Vancouver's bridge cameras and how often each one refreshes

At 07:30 the Causeway camera at the Stanley Park entrance tells you whether the Lions Gate counterflow lane has been set, and the image behind it turns over every 298 seconds. That is the one I check before driving in from the North Shore. The view itself is ordinary. The cadence is the useful part, and it is the thing none of the Vancouver camera directories write down.

Vancouver's public cameras come from two networks with quite different habits. The City of Vancouver runs the downtown grid, intersection by intersection, and publishes the list as open data: 219 records in web-cam-url-links, which is what the catalogue API returned when I counted on 2026-10-04. DriveBC runs the bridges, the Cassiar Tunnel and Highway 1 along the Upper Levels, and its API reports a measured mean update period for every camera it operates, which is unusually candid of it (1,066 webcams province-wide on 2026-10-04).

Grouping all that by street name, which is how the directories do it, throws away the thing a driver wants. Nobody cares about Hornby Street in the abstract. They care about one crossing, from both ends, at one moment. So below they are grouped by crossing, each with the refresh period its operator reports.

The Lions Gate, and the camera that moves fastest

Six cameras cover the Lions Gate corridor, and five of them run on the same ~298 second cycle.

• Causeway looks north from the Stanley Park entrance, every 298 seconds. This is the counterflow tell: when the lane configuration changes, it shows up here before it shows up anywhere else you can see from a desk.
• Georgia Street sits at Chilco looking south and refreshes every 224 seconds, the quickest of the six, so it is the one to leave open when the queue is building back into the West End.
• LGB North End 1 looks south off the bridge's north end and LGB North End 2 looks north from the same mast, both on 298 seconds. Opened side by side they tell you which direction is actually stopped, which one camera never can.
• Marine Drive looks east toward the bridge from Taylor Way, and Taylor Way looks north up the hill, both 298 seconds. West Vancouver traffic stacks here long before it reaches the span, so this pair is the early warning for the pair above.

Best watched around 15:30 on a Friday, when the Horseshoe Bay ferry run and the bridge peak meet each other.

The Ironworkers, where the cadence splits in four

Seven cameras cover the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, and they are not interchangeable. Two of them refresh nearly four times faster than the other five, which is worth knowing before you pick one and stare at it.

• Ironworkers North approach - N and Ironworkers North approach - S sit by Fern Street at the north end, both on 242 seconds. These are the two to use if you want something close to live.
• Ironworkers midspan looks south from the middle of the bridge on a 900 second cycle. It is the best picture on the crossing and the slowest to change, which makes it a view rather than a traffic tool.
• Ironworkers North - N and Ironworkers North - S cover the north end looking each way, 899 seconds.
• Ironworkers South westbound and Ironworkers South eastbound watch the south end, 900 seconds. The eastbound one looks toward the Cassiar, so it catches the merge that causes most of the backup.

Fifteen minutes is a long time in a traffic jam. If the midspan image looks clear and you are about to leave, check a 242 second camera before you trust it.

Knight Street, Oak Street and the Cassiar

Four cameras cover the Knight Street Bridge, two at each end, all on 298 seconds: northend - N, northend - S, southend - N and southend - S. Four views on one crossing at five minute intervals is the densest coverage of any bridge in the city, and for a route that carries the truck traffic to Richmond that seems about right.

The Oak Street Bridge is watched from its north approach by Oak Street at 70 Avenue - S, looking south toward the span on a 300 second cycle, with Oak Street at 70 Avenue - N pointing back up Oak Street. From the Richmond side, Hwy 99 at Shell Road looks north on the approach every 299 seconds.

The Cassiar Tunnel camera looks south from the tunnel's south end at 900 seconds. Further south, the nearest camera to the George Massey Tunnel in DriveBC's whole set is Deas, on Highway 99 north of the Highway 17A overpass, also 900 seconds, so the tunnel itself is watched by its approach rather than by anything on the deck.

The downtown grid, every five minutes exactly

The City of Vancouver cameras are the opposite proposition: no captions, no measured update period, but a flat and reliable 300 seconds, declared in the page markup rather than inferred. Burrard St Bridge is the one worth a look, and Granville Bridge and Howe St On Ramp covers the third of the three downtown crossings. For the view rather than the traffic, Denman St and Beach Av points into English Bay, and it is the only camera on this list I open for pleasure.

Out on the arterials, Commercial Drive and E Broadway and Boundary Road and Kingsway are the two that tell you whether the east side is moving. Granville St and W Georgia St is downtown's busiest corner and reads as a crowd count as much as a traffic one.

On the North Shore, Highway 1 is covered in four-camera clusters pointing each way at Capilano, Westview and Lonsdale, on cycles between 745 and 934 seconds. Slow, but four angles at one interchange beats one angle anywhere. The ferry queue at Horseshoe Bay has two cameras on 689 seconds, east and west, and they are the ones to check before driving out to a sailing.

Counted from our own data on 2026-10-04, 110 live cameras sit within 5 km of Georgia and Granville, and the Vancouver page lists 141 live across the city. Those are the two numbers I trust, both measured today, because the fleet turns over fast enough that a count written last month is already wrong.

We are going to start putting the operator's reported refresh period on the camera pages themselves, DriveBC's measured mean where we have it and the declared meta refresh where we do not, because it changes which camera you should open and right now you have to know to go looking for it. The open question for me is what to do with a 900 second camera in a traffic jam. A quarter of an hour old is not live, and I am not sure whether the right answer is to label it, to rank it below the quick ones, or to show the last three frames side by side so you can at least see which way it is going.