With little more than a minute between them, floatplane after floatplane glided over Stanley Park and onto the water at Coal Harbour. It was 7:45 a.m. Tuesday morning (September 23), and the crowds exiting the planes were dressed in suits and luggage-free.

These are Vancouver’s supercommuters, defined for this article as people who travel more than a two-hour drive to work. The 2006 census shows that commuting long distances is common, and a trend that has grown since 2001, despite the rapidly rising cost of fuel.

The environmental costs of flying or ferrying to work—as against the vision of the Metro Vancouver Liveable Region Strategic Plan, which promotes compact communities—are obvious. Anthony Perl, the director of Simon Fraser University’s urban studies program, called the growth in supercommuting a “self-correcting problem”, as fuel costs will soon crunch the lifestyles of even the most flush among the suit-and-tie set.

However, he told the Georgia Straight, the notion of flying to work in the Lower Mainland doesn’t have to die with peak oil.

“There’s two places where I think dirigibles would make good transportation,” Perl said, noting he’s touted the use of zeppelins in his newest book, Transport Revolutions (Earthscan, 2007), which he coauthored with Toronto urban consultant Richard Gilbert.

“One is transporting food in the remote North. The other is in the triangle between the Gulf Islands, Vancouver, Victoria, and Nanaimo. It may sound futuristic, but there’s no combination of biodiesel and French-fry oil that can fly the light planes around the gulf economically.”

Perl may be alone in planning for the future of supercommuting in
southwestern British Columbia. Metro Vancouver hasn’t talked to the Victoria-area Capital Regional District about it, according to Metro spokesperson Bill Morrell. Nor does TransLink deal with it, according to spokesperson Ken Hardie. At the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention held September 22 to 26 in Penticton, the delegates are not discussing supercommuting, nor do any resolutions address it.

The 2006 census asked citizens to name their regular place of residence and regular place of work. Bowen Island, for example, sends 675 people to work in Greater Vancouver. That’s more than the 430 who both live and work on the island. From Whistler, 280 commute to the Lower Mainland, up from 235 in 2001. Victoria sends 195 across the Strait of Georgia, up from 160. Kelowna sends 255 to the Lower Mainland, up from 190. Gibsons sends 190, up from 75.

The City of Vancouver sends 745 workers out of province to their regular place of work, to cities such as Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, and Fort McMurray, Alberta. Another 1,075 of the city’s residents leave Greater
Vancouver for their workplace.

According to census data, many communities around the strait send workers to Vancouver, and many of them saw a rise in supercommuters between 2001 and 2006. That’s despite substantial increases in ferry fares.

Michael Alexander, a research analyst for Smart Growth B.C., said the stats don’t tell the full story. How often do these commuters commute, for example? Statistics Canada doesn’t ask. He told the Straight he’s not surprised at the numbers, as many businesses have two or more offices.

“From 2001 to 2006, the amount of national and international business was growing substantially,” Alexander said. “I’m much more interested in what happened last year.”

Perl said he knows he sounds like a nut for promoting dirigibles as an alternative. The aircraft lost popularity with the rise of the airplane and the 1937 explosion of the Hindenburg. But he argued that investing in sustainable solutions makes more sense than, say, building more fuel tanks at Vancouver International Airport. And, he said, the surface areas of dirigibles are large enough to be used for solar power.