Official Vancouver Information Sources: A Two-Layer Reference List

Core city sources

• City of Vancouver (vancouver.ca) — the municipal government: streets, sidewalks, parks, zoning, permits, property tax, local bylaws and City-run waste collection.
• Van311 (vancouver.ca/van311.aspx) — the City’s non-emergency service channel, reachable by phone, app and web, for service requests and municipal questions.
• TransLink (translink.ca) — the regional transit authority: SkyTrain, SeaBus, West Coast Express, buses, fares and service alerts. Not a City of Vancouver service.

The regional layer

Metro Vancouver is a separate body governed by a board drawn from its member municipalities, and it delivers services at a regional scale across all of them, including drinking water supply, regional sewage treatment and regional waste management.

This matters for verification because a question about regional infrastructure will not be answered authoritatively on a city site, and a city site will not list a regional contact as its own service. If you cannot find something on the City’s pages and it concerns a system serving the whole region, that is usually the explanation rather than an omission.

Transit sources, and why they are separate

Transit in Metro Vancouver is regional. TransLink serves the whole region, which is why the City of Vancouver neither sets fares nor decides routes, and why a transit problem reported to Van311 will be redirected.

Transit is also where the most confidently wrong numbers circulate, because fares and zone rules are adjusted periodically while old articles keep ranking in search. The operator’s own site is the only source that stays current on what a fare costs, what a pass includes, and whether a given service is running today.

How to tell an official source from a lookalike

The reliable signal is the domain, not the design. City services live under vancouver.ca; regional transit lives under the transit authority’s own domain. A polished site with a similar-sounding name and a checkout page is not the City.

• Check the domain before you enter payment details or personal information.
• Be sceptical of any site charging a service fee to process a municipal payment; the City does not require a third-party intermediary.
• Be especially wary of paid search results for ticket payment and permit renewals, where lookalike sites concentrate.
• When a page cites a specific rule, fee or deadline, follow its link back to the official source and confirm it there.

Emergency and police boundaries

Any emergency goes to 911, without exception and before anything else. Non-emergency police matters belong with the Vancouver Police Department, which is a separate organisation from City Hall and is not reached through Van311.

Provincial responsibilities — health care, driver licensing, courts and provincial benefits — sit with the province, so a search for them should not begin on a municipal site.

Why we link out instead of restating

Civic details change. Fares, fees, hours, collection rules and program criteria are revised by policy decisions, and a guide that freezes those values becomes quietly wrong over time, which is worse than useless to a reader who acts on it.

Our editorial standard is therefore to explain how a system works and how to use it, and to send you to the official page for any value that moves. Where a specific detail is stated, it is something structurally stable rather than a figure that will be different within a year.