Highways shouldn’t be the only option

Re: “The future is in rail transit, not more highways,” comment, Sept. 21. Victoria is in the midst of the biggest building boom in my 40 years of living here. • The new developers at Bear Mountain want to build homes for 10,000 new residents in the next 10 years. • Colwood’s massive Royal Bay development broke ground in June for 2,300 new homes. • Langford’s pro-development efforts to remove land from the Agricultural Land Reserve have resulted in previously pastoral Happy Valley now growing houses. • A new 81-hectare industrial park on the Langford-Metchosin border promises jobs for 4,000 permanent workers. • Omicron, having just built the 176,000-square-foot Eagle Creek Village near Victoria General Hospital, has now been given the green light by Sidney to build the 100,000-square-foot Gateway mall.

The Pat Bay Highway is clogging up and the Colwood Crawl now extends to Shawnigan Lake. To accommodate this growth, we need a new approach to transportation, and Dick Faulks has hit the hammer on the rail spike in his commentary. We have the rail right-of-way set aside to have commuter trains moving people safely and efficiently.

The B.C. Liberal government’s solution was to provide the public a false choice of three options that did not include a rail option to fix the McKenzie nightmare; 75 per cent of the respondents “approved” an $85-million Band-Aid overpass.

When the only tool you are given is a car, every solution looks like a new highway. Jim Pine Victoria