Island ferry riders may soon have a better look at the local vehicle lineup situation.
Last week Bowen council agreed to support a ferry camera project in collaboration with a trio of local residents. The project aims to establish a camera on the Community Centre aimed at Bowen Island Trunk Road. This would give people a look at the latter portions of the vehicle ferry lineup, particularly past the crest of the hill where vehicle cutoffs generally start to take place, and help them decide if they should try and make the current sailing or hang back until the next boat.
Rather than a live video feed, the camera would take snapshots of the lineup at one-minute intervals. These snapshots would be available through the municipality (BIM) website, with image quality reduced to protect privacy (ie. faces or licence plates wouldn’t be detectable) while still providing a meaningful view of the vehicle lineup. Images would not be stored or remain available for viewing anywhere after they are refreshed.
The group, made up of Dee Elliott, Tim Hausch and Matthew van der Giessen, is currently exploring fundraising options for camera costs and other equipment necessary to get the feed up and running. While there’s no official start date yet, the aim is to have the camera installed and operating sometime this year.
“We started this a year ago, responding to ongoing community needs and observations of what other island communities have done regarding ferry lineup monitoring,” said Elliott at the council meeting.
“We thought this would be a slam dunk but it became a much bigger process than anticipated. But so far we’ve not given up,” she added.
Mayor Andrew Leonard noted the persistence of Elliott and her partners to keep the project alive and now see it close to realization. “Thank you very much to those community members who have brought this forward and made this happen and put the pertinent resources into it. I think it’s a great project and I’m really happy to support it.”
The agreement between the municipality and volunteers will initially be in place for one year, with the option for BIM to either extend or assume more control of the ferry camera operation after that.
