Transportation

Metro Vancouver is built around water. Burrard Inlet separates the North Shore from Vancouver, False Creek cuts through the middle of the city, and the Fraser River and its arms separate Vancouver from Richmond and the northern suburbs from Delta and Surrey. Vancouver’s one land connection runs east through Burnaby and New Westminster. Richmond and the airport on Sea Island have none: every way on and off is a bridge or a tunnel. The North Shore has two vehicle crossings, with mountains behind it.

Work, school, deliveries, fuel and food cross the water on the same handful of structures, and a trip across the region stops where one of them is closed.

The province and the City of Vancouver have been strengthening bridges against earthquakes since the 1990s. The Lions Gate, the Granville and the Burrard are among those that have had seismic work. [1] [2] [3] Some crossings are recent: the stal̕əw̓asəm Bridge, which replaced the Pattullo, opened fully in 2026. [4]

Saying which crossings would still be usable the day after is much harder than it looks. It depends on the structure as it stands today, on the ground under its approaches and on the earthquake itself, and the answer moves as the engineering codes do. The Oak Street Bridge was retrofitted in the 1990s [5] and reassessed in 2021 and 2022, because “changes to codes and seismic hazard models since that time have resulted in substantially higher seismic loading requirements”. Further work was identified, and the results are not public. [6] That is the usual case: most of these crossings have been assessed, and most of the assessments are not published.

The City of Vancouver says the Cambie Bridge “can be seismically upgraded to levels that are not achievable with Granville and Burrard”, and that once the work is finished “emergency vehicles will be able to use the bridge shortly after an earthquake”. Design began in 2019, the first phase was finished in 2022, and the upgrade is not complete. [7]

Whatever happens to the bridge itself, the road leading onto it can fail. A bridge approach is usually an embankment of earth, and where it sits on loose, wet ground, liquefaction, which is saturated soil losing its strength and behaving like a liquid while the ground shakes, can make it settle or slide sideways. A bridge that stands with a step at the end of it carries nobody.

After a major earthquake there will be “many slight-to-moderately damaged bridges”, and each has to be checked before traffic is let back over it. The Ministry of Transportation maintains over 2,500 bridges in the highest seismic zones of the province, and has put monitoring instruments on fourteen bridges and one tunnel so that inspectors can find out quickly which are safe and go to the most important first. [8]

The tunnel carries Highway 99 under the Fraser between Richmond and Delta. It was built in the late 1950s, before engineers understood how loose, wet ground behaves in an earthquake. A seismic upgrade of the structure was finished in 2006; a second stage, to improve the ground around it, was not carried out. [9]

A system installed in 2008 is designed to close the tunnel to new traffic when it detects strong shaking, while letting vehicles already inside drive out. [9]

The province is replacing it with an eight-lane tunnel. In July 2026 the budget was updated to $8.5 billion, with major construction from 2027 and completion in September 2031. [10]

From the province’s magnitude 7.0 planning scenario:

• Transportation routes will be “damaged or only partially functional and operating at a much-reduced capacity for an extended period (weeks to months)”. [11]
• “The rail network in the impact area may be largely unusable during the immediate response phase.” [11]
• “Liquefaction of roadways in Richmond and Delta may make driving difficult, which may compound impacts to Vancouver International Airport and Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal.” [11]

On 29 December 2015 a magnitude 4.8 earthquake occurred 12 km southeast of North Saanich, 52 km down. [12] TransLink’s own account: “Although SkyTrain has been designed to withstand seismic events, the earthquake triggered guideway intrusion alarms along the Expo and Millennium lines. In the interest of the public’s safety, SkyTrain service was suspended and inspections of both lines were conducted.” Service resumed by 1am, about eighty minutes later. The Canada Line kept running, which TransLink attributed to 70 per cent of its track being underground. [13]

No damage was found: the alarms alone stopped the trains.