The Port Mann gets backed up past 176th St. daily, and faces serious congestion for 13 hours of the day. The Pattullo, 71 years old, has lanes that are two feet narrower than the highway standard, and has killed dozens of people in the last few years. It’s safe to say; Surrey has a bridge problem.
Both short and long term proposals have come and gone for the Pattullo. The bridge received a number of thin poles down the center, the inner lanes are now closed at night, and the speed limit was reduced. However, the overall safety of this crossing is still cause for alarm - especially if the Port Mann is twinned and some traffic gets redirected west. Moreover, TransLink continues to drag it’s feet on “studying” the options to eventually replace the bridge.
The Port Mann, as most should know, is to get a clone in about six years time. It’s the main part of the Gateway Project, touted by Transport Minister and MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale, Kevin Falcon, as both a means to ease congestion and facilitate expanded goods movement.
The total cost? In the billions.
The overall problem with the Gateway plan, however, is the failure to reconcile the idea of our century old oil-based economy to the realities of both climate change and peak oil. Many experts estimate that peak oil will hit by 2013 - the same time the Gateway Project should be finished. When it does, long distance, oil-based travel with no longer be economically viable: the transcontinental trucking industry will be dead.
With this knowledge today, why put billions of taxpayers dollars into an “economic gateway system” that is destined to never be necessary?
Furthermore, we all know the saying, “build it and they will come” - the same principle applies perfectly to highway systems. You can never build your way out of congestion. At some point, you have to say “enough is enough”. And that’s exactly what Vancouver did almost a decade ago with the refurbishment of the Lions Gate Bridge.
The historic crossing was getting old in the tooth, and many ideas and proposals came to the table. In the end, the bridge was upgraded and slightly reconfigured, for two main reasons - the province didn’t want to spend money to replace it, nor did Vancouver want to bring in more cars to the downtown core. Translation: the Transport Minister didn’t have billions to throw around, and Vancouver knows that if they expanded or built a bigger crossing, more traffic would come with it. Two realities missing from today’s situation.
Now, let’s take the Port Mann. Who’s knows what the traffic will look like when the Golden Ears Bridge opens up between Langley and Maple Ridge next year? What we do know is that the majority of traffic crossing the bridge is between North Surrey and Coquitlam along it’s maximum capacity of 5 lanes. Now, with the understanding that people are going one way in the morning and another in the evening, why not utilize these lanes more efficiently with counterflow/reversible lanes.
Where have we seen these before? On the Lions Gate Bridge, the Pitt River Bridge, and the Massey Tunnel! The systems are arguably a success, considering the minimal investments that are required to create them.
One of the major arguments for Gateway is the expansion of HOV lanes along Hwy 1 south of the Fraser. There’s no reason these can’t be put in now - there’s more than enough space for said expansion. The difficult part is that we can never have both a westbound and eastbound HOV lane because the bridge is just too narrow.
So, here’s my proposal: let’s take the existing HOV lane on the bridge and install a system to make it reversible. From here, let’s expand Hwy 1 south of the Fraser to have both westbound and eastbound HOV lanes. As many also know, it’s the merge onto the highway that slows things down. So, let’s built HOV-only merge lanes that bypass the lineups and lead directly onto the HOV lane on the highway.
Switch the reversible HOV bridge lane direction depending on the time of day. Allow smart cars, hybrids, and buses to use the HOV lanes. The whole system, built with very minimal funding, is designed right from the get go to *encourage* only sustainable transportation.
And it’s actually not that different from Falcon’s plan - we keep all the goods things, from restoring transit service to expanding the HOV network, while removing the largest expense: a whole new bridge!
Now, let’s look at the Pattullo. We currently have four, narrow lanes. Short of building a new bridge, what can we do, now, for minimal expense, that will vastly improve both the flow of traffic and the safety of the crossing?
Let’s take the existing space of the bridge, and repaint onto it three, standard highway width lanes. Make the center lane reversible. Imagine the Lions Gate Bridge.
Both proposals utilize the reversible lanes - a brilliant system for more effectively using our existing road space based on it’s real time usage. And best of all - it’s pennies compared to a billion dollars a bridge! Just think where we could redirect our taxes to.
Perhaps the best place would be into building an efficient, fast, and comfortable transit system south of the Fraser. I’m thinking at-grade LRT and a brand new Interurban commuter rail system - maybe even some bus rapid transit routes. So that, when peak oil hits in, oh, 2013, we won’t turn around looking for someone to blame. We won’t be choked and locked into our ever more expensive cars.
We will have been prepared. We will have invested our money into sustainable transportation systems for the 21st century. And it’s all thanks to those cheap miracle wonders called reversible lanes.
Sphere: Related Content
