Vancouver

The currency is the Canadian dollar. Tap-to-pay works for practically everything, including buses, the little ferries and street carts, and you never need to carry more than CAD 40 in cash on any given day. Taxes aren't included on the price tag: the federal GST, of 5%, applies to almost everything, and the provincial PST, of 7%, to goods. Restaurant meals are charged only GST, and alcoholic drinks carry 10% PST. 2026 price ranges, all approximate: coffee CAD 4–6, simple lunch CAD 15–25, sit-down dinner CAD 40–75 per person without drinks. Pint CAD 8–11, cocktail CAD 16–22, museum admission CAD 20–30. A mid-range hotel runs CAD 260–450 a night between June and September, and CAD 150–230 from November to March. Accommodation also adds about 8% PST, 3% MRDT and an additional 2.5% municipal fee, on top of GST. Tipping is expected and belongs in the budget: 15 to 20% at restaurants with table service. Card machines suggest 18, 20 and 25%, and it's acceptable to choose the lowest or enter another amount. Away from the table: CAD 1–2 per drink ordered at the bar, 10 to 15% in taxis and CAD 2–5 per day for housekeeping. Before deciding, always add the taxes and the tip to the price on the tag.

Airport: 15 km from downtown, on Sea Island

Vancouver Airport (YVR) is 15 km south of downtown on Sea Island, in the municipality of Richmond. The SkyTrain Canada Line, opened in August 2009, links the terminal to Waterfront station in about 26 minutes. Trains run every 6 to 10 minutes, from 5am to 1am. Leaving the airport by train incurs a CAD6.50 surcharge called YVR AddFare. Day passes bought at Sea Island stations also pay it. Monthly passes, day passes bought off the island and journeys toward the airport are exempt. A taxi or ride-hailing car downtown costs CAD40–55 and takes 25 to 40 minutes. Flights to the United States undergo US customs preclearance inside YVR: arrive three hours early. Abbotsford Airport (YXX), 70 km east, handles low-cost flights, but the transfer to the city takes more than an hour.

SkyTrain: three lines; all driverless

The regional network is run by TransLink: three driverless SkyTrain lines, Expo, from 1985; Millennium, from 2002; and Canada, from 2009. Rounding out the network are the SeaBus, which crosses to North Vancouver in 12 minutes every 15 minutes, the West Coast Express commuter train, with few trips on weekdays, and buses that include electric trolleybuses. Since July 1, 2026, the one-zone fare with stored value on a Compass card has been CAD 2.85, and longer trips are charged by zone. Transfers are free for 90 minutes. Pay with the Compass Card, with a refundable CAD 6 deposit, sold at station vending machines, or tap a credit card or phone directly on the reader. A day pass costs about CAD 12.50. The Broadway subway (an extension of the Millennium Line, 5.7 km with six stations between VCC–Clark and Arbutus) has been under construction since 2021, with opening scheduled for 2027, and the avenue still has reduced lanes. For cycling there's the public Mobi bike share, with about 250 stations. There are protected bike lanes on Hornby, Dunsmuir and 10th Avenue, and the seawall works as a real route. The little Aquabus and False Creek Ferries boats cross to Granville Island for CAD 4–8 each way. Downtown is flat and walkable; from Broadway the ground rises, and the hills are more tiring than the map suggests.

Watch your belongings downtown and favor busy streets at night. Theft from parked vehicles and bicycle theft occur. Use two locks and leave nothing visible in your car, even for ten minutes. The Downtown Eastside lies along Hastings between Main and Cambie, where visible poverty and the toxic drug crisis are concentrated. The province declared a public health emergency in April 2016 and has recorded more than 16,000 overdose deaths. If you cross the area, go during the day, respect residents and avoid photographing people without consent. Between mid-August and mid-September, wildfire smoke may require people with respiratory conditions to wear a mask; air-quality readings are published hourly. North Shore trails have black bears and coyotes: make noise, walk with others and don't carry strongly scented food. Tell someone your route, because rescue teams handle dozens of cases a year involving people who set out without a flashlight. The sea is 15 to 18 °C in summer, cold enough to shorten a swim. The region sits on the Cascadia seismic zone, and public earthquake-preparedness guidance is available. Emergency: 911.

Take your shoes off entering a house

Take off your shoes when entering any home, even if the host doesn't ask, because nobody is going to ask. Clean socks take care of it; at dressier dinners, some people bring a pair of shoes in their bag.

Thank the driver getting off the bus

Say “thank you” when getting off, even on a crowded bus, and the driver answers each person. Getting off in silence doesn't offend anyone, but it gets noticed.

Respect the seawall lanes

Pedestrians on one side, bikes and skates on the other; on the Stanley Park stretch, cycling is one-way, counterclockwise. Going against the flow is the mistake that earns you the only shout you'll hear in the city.

The land acknowledgment is literal

Public events, classes, and even company meetings open by citing the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh. It's not a decorative formula: the lack of treaties across most of British Columbia is an open legal question.

Sort trash into four streams

Organics, recyclables, paper, and garbage. Composting has been mandatory in the city since 2015, including in food courts, and getting the bin wrong in public usually earns a polite correction from a stranger.

Don't smoke in parks, on beaches, or by a restaurant's door

Cigarettes and cannabis follow the same rule: banned in parks, on beaches, and within 6 m of doors and windows, with a fine. Cannabis has been legal since October 17, 2018, for people over 19, and can only be bought at a licensed shop.

Thinking the mountain is close because it's at the end of the street

It's easy to think the mountain is close because it appears at the end of the street. The Lions Gate Bridge has three lanes with a reversible direction and jams at peak times. From downtown to the base of Grouse it's 40 to 70 minutes between SeaBus and bus, not 15.

A CAD 100 dinner really costs CAD 125

Adding up the prices on the menu and thinking that's the bill. Between tax and tip, a dinner advertised at CAD 100 comes out to CAD 125 to 130.

Leaving anything visible in the car

Vehicle break-ins are the city's most common crime. A backpack, a charger, or a coin in the cupholder is enough to get the window smashed.

Booking “Vancouver” and ending up in Surrey

Booking “Vancouver” on a site and ending up in Richmond, Burnaby, or Surrey without checking the nearest SkyTrain station. The difference can be an hour per trip.

Dressing for the photo instead of the rain

From October to March, prepare for rainy days: a waterproof hooded jacket and closed shoes help. A compact umbrella is useful when the wind is not strong.

The Drive

Commercial Drive. No one uses the full name, and saying “I live off the Drive” places you in the east side of the city.

Toque

Pronounced “tuk.” The knit wool hat. It's a Canadian word; calling it a “beanie” outs the outsider instantly.

Skookum

“Strong, good, real.” Comes from Chinook Wawa, the coast's 19th-century trade lingua franca, which also left behind “saltchuck” (the sea) and “high muckamuck” (the big shot).

Unceded territory

The opening formula for events, classes, and council sessions: most of British Columbia was never the subject of a treaty with Indigenous peoples.

Juneuary

June mixed with January: the gray, cold June that delays summer. “Raincouver” is the sister nickname, used with more resignation than humor.

Double-double

Coffee with two creams and two sugars, the standard order at the Tim Hortons chain. It works as a password of Canadianness in any line.

Downtown and West End

The central peninsula brings together offices, the cruise ship terminal, and the West End, Canada's densest residential neighborhood, with towers from the 1960s and 1970s among wood-frame houses and English Bay beach. Robson is the shopping axis; Davie has been the center of LGBT life since the 1970s, marked with rainbow crosswalks.

Gastown

The original core from 1867, around the steam clock installed in 1977, which has backup electric motors and whistles every quarter hour. Cobblestone streets and Victorian facades restored after the 1971 heritage designation, now with design shops, bars and the largest concentration of cruise passengers between May and September.

Chinatown and Strathcona

One of North America's largest historic Chinatowns, with the Millennium Gate (2002), the classical Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden (1986, the first of its kind outside China), and the Sam Kee Building, 1.8 m deep. Next to it, Strathcona is the city's oldest working-class neighborhood, saved from demolition by the freeway revolt.

Yaletown and North False Creek

Former rail warehouses converted into restaurants, and behind them the glass towers built starting in 1990 on the Expo 86 site. It's the most direct demonstration of the local urban model, with a continuous waterfront walk and no freeway in sight.

Kitsilano and Point Grey

South of English Bay: wood-frame houses from the early 20th century, Kits Beach, and a 137 m saltwater pool. It was the counterculture neighborhood in the 1960s (Greenpeace was born there in 1971) and today it's expensive, with sports shops on 4th Avenue and, at the far west end, the UBC campus.

Mount Pleasant and Main Street

East of False Creek, around Main and Broadway, it gathers craft breweries in the old Brewery Creek, thrift stores, design studios, and small restaurants. It's also the neighborhood hardest hit by the Broadway subway construction, which has narrowed lanes since 2021.

Commercial Drive

“The Drive” was Little Italy for postwar immigration and still keeps Italian cafés next to Ethiopian, Vietnamese, and Latin American restaurants. It's the city's most activist neighborhood and one of the cheapest to sit and eat ten minutes from downtown by SkyTrain.

Granville Island and South False Creek

A strip of industrial landfill built in 1916 under the Granville Bridge, converted in 1979 into a public market, theaters, a marina, and studios (the Emily Carr art university moved to Great Northern Way in 2017). It's not a residential neighborhood, but it works as a central plaza: you get there by little ferry in five minutes.

The peninsula, the mountains, and the rain

Vancouver occupies the Burrard Peninsula, between the shallow fjord of Burrard Inlet to the north and the north arm of the Fraser River to the south, with the Strait of Georgia to the west and the Coast Mountains rising sharply on the other side of the water: Grouse at 1,231 m, Seymour at 1,449 m, Cypress at 1,440 m, all visible from downtown on a clear day. The climate is temperate oceanic: 1,150 to 1,200 mm of rain a year at sea level, concentrated from October to March, dry and mild summers, snow rare in the city and abundant 900 m above it.

The grid and the twisted peninsula

The layout is a grid oriented to the cardinal points, with numbered streets running east-west south of False Creek and address numbering starting from Ontario Street and the port; the downtown peninsula is an appendix to that grid, twisted relative to it.

Height instead of a freeway

Since the freeway never reached downtown, density built upward instead: thin towers over a two-to-four-story commercial base, with view corridors to the mountains protected by bylaw since 1989, and the West End became the densest residential neighborhood in Canada. About 11% of the municipal territory is parkland, and the seawall stitches the waterline for roughly 28 km.

The continent's third-largest film and TV hub

Vancouver is the third-largest film and television production center in North America, behind only Los Angeles and New York, and the industry employs tens of thousands of people in studios in Burnaby, Richmond, and the east side of the city. “The X-Files” was shot here from 1993 to 1998 and set the pattern: the city rarely plays itself, doubling for Seattle, Portland, New York, and generic Pacific Northwest forests. It's common to run into a closed-off street and yellow location signs. The same technical economy sustains a video-game hub (Electronic Arts has operated in Burnaby since 1983) and one of the country's largest clusters of animation and effects studios.

The Vancouver School of photoconceptualism

In visual art, the city produced the so-called Vancouver School of photoconceptualism, with Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace, and Stan Douglas, whose large-format staged photographs have been studied since the 1980s. Before them, Emily Carr (1871–1945) painted the forest and the coastal villages; alongside them, and for much longer, Northwest Coast Indigenous art: Bill Reid, of the Haida nation, and Susan Point, Musqueam, whose cedar portals stand at the airport and at the Museum of Anthropology. It's what the city exports most as an image. In literature, Douglas Coupland wrote about the city in short dictionary-style entries, Wayson Choy wrote the Chinatown of the 1930s, and Timothy Taylor wrote the kitchen of the 1990s; the Vancouver Writers Fest takes place on Granville Island in October.

Nightlife is modest for the size

Nightlife is modest for the size of the city. The nickname “No Fun City” comes from decades of restrictive licensing, and most bars close between 1am and 3am. The main pastime is outdoors: running the seawall, paddling in False Creek, skiing on three mountains 30–40 minutes from downtown. In pro sports, the Canucks, founded in 1970, play hockey at Rogers Arena, opened in 1995, and have reached three Stanley Cup finals, in 1982, 1994 and 2011, losing all of them; the 1994 and 2011 losses ended in riots downtown. The Whitecaps (soccer) and the BC Lions (Canadian football) share BC Place, which hosted seven World Cup matches in June and July 2026. In music, the city gave the world late-1970s punk with D.O.A., the Nettwerk label and Sarah McLachlan in the 1990s, and more recently Grimes and Michael Bublé.

“City of Glass,” by Douglas Coupland (2000)

A portrait of the city in short entries, written by someone who grew up in it. It explains the glass towers, the body obsession, and the lack of urban memory better than any conventional guide.

“The Jade Peony,” by Wayson Choy (1995)

Novel about three siblings in the Chinatown of the 1930s and 1940s, with the head tax, legal exclusion, and the Second World War seen from inside a single family.

“Double Happiness,” by Mina Shum (1994)

The director's first feature film, shot in the city: a young Chinese-Canadian woman torn between family and an acting career. It's the most direct portrait of immigrant Vancouver in the 1990s.