Lions Gate Bridge · 88th Birthday · 12 November 1938–2026 · 1938–2026
Lions Gate Bridge Museum
Live traffic

Museum

Digital Twin

A digital twin of the Lions Gate Bridge is being built. It is not live yet.

Published Updated

Digital-twin render · © lionsgatebridge.org. Computer graphics, not camera footage.
Digital-twin render · © lionsgatebridge.org. Computer graphics, not camera footage.

Both films were rendered ahead of time from the model. Nothing in them is live.

What it is meant to be

A digital twin is a model of the bridge and the shore around it that real data can drive. This one is not finished: the model exists, and the live readings exist, but they are not yet joined into a live twin.

What is live today is on the Traffic page: queue levels, delays and the centre lane; where each reading comes from is on the Data page. Its 3D view draws the lanes and the queue from those readings. It is a schematic, not the model in the films.

What in the model is real

  • The ground. Heights come from LidarBC’s 2025 laser survey of the land (a 1 m model of the bare ground, acquired on 26 August 2025). The mountains behind the shore come from the CDED 1:50,000 height data.
  • The buildings. The shore has 89,026 building records, from OpenStreetMap and municipal open data. For 75,599 of them the height is measured from the LidarBC survey; 871 come from city records, 2,951 from OpenStreetMap tags, and 9,605 are estimated from the type of building (mostly outside the surveyed area).
  • The street lights. There are 43,266. Of them 1,846 are lamps that are mapped; the others are placed by rules from the class of the road, its lighting tag and a fixed spacing.
  • The coast. The coastline is the line where the LidarBC ground rises above the highest tides. OpenStreetMap says what the shore is made of: seawall, beach, rocks.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – British Columbia. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Vancouver. All credits are on the Data page.

What is not real, or not done yet

  • The model is not connected to live data. The films are fixed renders.
  • Most houses are simple shapes: a box with a generic roof. Roof and wall colours come from tags where the data has them, and from typical colours for the kind of building where it has not. They are not taken from photographs of each building.
  • The colours of the street lights are estimates, not surveyed.
  • There is no depth survey for the sea floor: the shore is continued downward on a simple slope, so the shape under the water is an estimate.