All about the behind-the-scenes attempt to make Vancouver’s Olympic Line streetcar permanent

Imagine if the Olympic Line streetcar, originally built as a temporary demonstration system for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, became a permanent transportation infrastructure asset for Vancouver.

What if the Olympic Line were still in operation today?

Today, nearly 15 years after the Olympics, the Olympic Line’s ridership has only grown, moving thousands of people per day between Granville Island and SkyTrain Canada Line’s Olympic Village Station.

The streetcar has meaningfully improved Granville Island’s accessibility and reduced its dependence on cars, tackling longstanding issues for the arts, culture, culinary, and tourism attraction.

This streetcar will also directly serve Squamish Nation’s Senakw residential neighbourhood, which is currently well under construction. Upon full completion in the early 2030s, Senakw will be home to as many as 9,000 people within over 6,000 secured purpose-built rental homes.

Over the years after 2010, perhaps the Olympic Line was even extended west to reach Vanier Park and east to reach SkyTrain Expo Line’s Main Street-Science World Station.

But that was not to be.

Instead, the Olympic Line’s streetcar infrastructure is now in a poor state of repair, with thick vegetation growth taking over the railway right-of-way.

In reality, shortly after the conclusion of the Paralympic Winter Games in March 2010, the Olympic Line’s pair of trains were shipped back to Europe, following the original timeline and agreement to run the service temporarily from January 21 to March 21.

Throughout the 60-day demonstration period, the Olympic Line was highly regarded by residents and deemed to be an immense success, attracting a total of 550,000 boardings over the course of two months — an average of about 9,200 boardings per day, operating 18 hours per day, seven days per week, for free.

During the 17-day Olympic period, its average ridership surged to 18,600 per day. And on its busiest day, it recorded over 25,000 boardings. Snaking long lines at the two stops to board the free shuttle streetcar service was a common occurrence.

The end-to-end travel time on the 1.8 km route between the streetcar stop behind Olympic Village Station and the streetcar stop on Anderson Street next to Granville Island’s entrance was six minutes. Trains also ran on a schedule of about every six minutes.

The creation of a streetcar network serving Granville Island, False Creek South, Southeast False Creek and eventually downtown Vancouver was a key strategy for Sam Sullivan, who was the Mayor of Vancouver from 2005 to 2008, under the Non-Partisan Association (NPA). In fact, such a vision for a comprehensive contemporary streetcar network serving these areas has existed since the 1990s.

Plans for the Olympic Line were first announced by Sullivan in September 2008, with the existing False Creek South railway right-of-way, originally established by Canadian Pacific, upgraded at a cost of $8.5 million, with $8 million funded by the City of Vancouver and $500,000 by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), which owns and operates Granville Island. This included building brand-new tracks, overhead catenary electrical systems, and streetcar stops along the entire 1.8 km route.

Furthermore, the Olympic Line was a partnership with Bombardier, which shipped two new Bombardier Flexity streetcars on loan from one of its customers — the public transit authority in Brussels — to Vancouver. Each streetcar train could accommodate up to 150 passengers.

As part of the sponsorship agreement with the City, Bombardier operated the Olympic Line for two months.

The Olympic Line was intended to provide a proof-of-concept for the City’s vision at the time to build a streetcar network along False Creek South, eventually further expanded to reach North False Creek, Chinatown, Gastown, Coal Harbour, and even Stanley Park, with additional connections to SkyTrain at Main Street-Science World Station and Waterfront Station. Under-utilized space under the Dunsmuir and Georgia Viaducts next to Quebec Street would have been used as a maintenance facility and storage yard for the streetcar fleet.

In 2005, the municipal government estimated this entire streetcar network would carry a construction cost of about $100 million. The streetcar segment along False Creek South was the easiest to achieve as it could use an existing railway right-of-way through relatively minimal upgrades.

However, Sullivan lost the November 2008 civic election, and the subsequent decade-long governance under Mayor Gregor Robertson and his Vision Vancouver party was largely apathetic toward advancing the streetcar concept. Instead, over the span of their three terms, the Vision Vancouver-led municipal government’s transportation strategy took a big pivot and prioritized building new protected bike lanes, a plan to demolish the Dunsmuir and Georgia Viaducts, and advocating for SkyTrain Millennium Line’s Broadway extension to the University of British Columbia or at least to Arbutus.

The general idea of making the Olympic Line a permanent part of Vancouver’s transportation infrastructure is not entirely new and was publicly pondered by politicians. However, what is not known is the extensive behind-the-scenes efforts made to try to retain the Olympic Line as the 2010 Games came to a close.

Those previously within the inner circle of Shirley Bond, the BC Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure during the Olympics, told Daily Hive Urbanized that there was a “valiant” effort by the provincial government immediately after the 2010 Games to persuade the City of Vancouver to retain the Olympic Line.

Only a very small inner circle of people were aware of this serious attempt to immediately make the Olympic Line permanent, entailing the Mayors’ Office, City Manager’s Office, and a handful of provincial officials, including those in the Premier’s Office.

The Ministry reached a deal with Bombardier to bring the price of buying each of the two then-new generation Bombardier Flexity streetcar trains to about $5 million per train or roughly $10 million in total.

This was in line with the market prices for these trains at the time. That same year, the Toronto Transit Commission reached a deal with Bombardier to buy 182 Bombardier Flexity streetcar trains at a cost of $770 million or $4.2 million per train.

The Government of British Columbia was prepared to spend $5 million to buy the two demonstration streetcar trains of the Olympic Line, and it was able to immediately convince the federal government to match this contribution with $5 million.

“The feds agreed right away to cost share under the 50/50 funding formula,” they said.

A formal letter outlining the provincial and federal government’s proposal was sent to the City Manager’s Office. At the time, Penny Ballem was the City Manager.

Upon the request of the Ministry to provide the City with more time to make a decision on the matter, Bombardier even delayed the return of the two trains back to Europe, holding the shipment at the Port of Tacoma.

The idea was to add to the legacy of the 2010 Games, given the undeniable popularity and success of the streetcar service and the investments that had already been made by the municipal government in upgrading the railway infrastructure.

“After the City team proudly toured us through their demonstration project, we went away thinking of how we could keep it going as a lasting legacy of the Olympics and a nice announce-able coming out of the Games,” they told Daily Hive Urbanized.

Prior to the formal letter, City officials also told media that making the streetcar permanent would require provincial investment.

For weeks, the Ministry received no response from the City Manager’s Office after sending a formal letter outlining the investments that senior governments were prepared to make immediately. When a response finally came, the City Manager’s Office politely declined, stating that they did not want to set a precedent for funding and operating public transit and believed that this responsibility should lie with TransLink.

But as a 1.8 km long streetcar system that runs along an existing railway right-of-way and with a fleet of only two new generation streetcar vehicles, the expected operating and maintenance costs would have been relatively low, with such costs at least partly offset by introducing fare payment.

“It turned out just to be politics when the province and feds agreed to buy the demonstration units for them,” they told Daily Hive Urbanized.

“We thought it was incredibly shortsighted and a missed opportunity, but I think there were a bunch of other hot City of Vancouver files at that moment, so we chose not to embarrass them.”

They also mentioned that they chose not to go public with this rejection because the provincial government wanted to avoid disrupting the delicate discussions with TransLink regarding the funding needed for the construction of the Evergreen extension of the SkyTrain Millennium Line.

This came at a time when the provincial government was already asking a lot from TransLink, intervening and overriding decisions made by municipal officials.

At the time, the BC Liberals-led provincial government had recently overhauled TransLink’s governance structure, removing TransLink’s previous elected board of select mayors and city councillors from across the region, following the debacle with the elected board’s position on building the Canada Line.

The provincial government had also provided TransLink with several major mandates to follow, including the implementation of fare gates and smart cards and pivoting the controversial Evergreen Line street-level light rail transit (LRT) project into a seamless extension of the SkyTrain Millennium Line. This pivot was made after the provincial government presented a business case that favoured SkyTrain for its shorter travel times, higher ridership, and economic benefit potential than LRT, all the while costing only 12% ($150 million) more than LRT.

Furthermore, the period spanning the late 2000s to the early 2010s marked the last time TransLink faced a fiscal crisis, with major service cuts ultimately averted.

“For many decent reasons, the streetcar wasn’t a TransLink priority at that time,” they added.

Kevin Falcon, who was the BC Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure in the years leading up to the Olympics, recalls some of the behind-the-scenes efforts by his provincial cabinet colleagues at the time to save the streetcar.

“I thought that that line enjoyed great support during the Winter Olympics, and I felt very strongly that that was something that should remain. I know there was some back and forth between whether it’s a City or a TransLink issue,” Falcon told Daily Hive Urbanized in an interview in August 2024.

“I think that’s a really good example of sometimes the short-sightedness of government, because I think it would have been great to have kept that. Now, obviously, I would do that in conjunction with a deeper discussion with the Mayor of Vancouver and some of the different interested groups, but I always felt sad that we lost that opportunity.”

Lon LaClaire, who was the City of Vancouver’s manager of strategic transportation planning from 2005 to 2015, said he was unaware of any funding offer made to the City by the provincial government.

“We tried to get senior governments to make the streetcar permanent. I have never heard of funding offers from the federal or provincial governments nor from TransLink. So without any interest from senior governments, we shut it down,” LaClaire, who is now the City of Vancouver’s chief engineer, previously told Daily Hive Urbanized.

The following year, the implementation of a streetcar network became a 2011 civic election issue when Suzanne Anton, the NPA’s candidate for mayor, promised to get going with the long-planned strategy, beginning with the revival of the Olympic Line streetcar route between Granville Island and Olympic Village Station, and extending it eastward through the Olympic Village to reach Main Street-Science World Station, Chinatown, Gastown, and Waterfront Station. The existing wide centre median along 1st Avenue between the Cambie Street Bridge and Quebec Street through the Olympic Village neighbourhood is reserved for a future streetcar route.

This streetcar project had an estimated cost of about $100 million, which included $21 million for acquiring six streetcar trains, according to the NPA in 2011. Similar to the conception and ongoing operation of the Canada Line, this project was envisioned by Anton as a public-private partnership to alleviate the potential financial pressure on both TransLink and the municipal government.

“It’s extremely disappointing that the City did not take up on that provincial funding offer,” said Anton, who was also a former Vancouver city councillor and BC Attorney General, in an interview with Daily Hive Urbanized.

“One of my prime mayoral election issues was to get a streetcar built. And there actually has been a plan in Vancouver for a long time. That’s why down in Olympic Village, there’s a whole streetcar layout down there [along 1st Avenue].”

After a Vision Vancouver-led majority government was re-elected in the 2011 civic election, the City discontinued its $100,000 annual subsidy to the volunteer-operated streetcar service by the not-for-profit Vancouver Downtown Historic Railway, with the subsidy not provided starting in 2012. The tourist-centric, historic streetcar attraction used vintage trains and operated for 15 years until 2011, running only on weekends and holidays from May to October, carrying 133,000 passengers over its lifespan.

After five years of neglect, in 2014, the railway infrastructure previously upgraded and used for the Olympic Line had fallen into a poor state of repair, and a decision was made by the municipal government to spend $400,000 to remove some of the infrastructure built from the $8.5 million pre-Olympic investment, which formally extinguished any hope of reviving the historic railway service. Earlier that year, thieves had also stolen 0.5 km of metal cable from the tracks.

Other than the Olympic Line’s streetcar infrastructure, one of the most prominent remnants of this former historic railway service is located just outside Science World, where a station platform on Quebec Street remains fully intact.

The shelter structures for the Olympic Line’s stop at Olympic Village Station remain, but sometime earlier this year the structures for the stop next to Anderson Street next to Granville Island were removed.

In 2022, on behalf of the municipal government, the provincial government conducted an auction of a mothballed vintage European streetcar train that had been sitting unused in the defunct historic railway’s maintenance and storage shed near the northwest corner of the intersection of West 6th Avenue and Ash Street (west of Olympic Village Station, along the former Olympic Line route). The train, sitting unused since 2011, was in extremely poor condition by the time of the auction, and the municipal government’s intention was to vacate the shed to enable the demolition of the dilapidated structure.

Although the municipal government has performed ample work in unwinding Vancouver’s remaining functional streetcar infrastructure over the past 15 years, during the same period, it has also undergone some major technical study efforts to examine the long-term feasibility of implementing a streetcar network and preserve the road space and right of ways of potential streetcar routes.

In 2018, the Vision Vancouver-led City Council approved a future design concept for the Arbutus Greenway’s future permanent pedestrian and cycling pathways, public spaces, community amenities, and other features. As required by the City under its 2016 agreement with Canadian Pacific to buy the former railway corridor, this greenway design concept is configured in a way that will enable a future north-south streetcar route spanning 8.5 km from near Granville Island to the Fraser River.

That same year, in 2018, transportation consultancy firms contracted by the City completed a streetcar network feasibility study that provided an update to the concept originally conceived in the 1990s. It identified a 12-km-long network composed of two routes, with the streetcar segment previously used for the Olympic Line being the easiest to implement due to the existence of the right-of-way and off-road configuration (except at the crossroads), reaffirming previous studies.

Taking into account the future existence of the Broadway Subway, the consultants suggested an optimal initial phase of such a network to be a line running along a segment of the Arbutus Greenway between SkyTrain’s future Arbutus Station and Main Street-Science World Station, which had an estimated cost of about $500 million at the time. The full 12 km network carried an estimated cost of about $1 billion, and it would see high ridership levels of up to 65,500 boardings per weekday — exceeding the current ridership levels of the 99 B-Line, TransLink’s busiest bus route.

In recent years, the City has disposed of some of the “surplus lands” from its acquisition of Canadian Pacific’s Arbutus railway corridor to open up redevelopment possibilities, specifically select parcels north of West 4th Avenue paralleling Fir Street. Instead of using the former railway right-of-way, the intention is to have an on-road streetcar route in the vicinity west of the Granville Street Bridge — running along Fir Street and West 2nd Avenue for the streetcar route between the Arbutus Greenway and the False Creek South railway right-of-way just south of Granville Island.

“Given that we’ve got a lot of space carved out for it, we’ve got the Arbutus Corridor, and we’ve got the Olympic Village run, there’s a lot of room for a streetcar in Vancouver. It would not be a really hard thing to do,” said Anton.

Thomas Lancaster, the General Manager of CMHC-Granville Island, told Daily Hive Urbanized his organization remains very supportive of the City’s long-term vision to build a streetcar network to help ease Granville Island’s transportation woes and reliance on car access.

In 2017, the organization created a 2040 plan outlining comprehensive strategies to revitalize Granville Island, including the transportation strategies of a streetcar at its doorstep and the construction of a tower to provide a direct vertical connection of elevators and a staircase between Granville Street Bridge’s new pedestrian and cycling pathways (known as the Granville Connector) and Granville Island below.

“CMHC-Granville Island has been eagerly awaiting the implementation of a streetcar on the existing east-west right of way where the 2010 Olympic streetcar travelled. This has the potential to support Granville Island in dramatically reducing car trips to the Island,” Lancaster told Daily Hive Urbanized.

“We understand that the City is looking at the gradual intensification of False Creek South and that an east-west transit connection is critical to those developments and the new connections across West 6th Avenue that are being planned.”

Lancaster also shared that CMHC-Granville Island is currently working on design concepts for the Granville Street Bridge’s vertical tower connection of elevators and staircase reaching Granville Island, as well as improved connections to and from the bridge itself, the Arbutus Greenway and SkyTrain’s future South Granville Station (on West Broadway).

As well, Lancaster emphasized that a streetcar would serve Senakw’s needs very well, especially when considering that only 886 vehicle parking stalls will be built for the project of over 6,000 rental homes and over 100,000 sq ft of commercial space.

Under Squamish Nation’s Senakw services agreement with the City of Vancouver, the First Nation is required to conduct a detailed feasibility study for a streetcar line to Senakw before the completion of the first phase of the residential development, which is expected to see its first few thousand residents by 2026.

Squamish Nation previously expressed strong support for the streetcar to serve its high-density, car-light residential development, going as far as dedicating a small parcel of land for a streetcar stop in addition to the feasibility study. It will also be making major investments in active transportation, the construction of a bus rapid transit-like station facility on the south end of the deck of the Burrard Street Bridge, and possibly a new passenger-only ferry dock to enable Aquabus and False Creek Ferries services that directly serve Senakw.

A streetcar line that not only serves Senakw but continues westward to reach Vanier Park would also go a long way to resolve some of the longstanding accessibility issues of the HR MacMillan Space Centre, Museum of Vancouver, and Vancouver Maritime Museum located within Kitsilano Point.

The attractions suffer from poor active transportation connectivity, and the nearest public transit bus stops are about a 10-minute walk away. For many, this means getting to these museums is highly dependent on driving there.

Michael Unger, a veteran of the HR MacMillan Space Centre, a program coordinator with the organization since 2006, says the highly limited transportation options to reach the museum attractions at Vanier Park have been a longstanding key issue for visitors.

He says a sticking point is the municipal government’s conversion about 15 years ago of the large free surface vehicle parking lot outside the museum building into pay parking. Currently, the 264 stalls at the parking lot directly in front of the building have a rate of $5.00 per hour, with a daily maximum ceiling of $29.00.

“That was a big issue because if you wanted to come here, you basically had to drive here, right? There is basically no other way to get to the space centre. All of a sudden, that became the biggest hindrance,” Unger told Daily Hive Urbanized, suggesting a sustained dip in attendance after the introduction of pay parking.

Unger also recalled that during the planning process for the Olympic Line in the late 2000s, there were discussions to bring the demonstration streetcar line’s western terminus all the way to Vanier Park instead of terminating at Granville Island.

However, the possible option for a longer Olympic Line route was truncated due to opposition from local residents in Kitsilano Point.

“You’ve got a lot of really expensive houses like right next door to us, and they have always been very anti-any development coming in here… There’s been lots of proposals that have happened over the years that would have changed lots of things, including the opportunity that was there during the Olympics to extend that streetcar from Granville Island,” said Unger.

“But I think Senakw perhaps provides a way of kind of like forcing a hand to maybe fix that [transportation] issue.”

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