Follow Bennett

Hosting Expo 86 and building Metro Vancouver’s SkyTrain brought benefits that could be replicated in Surrey with a little political effort.

The industrial park wasteland where Surrey borders the Fraser River and the City of New Westminster would be ideal as a World Exposition site.

Afterwards, this area could be re-developed as mixed-use highrises and parkland, emulating Vancouver’s downtown business district and Coal Harbour areas, thereby helping to reduce the region’s housing shortage and attract corporate head offices along with high-technology design and research and development firms.

Bill Bennett would never have accepted the lowest common denominator, as cheap-as-possible, at-roadway-level rapid transit system that is proposed for much of Surrey. The ambitious foresight criteria so often associated with Bennett would demand a city-wide rapid transit system for Surrey that will be perceived internationally as a world beater, and certainly no worse than the 30-year-old, but still excellent, above-the-roadway SkyTrain.

Ridiculous? Impossible? Insurmountable? Maybe that’s what some would have thought in the 1980s. Bennett, and other leaders of his time, clearly didn’t, and we are all beneficiaries today.

RODERICK LOUIS White Rock