Getting Around Vancouver

TransLink prices SkyTrain, SeaBus and the West Coast Express by zone, and buses not at all: a bus is a one-zone fare at every hour of every day, wherever it goes. Zone 1 is the City of Vancouver and the UBC peninsula. Zone 2 picks up the North Shore, Burnaby, Richmond and New Westminster. Zone 3 is everything further out. Downtown to Lonsdale Quay on the SeaBus crosses a boundary, so it is a two-zone trip on a Tuesday afternoon.

Then the rule that flattens all of it. In the operator's own wording, all trips starting after 6:30 p.m. Monday to Friday, and all travel on Saturday and Sunday, are charged as a one-zone fare, and statutory holidays qualify for the same rate. Add the bus exemption and the effect is blunt: unless your sightseeing runs on rail, on a weekday, before half past six, the zone map is decoration. A Saturday return on the SeaBus is $2.54 (CA$3.50) each way rather than $3.69 (CA$5.10).

One fare buys 90 minutes of travel across every mode, so a bus, a train and a boat inside that window are one payment. The clock starts when you tap in. It does not restart when you change your mind, and it does not stretch for a coffee stop, which is why the DayPass exists.

The DayPass at $9.09 (CA$12.55) is the right buy only when the day has four or more separate journeys in it, and for most visitors that means a day that crosses the water twice or reaches out to Richmond and back. Three rides on stored value cost $6.18 (CA$8.55), which is less. Do the arithmetic on the morning, not at the machine.

Most short-stay visitors tap a contactless bank card at the gate and never buy anything. It works, and it is the fastest thing to do on arrival. It also charges the cash fare rather than the stored-value fare, so every adult ride costs CA$0.65 more than it needs to.

The deposit is CA$6 and refundable. You buy the card at compasscard.ca, at Compass retailers, at the TransLink Customer Service Centre inside Waterfront Station, or by phone. Getting the deposit back means handing the card in at Waterfront Station in person or posting it with a refund form, and the refund is the deposit less any negative balance. A traveller leaving from the airport can hand the card in at Waterfront on the way through and lose nothing.

The accepted contactless networks are American Express, Mastercard, Debit Mastercard, Visa and Visa Debit issued by Canadian financial institutions, which is TransLink's wording rather than ours. Foreign-issued cards on those networks are what most visitors tap, and readers accept them at the fare gates, on buses and on the SeaBus. Tap the same card at both ends of a SkyTrain journey; the exit tap is what tells the system how far you went.

Two small facts that save arguments. Children 12 and under ride free without a card of any kind. And a concession fare is the same CA$2.30 whether it comes off stored value or a tapped card, so a senior or a teenager has no reason to buy a Compass Card at all for a short visit.

Three lines carry everything. The Expo Line runs from Waterfront out to King George and to Production Way, the Millennium Line from VCC-Clark to Lafarge Lake, and the Canada Line from Waterfront to YVR-Airport and to Richmond-Brighouse. Waterfront Station is where all of it meets the SeaBus and the commuter train, one block from Canada Place and a short walk from Gastown.

Frequency is every 2 to 6 minutes at peak, every 6 to 8 minutes in the middle of the day, and every 12 to 15 minutes in the evening and late at night. Nobody needs a timetable inside those hours, which is the point of the system.

What the timetable does decide is the end of the night. The last Canada Line train leaves Waterfront at 1:08 am and the last Expo Line train at 1:16 am, so a late dinner in Gastown is fine and a 2 am one is a taxi. When the trains are shut, the N10 NightBus covers the corridor between downtown, Richmond and the airport, which is why YVR has round-the-clock transit and other North American airports do not.

Every SkyTrain station has elevators, and the platform tiles are tactile. What that means for a wheelchair user in practice, including the stations where an escalator runs one way only, is on the accessibility page.

The SeaBus crosses Burrard Inlet from Waterfront to Lonsdale Quay in 12 minutes, carries up to 395 seated passengers a sailing, and runs every 10 to 15 minutes at peak, roughly every 15 minutes in daytime at weekends and holidays, and every 30 minutes late in the evening. From Waterfront the first sailing is 6:01 am Monday to Friday and the last is 1:22 am; from Lonsdale Quay the first is 5:47 am and the last 1:00 am. Sunday and holiday service starts noticeably later, 8:16 am from Waterfront and 8:02 am from Lonsdale, and finishes earlier.

The crossing goes over a zone boundary, so it is a two-zone fare at $3.69 (CA$5.10) on a weekday afternoon and a one-zone fare at $2.54 (CA$3.50) after 6:30 pm and all weekend. That is the cheapest sightseeing boat in the city by a distance: an evening return costs $5.08 (CA$7.00) and delivers the downtown skyline from the water twice. Compare it with the paid harbour cruises further down this page before you spend more.

One negative finding. TransLink's SeaBus schedule page does not state a bicycle policy, so we are not printing a bikes-per-sailing figure here. Ask the crew at the gate, and note that the Aquabus charges CA$1.00 a bike and says so.

The far dock at Lonsdale Quay is a market building, a bus exchange and the start of North Vancouver. Buses 236 to Grouse Mountain and 228 to Lynn Canyon both leave from there, which makes the SeaBus the arrival leg of most North Shore days on the day trips hub.

Every bus trip is a one-zone fare at every hour, so a bus is never the expensive choice. That flat price is what makes some awkward journeys cheap: bus 19 reaches Stanley Park at Stanley Park Drive and Pipeline Road, and the City states outright that there is no public transit service around the park itself, so the bus takes you to an entrance and your legs do the rest.

The two North Shore buses worth memorising both start at Lonsdale Quay: the 236 runs to Grouse Mountain in about 25 minutes, and the 228 runs to Lynn Canyon. Grouse publishes a CA$10 transit discount for arriving that way, which is the only case on this site where the bus is rewarded with money rather than time.

At night the NightBus network takes over when the trains stop. The N10 is the one a visitor is most likely to want, because it links downtown to Richmond and the airport through the hours when the Canada Line is closed.

HandyDART is TransLink's door-to-door shared-ride service for people who cannot use conventional transit without assistance, and it is open to visitors through a Visitor Application Form rather than being a same-day service. Fares are the ordinary one-zone fare, CA$3.50 cash or CA$2.85 stored value for an adult, CA$2.30 concession, and TransLink processes an application within 10 days of confirming receipt. The application timing is the whole story: it is a service to arrange before you fly, not one to discover on arrival. The accessibility page has the detail and the contact address.

Five trains run in each direction, Monday to Friday only, and they run one way at a time: westbound into Waterfront in the morning, eastbound out of it in the afternoon and evening. The first departure from Mission City is 5:25 am and the last is 7:25 am; from Waterfront the first is 3:50 pm and the last is 6:20 pm. There is no midday train and no weekend service, so a day trip out and back on it is not possible.

Eight stations serve the line: Waterfront, Moody Centre, Coquitlam Central, Port Coquitlam, Pitt Meadows, Maple Meadows, Port Haney and Mission City. Once you tap in you have 120 minutes rather than the usual 90, and the transfer covers bus, SeaBus and SkyTrain in that window. Monthly passes run from CA$189.85 to CA$409.90 for adults and CA$113.20 to CA$253.35 for concession holders, which tells you plainly who the train is for.

The honest verdict: unless you are staying in Port Moody or the Fraser Valley and travelling into the city on a weekday morning, this line will not appear in your trip. It is on this page so you can rule it out rather than wonder.

Both fleets run out of docks a couple of minutes apart on Granville Island: the Aquabus dock sits between the Public Market and the Arts Club Theatre, the False Creek Ferries dock is by the entrance to Bridges Restaurant. Both run roughly 7 am to 10 pm, both take bikes, and neither takes a transit fare. Adult one-way prices from Granville Island:

Children and seniors pay less on both: the Aquabus charges CA$3.50 to CA$6.50 depending on the hop and CA$19.00 for the day pass, and False Creek Ferries charges CA$3 to CA$6 and CA$18 for the day. Bikes are CA$1.00 a bike on the Aquabus. Neither operator states whether tax is included, so treat the printed figure as what you will be asked for and no more.

False Creek Ferries also sells the water as an activity rather than a crossing: a 20-minute cruise at CA$10, a 40-minute one at CA$14 and a one-hour narrated tour at CA$30 per person, departing the Granville Island dock every 15 minutes between 9 am and 7 pm. That is a different product from the harbour sightseeing cruise, which runs out of Coal Harbour and shows you the working port and the North Shore instead.

Accessibility splits the two operators sharply, and both publish it. Over half of the Aquabus fleet is wheelchair accessible and all of its routes are described as accessible and bike-friendly. False Creek Ferries states that its vessels are only accessible to passengers with collapsible wheelchairs who can remain standing once aboard. If that matters, the Aquabus is the boat.

Mobi by Rogers charges CA$1.25 to unlock a classic bike and CA$0.29 a minute after that, or CA$2.00 and CA$0.39 a minute for an e-bike, all plus tax. A monthly pass is CA$49 and an annual CA$169. There is no day pass and no 24-hour option on the pricing page at all, which is the fact most guides get wrong. A visitor pays by the minute, so an hour on a classic bike is roughly CA$18.65 before tax, and two hours is roughly CA$36.05. Rental shops near the park entrance are worth pricing against that for anything over an hour.

The path itself is the draw. The City calls the 28 km seaside greenway the world's longest uninterrupted waterfront path, running from the Convention Centre to Spanish Banks Park, with 9 km of it around Stanley Park. It is split into two marked lanes, walkers and joggers on the water side and cyclists and skaters on the inside path, and the shared-path speed limit is 15 km/h. The City's own figure for the Stanley Park section is 2 to 3 hours on foot or about 1 hour on a bike. The seawall page covers the route in detail.

One widely repeated rule is not an official one: no vancouver.ca page we read states that seawall cycling is counter-clockwise only. The published rules are the two lanes and the speed limit. If you would rather ride with somebody who knows the junctions, the Stanley Park bicycle tour includes the bike.

Parking meters run 9 am to 10 pm, seven days a week, including statutory holidays, unless a sign says otherwise. Rates are set block by block and vary by demand, and the City does not publish a single citywide rate table on its parking page; the block-level rates live in its open-data portal instead. The lowest meter fee rose from CA$1 to CA$1.50 an hour after a Council decision in November 2024, the first change to the lowest fees since 2012.

Since 27 April 2026 the meters and pay stations no longer accept coins. Payment is by card at the machine, or through PayByPhone or HotSpot, both added with no extra fee. And the warning worth carrying: the City does not use QR codes for parking payment at all, so a QR sticker on a meter is a known scam. Scan nothing on a parking machine in this city.

Stanley Park parking rates come from EasyPark, the City's lot operator, and EasyPark states that daily parking rates include GST and a 29% Parking Sales Tax, so those are tax-inclusive figures. Day-maximum tickets are not sold at every machine in the park: the Totem Poles, Brockton Point, Prospect Point, Tea House and Fish House meters sell hourly only. Granville Island's own advice is blunter than ours: leave the car at home and arrive by bus, boat, bicycle or on foot.

For visiting drivers, ICBC states that you can drive in British Columbia on your existing out-of-province licence and your home insurance for up to six months, provided the vehicle is properly licensed where it comes from. ICBC's tourist page says nothing at all about an International Driving Permit, so we are not telling you that you need one or that you do not. Speed limits and every road sign are in kilometres per hour, and fuel is sold by the litre.

For a trip built around downtown, Stanley Park, Granville Island, the beaches and the museums, a car is a liability. Everything on the things to do hub is reachable on a bus or a train, downtown parking is metered until 10 pm every day of the week, and a rental sitting outside a hotel earns nothing while you walk the seawall. The North Shore attractions are the same story with an extra boat: SeaBus to Lonsdale Quay, then the 236 to Grouse or the 228 to Lynn Canyon.

The exceptions are real and they are all mountains or distance. Cypress and Mount Seymour have no rapid transit; each runs its own paid shuttle instead, Cypress Coach Lines at CA$35 return for an adult and CA$30 for a senior or youth, plus fees and GST, cash only and booked ahead, and Mount Seymour at CA$15 return from Rupert SkyTrain or CA$10 from Parkgate, prepaid online only. Winter tyres are mandatory on the North Shore mountain roads from 1 October to 31 March, which a rental company may or may not have fitted.

Whistler has no public transit link at all. The coaches are private: YVR Skylynx charges CA$32 one way and CA$42 return from downtown, or CA$55 and CA$75 from the airport, and Epic Rides charges CA$32.50 one way and CA$44 return from Burrard Station to the Gateway loop in 1 hour 45 minutes direct. Once you are in Whistler, village shuttle routes 4 and 5 are free year-round from 5:20 am to 3 am, so the car problem ends at the bus door. All of that sits on the day trips hub. Where this sits in a full itinerary is set out on the Vancouver city guide.

The rule of thumb we would give: rent a car for the days you leave the city, not for the days you are in it. If that means one day of a five-day trip, rent it for one day.