Transportation Hub — New Westminster, BC
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Dunbar Loop
N 49° 12.080 W 122° 54.672
10U E 506468 N 5449840
Columbia and Eighth streets has been the centre of New Westminster's transportation since essentially the 1890s when the interurban railway linked the city to Vancouver and the Canadian Pacific Railway to the rest of Canada.
Waymark Code: WM11B37
Location: British Columbia, Canada
Date Posted: 09/19/2019
Views: 7
For much of the 20th century, the intersection of Columbia and Eighth streets has been New Westminster's transportation hub. To the west is the Canadian Pacific Railway station built in 1899. The east is the British Columbia Electric Railway station. From these stations, you could travel across Canada or just to Vancouver, Fraser Mills, Chilliwack, Marpole, and Queensborough.
However, by the 1950s and 1960s, both stations ceased to be used for passenger use as the Lower Mainland residents began to drive cars and the Provincial government started to build freeways. It also led to the slow decline of New Westminster's Columbia Street as the main shopping street for the Fraser Valley. With the opening of the Trans-Canada Freeway linking Vancouver to the province's Interior, New Westminster was bypassed. When Guildford Shopping Centre opened in north Surrey in the late 1960s Columbia Street's and New Westminster fate seemed doomed.
Then in the mid-1980s, the Lower Mainland's transit network got its first rapid transit line built and New Westminster was the original terminus until the line was built to cross the Fraser River into Surrey. However, New Westminster became an important transit hub where buses travel from it to serve New Westminster and Burnaby. Very slowly New Westminster recovered.
Today Columbia Street is now lined with condo towers housing thousands of people. Even the BCER Station has been incorporated into a tall condo building towering over the street.
Transportation Hub
New Westminster is situated at the geographic centre of the Lower Mainland, and through its history, has been connected to the rest of the world through streetcars, trains, boats, cars, trucks, buses and rapid transit. But the first major mode of transportation was on the Fraser River.
Hundreds of sternwheel steamboats once drove the economy of the lower Fraser River. The Skeena is regarded as the last of her type to carry passengers, livestock and freight on the river. When she was tied up in the fall of 1928, the sternwheel riverboat trade ended.
Major roads systems linking New Westminster to the United States and the rest of Canada brought vehicular transport, with the arrival of the CP railway in 1886, in conjunction with the city's deep water port, expanded the import and export of goods to and from the rest of the world.