Start Here | How We Measure
How we measure distance to a station
Every distance on this hub comes from one source and one calculation. Here is exactly what they are, and where the method is weakest.
The short answer
Station coordinates come from TransLink's published GTFS feed, the same file transit apps use. 60 stations across 5 services. Distances are straight line from each listing to each station, not walking distance. A station area on this hub means 1200 metres, and a station needs 12 nearby homes before it gets a page.
- Stations
- 60
- Station area radius
- 1200 m
- Homes we can place
- 1,243
- Stations with homes nearby
- 40
1. Where the stations come from
TransLink publishes a GTFS static feed, the machine-readable schedule and stop data that every transit app consumes. We take the stations from that: route types for metro, rail, and ferry, which is SkyTrain, the West Coast Express, and the SeaBus.
TransLink names each platform separately, so "Waterfront Station @ Platform 1" and "Waterfront Station @ Platform 2" are distinct rows. A buyer cares about the station, not the platform, so platforms are collapsed to one point per station.
Stations by service
- Expo Line 24
- Millennium Line 17
- Canada Line 17
- SeaBus 2
- West Coast Express 8
Waterfront counts once while serving four services, which is why the per-service figures sum above 60.
2. A straight line is not a walk
This is the most important limitation on the hub and the one most likely to mislead you, so it is stated on every page rather than buried here.
Distances are great-circle: the shortest line between two points on the globe, ignoring everything in between. Metro Vancouver has a great deal in between. Rail cuts, the Fraser River, Burrard Inlet, highway interchanges, and steep hills all turn a short line into a long walk.
Use these figures to build a shortlist. Then open the specific address on a map and look at the actual route before you rule anything in or out.
3. Two different radii, on purpose
The search filter defaults to 800 metres, the standard catchment used in transit-oriented development planning. That is the right default for "show me homes near transit".
This hub describes station areas at 1200 metres, about a fifteen minute walk. At 800 m only ten stations in the region have eight or more newly built ground-oriented homes, which is too thin to write about honestly. At 1200 m, twenty clear that bar.
Both numbers appear beside the figures they produced. The one thing that must never happen is a distance quoted without saying which radius measured it.
A station needs 12 or more nearby homes before it gets its own page. Below that the median swings on a single sale.
4. The homes we cannot place
79 of 1,322 active listings have no usable coordinates. Most arrive with a latitude and longitude of exactly zero, which is a real point in the Gulf of Guinea off West Africa.
They are excluded from every distance, every count, and every map on this hub. They are not treated as far from transit, and they are not silently counted as near it. A home we cannot place is a home we cannot make a claim about.
Where a page shows a map, the caption states how many homes were plotted, how many were held back to keep the map readable, and how many could not be placed at all.
5. What this cannot tell you
- → How long the walk actually takes. That needs a routing engine and a road network, and we do not run one.
- → How long your commute is. Distance to a station says nothing about where the line goes, how often it runs, or what happens at your end.
- → Whether a station area is a pleasant place to live. This hub measures homes and distances, nothing else.
- → What proximity will do to future value. These are asking prices today, not a forecast.
Measured on and recalculated on every site build.
Common questions
Where do the station coordinates come from?
TransLink's GTFS static feed, which is the machine-readable schedule and stop data every transit app consumes. Not a wiki, not a scrape, and not typed in from memory. It is regenerated by a script in the repository so the source is reproducible.
Why straight-line distance instead of walking distance?
Because walking distance needs a routing engine and a road network, and doing it badly is worse than not doing it. Straight line is honest, cheap, reproducible, and stated as what it is on every page that uses it. The cost is that it flatters any address separated from its station by a rail cut, a river, a highway, or a hill, all of which this region has.
Why 1,200 metres for a station area?
Because 800 m, the standard transit-oriented-development catchment, is too tight to describe an area here: only ten stations in the whole region have eight or more newly built ground-oriented homes within it. At 1,200 m, roughly a fifteen minute walk, twenty stations clear that bar. The search filter still defaults to 800 m, because "show me homes near transit" and "describe this station area" are different questions.
What about the Broadway Subway and the Surrey Langley extension?
Neither is operating, so neither has stations in TransLink's published feed and neither appears anywhere on this hub. We do not place stations that do not exist yet. When they open and appear in the feed, the pages pick them up on the next build.
Why are some homes missing from the maps?
79 of 1,322 active listings have no usable coordinates. Most of them arrive with a latitude and longitude of exactly zero, which is a point in the Gulf of Guinea off West Africa. Those are excluded rather than plotted or counted as near anything, which is the only defensible thing to do with them.
Do bus stops count?
No. This hub covers SkyTrain, SeaBus, and the West Coast Express only. Almost every address in the region is near a bus stop, so proximity to one carries no information for a buyer, and including them would make the whole measure meaningless.
Where these figures come from
- TransLink, open data and GTFS
Station and stop locations for the transit distance calculations.
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- VanPlex active listings, MLS® data
Active townhouses, half duplexes, and row houses built in the last two years across Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley.
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Filter the whole search by station
Every home on these pages is in the main search, where you can pick the stations you want and set how far you are willing to walk, then filter by price, bedrooms, and everything else.