Ditch the tunnel and build bridge commuters need
Coming back to Vancouver after a couple of bucolic weeks on Salt Spring Island is always a bit of a culture shock — usually the second you drive off the ferry into the insanity of Lower Mainland traffic.
To my family’s dismay, I usually find myself ranting out loud in the car for a few days after getting back to town about the inefficiency of our antiquated, neglected and inadequate road network and the homicidal insanity of the region’s drivers until I re-acclimate to motoring in the Big Smoke and calm down. The pills help. But it was worse 10 days ago when we disembarked in Tsawwassen and then tried to get through the George Massey Tunnel northbound during the afternoon rush hour. You know? That exciting time of day when many politicians and traffic engineers think it’s perfectly reasonable to merge about eight or 10 lanes of traffic coming from three directions into one lane in the tunnel? It took us over an hour to inch forward a few metres at a time through a couple of kilometres.
I’m fortunate to live in Kitsilano and don’t have to commute into Vancouver for work, so I know that our tunnel turmoil was just a taste of what many people deal with twice daily. Truly, I feel for those brave souls.
What I’m having trouble understanding is why so many Lower Mainland mayors, predominantly leftist activists and urban planners, and our new NDP government, clearly do not give a damn about all those citizens stuck in tunnel traffic, with their plan to kill the readyto-go project to replace the decrepit tunnel with a 10-lane bridge. Almost any way you look at the issue, the bridge bashers are simply wrong. Just read the nearly 30 years of engineering reports on the issue.
If you dismiss the notions of the truly zany, thoroughly impractical folks who don’t want to replace the tunnel because it will “encourage” driving, the political push now is to seismically and otherwise upgrade the existing tunnel and build a second one beside it to add capacity.
But a July 2016 engineering report prepared for the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure reveals that twinning would be the most expensive option — costing $5.8 billion, compared to $3.5 billion for a bridge. And a twinned tunnel, it says, would achieve only 40 per cent of the replacement project goals, compared to 90 per cent for the bridge. How does spending more money for a less-useful crossing make sense? (I could make a joke about the NDP here, but I won’t.)
Twinning also presented “significant property impacts including ALR; significant environmental impacts from tunnel construction; poor seismic performance of existing tunnel,” the report says.
As Delta Mayor Lois Jackson and her staff pointed out last month, fixing the current tunnel isn’t even safe, particularly if the significant, 6.1-magnitude earthquake we have a 30 per cent chance of experiencing in the next 50 years turns the decaying, 58-year-old tunnel into a death trap as cracks during a quake allow it to flood.
“If the public is unable to exit the tunnel in a timely manner due to any reason such as vehicle blockage, minor injury, darkness, confusion or panic, fatalities due to drowning are possible,” noted a 2007 engineering report. Imagine being premier if that happened, with that warning on the record.
Engineers tell us that the same quake that would take out the tunnel would also destroy the Pattullo Bridge, leaving the already-at-capacity Alex Fraser Bridge as the only nearby alternative. Combined, the tunnel and Pattullo serve 157,000 crossings a day. I suppose the Lower Mainland economy would be just fine, missing all those workers. Yeah, I’m talking to you Richmond and Vancouver.
Delta’s report also notes that tunnels cause more deadly accidents compared to bridges.
Even if you ignore all that, it’s just not OK for regional and provincial politicians to further ignore the unacceptable Massey bottleneck. The hardworking taxpayers who use the tunnel deserve far better from government than being told to sit in traffic for a few more years while more unnecessary studies are done.
The NDP is removing tolls from the Port Mann, so they clearly have sympathy for commuters. They should show the same concern for those who must use the tunnel and get on with building the ready-togo bridge.