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Poll: Four wheels or two wings? Vancouverites weigh in on their travel preferences

Of five options, two were clear front runners
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Photo: Vancouver International Airport/Facebook

When it comes to travel there are a myriad of options on how to do it, from walking pilgrimages to supersonic flight (well, until 2003 that was a public option).

With that in mind, Vancouver Is Awesome (VIA) polled 834 readers and asked the question: What's your favourite way to travel?

There are a few major methods most people use as a significant piece of their trip. You've got your road trips, travelling by plane, the cruise ship industry, trains and, since we're on the coast, sail boats. Yes buses are an option as well, but there are limited slots for poll options and who's going to choose an intercity bus first?

There's a clear winner here: road trips. Notably, non-Vancouver readers of VIA are much bigger fans of road trips than those in the city, with a more than 3 per cent difference.

Second place is perhaps not surprising, with planes opening up the rest of the world; over a quarter of those in Vancouver and outside of the city picked that.

In third place, given the option, a lot of people would travel by train. This is perhaps unexpected given the size of the train industry compared to the cruise industry in the city, but it matches with the sentiment a previous VIA poll saw where most readers were not excited to see the cruise ships return to Vancouver's waters.

Sailboats, an unusual and more difficult mode of travel, was firmly in last place.

The poll ran from 8/21/2022 to 8/26/2022. Of the 834 votes, we can determine that 405 are from within the community. The full results are as follows:

Road trip 33.83 % local, 36.93 % total    
By plane 27.16 % local, 26.50 % total    
Cruise ship 14.57 % local, 12.95 % total    
Sailboat 5.43 % local, 5.52 % total    
Train 18.77 % local, 18.11 % total    
  Local   Total

Results are based on an online study of adult Vancouver Is Awesome readers that are located in Vancouver. The margin of error - which measures sample variability - is +/- 3.39%, 19 times out of 20.

Vancouver Is Awesome uses a variety of techniques to capture data, detect and prevent fraudulent votes, detect and prevent robots, and filter out non-local and duplicate votes.