driving distance

Driving from the sleepy suburb of Coquitlam all the way to Downtown Vancouver always seemed like such a long ass haul because the highway system cuts diagonally through greater Vancouver and leaves you to do about 10-15 min of city driving before and after getting on the highway to get to your destination. Here, the 101 is pretty efficient (at night), gets you real close to where you need to go (usually) and cops are lenient on speeding (120 km/80 miles is OK) so the distance you actually drive in the Bay Area is actually somewhat deceiving because you can get a long distance in a short time.

So I decided to do a comparison of the distances between home and downtown in Van, TO and here.

Si's old house to downtown TO (Yonge @ Queen): 19.5 km / 12.12 miles / 22 min driving time
My old house to downtown Vancouver (Granville @ Robson): 24.9 km / 15.47 miles / 26 min driving time (totally off, I'd say 35 min)
Our place to SF (1015 Folsom to be exact): 34.4 km / 21.4 miles/ 27 min driving time

I was right, we live a lot further from downtown now but it takes around the same amount of time to get there. I think if I had lived 34 km from Vancouver, that would put me somewhere in Surrey or Steveston :-/