North Vancouver and Lonsdale Quay

TransLink puts it in one sentence: "It takes a short 12 minutes to cross the Inlet." The vessels seat up to 395 passengers each, and they run between Waterfront Station downtown, which is also the terminus of all three SkyTrain lines, and Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver. There is no separate ticket. You tap through the same gates you would for a train, and the boat is part of the network.

That is the fact this page exists to state. Every harbour cruise in Vancouver sells a view of the downtown skyline from the water, and the SeaBus delivers the same view, from the same water, on a transit fare. At a weekend one-zone rate of $2.54 (CA$3.50) each way, a return crossing at dusk costs $5.08 (CA$7) and takes twenty-four minutes.

It is not narrated and there is no bar, which is what the harbour cruise is selling instead.

The Sunday row is the one that catches people. Service starts more than two hours later and finishes more than two hours earlier than on a weekday, so a Sunday evening on the North Shore has a hard edge at about 11:00 p.m. from the Quay. Miss it and you are looking at a bus over the Lions Gate Bridge or a taxi.

Bikes, luggage and accessibility

Bikes ride free at all times, but with a maximum of six bikes per sailing during peak hours, weekdays 7:00 to 9:30 a.m. and 3:00 to 6:30 p.m. Bikes with trailers are not allowed, bicycles may not exceed 185 cm in length, and you may not ride inside the vessel or the stations. Both terminals are step-free.

Nothing on the schedule page addresses large luggage, which in practice is not a problem: the vessels are wide and the crossing is short.

Lonsdale Quay Market sits at 123 Carrie Cates Court, directly at the SeaBus terminal, and it is open seven days a week. The hours run by level rather than by building: the Level 1 market is 9am to 7pm; the Level 1 food hall is 10am to 9pm Sunday to Thursday and 10am to 11pm on Friday and Saturday; the second level is 10am to 6pm. The market describes itself as home to over 60 locally owned and operated businesses.

It is owned and operated by Quay North Urban Development, which is a private company, not the City of North Vancouver.

What it is: a working produce and food market with a two-storey building of small shops, a food hall that stays open later than anything else nearby, and a public plaza in front of it with a view straight back across the inlet to downtown. What it is not: a substitute for Granville Island, which is larger, better known and busier. The Quay is the smaller of the two and the better one on a Saturday morning, precisely because the crowds are on the other side of the water.

The pattern that makes the Quay work

Arrive on the SeaBus, eat in the food hall, walk east along the waterfront to the Shipyards, and take the next boat back. That is ninety minutes and one transit fare, and it is one of the few genuinely cheap half-days in Vancouver. Anything longer means going up the hill or out to the mountains, which is a different trip with a different budget, set out below.

One caution about hours. The market building publishes its own times, but the individual stalls inside it do not have to keep them, and neither the market nor the City publishes a stall-by-stall list. Late on a Sunday afternoon you may find the food hall open and much of the produce level shut.

A ten-minute walk east from the Quay is The Shipyards, the old Burrard Dry Dock site turned into public space. The City of North Vancouver lists it as comprising the Skate Plaza, Shipyard Commons, Shipbuilders' Square, Canada Soccer House and the Splash Park. That is the City's own list, and it is worth reproducing exactly, because the City's page then stops: seasonal dates and hours for those facilities are not stated on it.

So here is the honest position on the ice. The Shipyards is well known for a winter skating rink, the Skate Plaza, in the middle of the square. We could not read a single official page giving its season dates, opening hours, admission price or skate-rental rate: the City's own Skate Plaza page returned only its navigation to us on the date in the freshness box.

Every figure circulating for it comes from second-hand summaries. Rather than repeat one, this page states that the rink exists, that the City lists it as a Shipyards facility, and that anyone travelling for it should ring the City before they go.

The Shipyards Night Market

This one is fully published by the market's own site. It runs every Friday from 15 May to 11 September 2026, 3:00 pm to 10:00 pm, at 19 Wallace Mews. Entry is free.

There is live music and DJs on the stage at Shipbuilders Square, a pop-up beer garden that is 19 and over with ID required after 9 pm, artisan vendors, food trucks and the splash park. It is the single best reason to be on the North Shore on a summer Friday evening, and the SeaBus back runs until 1:22 a.m.

A warning about sourcing that applies to anyone researching this themselves: shipyardsdistrict.ca is a parked domain and not the market's site. The official pages are shipyardsnightmarket.com and the City's own Shipyards page. The Vancouver events calendar collects the city-side festivals that run in the same months.

The single most useful thing this site says about Vancouver is that two of the four have an admission charge and two do not, and the difference is not quality. Capilano Suspension Bridge is a private park with a gate. Lynn Canyon has a suspension bridge of its own, hangs 50 metres above Lynn Creek, and is run by the District of North Vancouver with no admission at all.

Both are twenty minutes from the Quay by bus.

Two money notes that operators bury. Grouse gives a CA$10 discount off mountain admission or ski tickets to guests arriving by transit, redeemable at Guest Services and not combinable with other offers, which very nearly pays the ferry fare both ways. And Capilano's rates are quoted before tax: its own page says "Park Rates are subject to GST.

Rates subject to change."

The free shuttles, and where they actually start

Capilano runs a complimentary year-round shuttle from downtown Vancouver, picking up at Canada Place between the convention centres, at the Hyatt Regency on Melville Street and at the Blue Horizon on Robson Street. Seating is first-come, first-served for park guests only, and proof of admission is required for the return. Grouse runs its own free shuttle between Canada Place and the mountain, with the purchase of a round-trip mountain admission ticket or a pass.

Both start downtown, not at the Quay.

There is also a free North Shore Shuttle departing hourly from The Shipyards with direct service to Grouse Mountain, Capilano Suspension Bridge and Edgemont Village, but Grouse's own page states it is "operating until September 7th, 2026", so anyone reading this later should assume it has stopped for the season and check before planning around it. Without it, the bus 236 from the Quay does the same job on a transit fare.

Deep Cove is the one to plan around a car rather than a bus if you have one, and then not to. The District states that street parking in the village is "extremely limited and highly sought-after", that the lots "tend to fill up early in the day, and remain full all day" in summer, and that the school overflow lots fill quickly too. Seasonal pay parking is CA$3 an hour, 8am to 6pm daily from 1 March to 31 October.

It recommends transit. Routes 211 and 212 reach it via Phibbs Exchange.

North Vancouver is not a district of the City of Vancouver. It is not one place at all: there is a City of North Vancouver, the dense lower Lonsdale area around the ferry dock, and a District of North Vancouver, the much larger municipality wrapping around it that contains Lynn Canyon, Deep Cove and most of the forest. They have separate councils and separate websites, cnv.org and dnv.org, and they publish different things.

That matters when you are checking a fact. Lynn Canyon rules are on the District's pages and on the Ecology Centre's; the Shipyards is the City's; the SeaBus is TransLink's; Capilano and Grouse are private companies. There is no single North Shore authority, which is exactly why so much of the information circulating about it is unsourced.

Where this page says "not stated", it means we looked at the right body's own page and the figure was not there.

What that means for the visit itself

You cross a body of water, and the character changes immediately. The Quay side is walkable and dense for about six blocks. Above that, North Vancouver becomes suburban very fast, on steep streets, and it is not a place to wander.

The parts a visitor wants are the waterfront strip and the four mountain destinations, and everything between them is somebody's residential street. Plan the day as the ferry, the waterfront, and one mountain.

The wider North Shore also includes West Vancouver, a separate municipality again, which is where Lighthouse Park and the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal are. Anything reached through Horseshoe Bay, including the Bowen Island crossing, is covered on day trips from Vancouver.

The crossing itself is twelve minutes each way, so the question is only what you do on the far side.

Our pick for a first visit with a full day to spend is the third row with Lynn Canyon rather than Capilano, because it costs a transit fare and delivers a suspension bridge, and because it leaves the money for something the city does better. Our pick for a half day is the Friday evening, which is the only routing here where the timing is doing work.

Where this fits in a longer trip: North Vancouver is the natural second day, after a first day spent on the downtown peninsula between Stanley Park and Canada Place. It does not combine with a day trip out of the city, because both want the whole day and both start from Waterfront. For the shape of a first visit, start from the Vancouver city guide.