How production zones work
What a studio zone is, why the agreements describe them so differently, and why the same address can produce two different answers.
Checked against sources
A studio zone is the area inside which getting to work is your own problem. Outside it, travel starts to count — as time, as kilometres, or both, depending on the agreement. That is the whole idea, and everything else is detail about where the line sits.
The detail matters, because the line is described in words, and words are harder to pin down than they look.
Two zones, described completely differently
British Columbia’s two zones are written in ways that have almost nothing in common.
Vancouver is a line. The agreements trace it: a shoreline on the west, municipal boundaries along the north, a specific line of longitude on the east, then a BC Hydro power line, a park road end, a river, and the Canada–US border in the south. Nine segments, each needing its own source, and only two of them stated as a number you can simply write down.
Victoria is a list. It names twelve communities, adds two areas bounded by named roads, and excludes anything you cannot drive to without a ferry. No line is traced at all.
The list is far easier to work with, because municipal boundaries are published data. The line has to be reconstructed piece by piece.
Why the same address can get two answers
Three different things can decide whether a location is in the zone, and they do not always agree.
What decides it, in order of authority
1. A named property. Some addresses are listed in the agreement by name and postal code. Those are in, full stop, even when nothing else would put them there.
2. The address rule. Along the eastern edge, the agreements say east–west street addresses below 20000 are inside the zone. That is an address test, not a geographic one.
3. The drawn line. Any map, including ours, is an interpretation of the words. It ranks last.
So a studio at an address above 20000 can still be inside, because the agreement names it. And near the eastern edge, the address rule can override what a map shows — which is why a tool should tell you which rule decided your answer, not just what the answer was.
The zone is not the only thing that differs
Two agreements can share a boundary and still produce different numbers from it. One BC agreement caps out-of-zone travel time at half an hour a day. Another pays it as working time with no cap. Same location, same drive, different entitlement.
This is why a zone tool must never assume which agreement you are under. A default would be wrong for roughly half its users, on the number that goes onto a timecard.
Where the measurement starts
Out-of-zone travel is measured from the zone boundary, not from home and not from the studio. In practice, Accounting and Locations open a map and measure from the edge to the location using the average travel time for the time of day.
On at least one corridor it is more precise than that: the BCCFU publishes fixed coordinates for the Highway 99 zone edge and states that it uses them to calculate travel out of the zone. On that road, the measurement starts at a published point rather than wherever your route happens to cross.
Why there is no address checker here yet
Because parts of the boundary are still being sourced, and a boundary that is confidently wrong is worse than no boundary at all. Getting it wrong by a block costs somebody a travel day.
What exists today is the definition itself, published in the agreements’ own words with the exceptions and the sourced data alongside — enough to check a location by hand, and enough to see exactly how far the work has got.
When a map and the agreement disagree
The agreement governs. Every time, without exception.