The empty-pool videos, tested against the pool’s own ledger

Source: the Park Board’s March 26, 2026 briefing memo to commissioners (“2026 Outdoor Pools Operational Plan – Update – Supplemental Information”), containing the first daily attendance ledger ever kept for the pool (tracking began July 2025; Tables 2 and 3). The memo went to commissioners privately and was later posted with board materials; it is in the site’s library.

The claim and the test

Through 2025 and 2026, a campaign about Kitsilano Pool built its case on video: reserved swim times, empty water. The videos are real. The question a ledger can answer is what they show.

What the ledger says

For the tracked season, Kitsilano Pool averaged about 1,546 swimmers a day, with utilization above scheduled capacity on day-of adjustments — and only two sessions all season reached maximum pool capacity. Drop-in swimmers were not shut out: drop-ins made up 60% of all attendance, and the average number turned away was 0.3 people per day.

And the empty water? Also real, with a measured cause: a third of booked reservations never arrived. An average of 261 of 858 daily reservations were no-shows, on some days up to 60%. A camera at the right moment captures reserved-but-empty water, while the same day’s ledger shows 1,500 swimmers and above-capacity utilization. The campaign’s evidence is genuine and its inference is wrong — and the distinction is measurable, which is the point of this page.

The defect the ledger actually exposes

The real failure is no-show management, not access: roughly 260 admissions a day evaporating at peak. The fixes are standard anywhere reservations exist — check-in windows, timed release of unclaimed spots, overbooking calibrated to the measured rate — and none had been applied when the memo was written. Whether bookings required prepayment, which shapes the right fix, is not stated in the memo and is one of the questions in the follow-up records request.

Note the echo of the lesson system’s central finding: everywhere this program is examined, the binding waste is unmeasured behavioural slack, not physical capacity.

The governance echo

The memo reached commissioners on March 26, 2026. On May 20, City Council — legislating from the campaign’s framing — requested that the Park Board restore pre-pandemic operations at Kitsilano and all other pools and report back “in advance of the upcoming summer season” (clause G; council cannot direct the board, so the motion “requests”). The board’s own data had already reframed the problem seven weeks before council asked for the fix; whether that reflects not reading, not receiving, or not crediting the board’s evidence, the two bodies were demonstrably not working from one evidence base. Whether the ordered report-back was ever delivered is the subject of a pending freedom-of-information request; the 2026 season ledger, which will show whether the no-show rate improved after all of this, is the subject of another.

The honest limit

Tracking began in July 2025, so no comparable pre-COVID ledger exists. Nobody — not the city, not the campaign, not this site — can currently quantify “better or worse than 2019” at this level of detail. What can be said is what the one season of real measurement shows, and it shows a pool that is both heavily used and visibly empty in patches, because a third of its reservations evaporate daily.