It may not be clear initially, but the 84th extension through Bear Creek Park is indicative of a much larger transportation issue our City is going to have to deal with in the not too distant future.

See, we’re a suburban city, and rather than the typical grid road system, as found in Vancouver and Burnaby, which allows traffic to disperse through many streets, we have a modified grid with cul-de-sacs and townhouses complexes feeding into a few main arterials roads.

Most of our arterial roads have a limited right-of-way. That is to say, they can only be so wide, and contain a finite amount of lanes.

Due to our expansive population growth, we’ve expanded our roads to increase capacity. However, our arterials have hit their maximum width, and short of extremely expensive and destructive land acquisition, we are now stuck with a series of arterials featuring 2 lanes each way and a landscaped median with left turn bays.

While this road design works quite nicely during most of the day, we are already seeing that, in certain areas, and at certain times such as rush hour, this is not enough capacity to move people around without delay.

However, the general premise we all have about mobility is that moving cars is equivalent to moving people. That assumption is false.

Don’t feel bad though. This is what our city’s engineers were taught during their formal education and what most still believe today. Modern urban planning practices are changing that way of thinking, and we live right in the backyard of a city famous for employing a new transport practice.

In the 21st century, the mantra for mobility is moving people – not cars.

People have a variety of options. We can walk, bike, skate, swim, canoe, ski, take transit, drive, carpool, fly or jetpack.

What engineers and planners have discovered in the past few decades is that moving lone individuals in a large piece of private metal is the single most inefficient method of transport available – at least in an urban setting. If the goal is to move as many people as possible, and as quickly, efficiently, and green as possible, cars are most absolutely not the way to go.

If we keep expanding roads as we add more people, we will soon have 12 lane highways imported direct from LA. And as Angelenos are now finding, as they crawl along in traffic on the I-5, it wasn’t exactly the best way to deal with the problem.

We can either build our cities for people, or for cars. It is as simple as that.

In Surrey, as previously mentioned, we have a series of main arterial roads, all of which have a limited width, and many of which are congested at some point of the day. It is too cost prohibitive to add lanes. So, if we aren’t going to expand our roads anymore, then we need to think differently about mobility.

We need to get out of our cars and into more efficient transport, like transit. If 50% of the car driving population shifted over to transit in one fell swoop, such ridership would easily justify an expansive rapid rail network across the City.

So while our engineers press us to spend $12 million on a 1km road extension through one of the City’s most prestigious parks, and we pray that in doing so the congestion will dissipate, we must think rationally and with the foresight that has eluded us for far too long.

Extend 84th Ave and it will soon be filled with traffic.

And we’ll be exactly where we are now, trying to figure out when we will eventually shift to more efficient methods of transport and build a proper transit network.

So why not deal with the problem today, rather than tomorrow, and preserve Bear Creek Park from ultimately purposeless destruction?

It’s time to turn the page and open a new chapter in the mobility and livability of Surrey.

It’s time to re-engineer our thoughts and our roads to move people around; not just cars.