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Nicholson Road is an ongoing photo project aimed at sharing and celebrating the different communities in Metro Vancouver. Each week Vancouver Is Awesome will be featuring an image from the previous week, shot in one of the many 'hoods around town in order to draw your attention a little bit outside of the hyper-focus that we usually have on the City of Vancouver. |
Back in 2006, construction began on the Golden Ears Bridge; connecting Langley and Surrey on the south, to Pitt Meadows and Maple Ridge on the north side of the Fraser River. It opened in 2009 with a huge pedestrian celebration, drawing upwards of 60,000 people eager to see the brand new bridge. There's just something about large engineering/infrastructure projects that capture people's attention!
Of course, this wasn't the first crossing to connect these communities.
The Albion Ferry, which linked Albion and Fort Langley via McMillan Island, began operating back in 1957 and offered a free trip for up to 24 cars at a time, every 15 minutes from 5:30am to 1:30am. Averaging 80 trips a day during its last few years, it was not uncommon to have waits of 4, 5 even up to 8 sailings - when you include the loading/offloading times, that's a huge amount of time to wait, considering it took less than 7 minutes for the ferry to cross the river.
Enter the provincial government and the Golden Ears - the $808 million first piece of the Gateway project, complete with Western Canada's first electronic tolling system. While the crossing is much faster now, the $4.10 one-way toll (for unregistered vehicles) has proved to be a bit of a disincentive for those who previously rode the free ferry. I have to say, a quick drive over a cement, cable-stayed bridge lacks the romance and quaintness of a small open-deck ferry ride on a summer morning.
If you're curious for a window into the past, Google's StreetView cams were out around Fort Langley in 2009, and captured some of the final days of the ferry before she wrapped up on July 31, 2009 - Check it out!
Archives of the Nicholson Road project can be found HERE.
