, and it takes less available power to charge. Cell phones do a lot more, but that “more” comes at a cost of energy consumption.
Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of these smart phone apps are pretty bad at providing even driving directions in the back country. Plenty of times I’ve had either Apple or Google fail to recognize a forest service road, which I presume is in a freely available file somewhere, and tell me to park and walk miles to the trailhead. I’ve learned the hard lesson to have a backup plan just for navigating to the trailhead, let alone once I’m on the tr…
This gets back to whether the road in question is something you should direct the average smartphone user down given that they'll probably blindly follow the instructions. In many cases, the answer is no. If they know (or tink they know what they're doing), they can make their own decisions. I'd actually much rather a smartphone routing algorithm err on the side of caution in this regard.
That’s a really good point that I’ve never thought about. Some of the roads I’ve driven on were very much in the “you know what your ground clearance is, right?” category. It’s probably for the best that Apple and google don’t blindly send people that way.
Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certain recreational activities are in fact new as hobbies, at least at scale. Skiing, mountaineering, and camping were once things you did out of necessity, not for funsies. For example, our records for recreational skiing stretch back basically 300 years. Mountaineering has been done practically forever, but as a mass hobby it’s also basically 250 or so years old. The idea that you’d do it for fun rather than as a…
> But I think the idea of backpacking deep into the woods for fun has exploded in popularity over the past century Have you heard about Robin Hood? ;D
Yes, but that actually somewhat reinforces my general point if you think about it. Robin Hood hid in the woods because that’s where the power of the state couldn’t reach him. The legend tips it’s hat to the general understanding that deep forests were effectively stateless territory beyond the reach of the law.
For most of human history untamed woods and mountains have been dangerous, unordered places. This is where political dissidents, bandits, and runaway slaves have gone specifically because they’re not places that most people wanted to go given the choice. That’s why the legend of Robin Hood had him there rather than in a safe house in London.
Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada
#468> The only way to drive between the coast and the rest of Canada at this time is through the United States. Doesn't a large fraction of trans-Canada road traffic transit through the US anyway, because it's faster that way?
Only when you are going far east, but almost never going from Vancouver to other parts of BC and Alberta.
Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada
#469The ferries are still running.
So you can either go to an island (few hour trip) or to the north (many hours) And then once there another half day to get down to the interior, which when the roads were open was just a 4-5hr trip.
So even the ferry ride out would take very long time to get to the next major city.
Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada
#470Possibly useless comparison with a similar infrastructure failure: a section of I-85 on the way between the Atlanta perimeter and where a lot of people commute from caught on fire and collapsed. It took a little over a month to repair. That's with other worse but usable alternate routes, so maybe it'll go faster here.
Except we are starting the winter season here, which will cause serious havoc with rebuild efforts.