CIRQL Ferries clears Vancouver landing site and plans to help revitalize Harbour Green dock
- CIRQL Ferries Staff
- Apr 25
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 25
Key part of CIRQL Ferries' venture falls into place with recent Vancouver Park Board and City Council motions
The CIRQL Ferries' team has spent the past three years relentlessly working to build its all-electric passenger only ferry service between Vancouver, Gibsons, and Bowen Island. Several building blocks of the venture came together over time – including charging infrastructure plans and landing site relationships at Gibsons and Bowen Island – but recently we faced one last major barrier: clearing a landing site for the ferries in downtown Vancouver.
Our team is now thrilled to announce we have cleared Vancouver’s Harbour Green dock as our downtown landing site, after successful motions passed this month by Vancouver Park Board and City Council. Having worked with City of Vancouver staff since 2025 to assess the suitability of the site, we now have permission to move ahead on contract negotiations with the City to finalize CIRQL Ferries’ access to the dock. This puts us on track to start our ferry service in 2028.
Downtown or bust
Clearing a ferry landing site in downtown Vancouver was not a trivial piece of our puzzle. CIRQL Ferries’ vision has always been to expand coastal transportation options for the public by going straight from the centre of one community to another, eliminating the need to go through faraway suburban ferry terminals just to go across the water.
But with much of Vancouver’s waterfront controlled privately, many options were out of reach for a small venture like ours that wanted to create a robust, inexpensive means of transportation for the public. As we worked to build our service, we poured extensive time and resources into investigating suitable locations for a landing site, with more than a dozen meetings over two years.
Getting past the impasse
One year ago, we had seemingly exhausted all options and had reached an impasse with the Vancouver landing site. Our team started to fear that, despite our significant efforts and investments in this venture, we’d reached the end of the line.
Just when we’d almost given up, a new champion emerged. From our first meeting with Councillor Rebecca Bligh, she immediately understood our vision to increase connections between waterfront communities, extending the public transportation systems that have re-wired Vancouver over the past 20 years.
In February 2025, with support from Councillor Bligh, Mayor Silas White of Gibsons, Mayor Andrew Leonard of Bowen Island, MP Patrick Weiler, MLA Jeremy Valeriote, Park Board Commissioners Laura Christensen, and Brennan Bastyovanszky, we focused our attention on Harbour Green, an underutilized public dock off West Cordova Street. The dock had become run-down in recent years and was often closed off, awaiting various repairs. A nearby restaurant and retail space has been unoccupied for several years.
On the strength of that support, last year we received unanimous approval from all the Park Board Commissioners, from Mayor Sim and all City Councillors to work with Park Board and City of Vancouver staff to understand the necessary technical, financial, and public parameters of an agreement to use Harbour Green as a ferry landing site. We have worked extensively with multiple stakeholders, including BC Hydro, our structural engineers Moffat & Nichol, our marine engineers 3GA Marine and architects BOP to design a new approach for Harbour Green that balances sustainability, public benefit, and business.
Green light on Harbour Green
After all of this work over the past 12 months, the green light came when Vancouver Park Board and City Council each passed a motion in April that allows CIRQL Ferries to proceed with contract negotiations on the Harbour Green landing site. CIRQL Ferries is responsible for design, construction, and operation of the reconfigured dock, and the term of the lease will be 10 years. Changes to the dock will come at no cost to the public, and upon launch, CIRQL Ferries will be providing a stipend per passenger.
The CIRQL Ferries team now has the task of revitalizing this underutilized corner of the Vancouver waterfront, configuring the dock for our ferry service and adding new safety features. Accessibility will be improved and a new viewing platform will be accessed from the seawall. CIRQL Ferries’ design also includes a charge barge – a floating dock segment with onboard batteries. The charge barge draws a steady charge from the grid 24/7 so that it can provide a high-capacity charge to the vessel when needed.
Next Steps
We’re excited to be working with BOP, a local architectural firm, to design the reconfigured public space.
BOP’s work is site specific, locally derived and regional concerned. The Charge Barge and associated public dock is a rare opportunity for those things to come together in a truly unique and catalyzing way for Harbour Green park, Vancouver and the coastal communities it will connect to. We look forward to helping develop CIRQL’s vision with them in the coming months and bring a beautiful, sustainable, functional and fun future to Vancouver’s waterfront
-- Shane Oleksiuk, Principal, BOP Architects
With this latest development, CIRQL Ferries’ all electric passenger ferry service is closer than ever. By 2028, we aim to bring multiple benefits for local residents by providing a much-needed waterway extension of public transportation and better connectivity with vibrant communities on Bowen Island and in Gibsons.
