The 6th Day|Lions Gate Bridge — the green span on the way out of the city

Location databases for The 6th Day place the bridge crossing in the film's closing movement, the drive out of the city, on Lions Gate. If you are going to leave Vancouver by road heading north, this is very often how you do it, and the film simply used the real geography: three lanes of suspension bridge slung across the First Narrows, from the tip of Stanley Park to the North Shore.

It was built by the Guinness family. They had bought thousands of acres of hillside in West Vancouver in the early 1930s and needed a way to get buyers to it, so they paid for a bridge, opened it in 1938, and charged a toll until the province took it over in 1955. The main span is 473 metres. The two towers are painted a green that has become a civic colour, and the name comes from the Lions, the twin peaks visible up the valley behind. Since 1986 the bridge and its approaches have carried a decorative necklace of lights, a Guinness gift for the city's centennial, and it is now a National Historic Site of Canada.

Three lanes for a metropolitan region of nearly three million is not a comfortable arrangement, and the counterflow system that reverses the middle lane is a daily fact of life. Drive it at rush hour and the romance drains out fast. Drive it at ten at night and it comes straight back.

The better approach is not to drive it at all. There is a narrow sidewalk on each side, reached from the Stanley Park causeway, and it takes about twenty minutes to walk across. Do it and you feel the deck move under a passing truck — the whole span breathes — with freighters at anchor in the outer harbour below and the Lions standing up ahead of you exactly where the film pointed the car.

Location photo: Lions Gate Bridge from Stanley Park (Wikimedia Commons).