Sea to Sky Road Conditions is a Facebook group that most people in Squamish know pretty well.
The page has attracted just over 58,000 members, allowing them to post Highway 99 updates from Vancouver to Squamish to Whistler and beyond. But what was the reason behind starting the page?
From the page creator’s perspective, the whole purpose was building community.
“I really created this group to really bring community and partnership and clear communication together,” said Brian Loverin, who founded the group.
Loverin said he and his wife moved to Squamish in about 2014 and, like many of us, often used the Sea to Sky Highway for personal and work travels.
“I would always get stuck in traffic,” he said. “So I decided that I’m going to create communication for this highway.”
The page launched around September 2015, which Loverin said was around the time Facebook groups seemed to really be taking off.
“Within a week, I had about 1,500 people,” he said.
“This is crazy,” he thought at the time. “This is unbelievable.”
Loverin said that new requests to join would skyrocket after highway stoppages or closures. Eventually, it ballooned into what it is today. About eight administrators and moderators now manage the page.
Loverin said they had to stay on the ball with monitoring it as it grew. And Loverin credits admin Matthew Paugh with setting up the page to automatically prevent “any type of spam, advertising or cuss words.”
But, Loverin said he also has definitely had members get upset with him through personal communication and that he and other admin have even received threats.
“I have to remind them not to be attached to social media; it’s just social media,” he said about those that have gotten upset with him.
Despite that, Loverin believes the group has helped the corridor in rough situations. For example, he said he recently heard about members helping each other during a closure.
“There was an eight-month-old baby who was hungry and had no food, and the whole community came together and helped,” he said.
Other times, he said people have helped by giving extra food or gas or communicating to move out of the way so an ambulance could get through traffic.
“And that’s what I created this group for,” he explained.
In terms of the future of his role in the group, Loverin said he is somewhat taking a backseat from now on, as he wants to focus on being a full-time father. Meanwhile, he said they might do another competition or giveaway on the page as the group has done in the past.
Mostly though, Loverin said he hopes the group continues to be utilized for community collaboration.
“This community is slowly starting to be pulled together,” he said. “And this is just another tool that we can use to really pull it together.”
For more information about the page, visit Facebook.com/Groups/SeaToSkyRoadConditions.
