Hwy 99 Fraser River Tunnel (George Massey Replacement) | Proposed

[SFUVancouver]

It is with confidence that I can say that new road capacity spurs real estate development when the economy is growing and municipal support exists for that development to occur. It strikes me that is how development has always occurred, regardless of mode of transportation: improved accessibility increases the value and utility of the land that benefits from the transportation improvement and makes the land more attractive to development. We've seen the result of this with improved road and highway connectivity and level of service in areas like the Yorkson neighbourhood of the Township of Langley, which is absolutely booming in the years since the Port Mann and Highway 1 improvements were announced and compelted, and we see it in the station nodes of our SkyTrain system, as but two examples.

The expanded George Massey bridge capacity and supporting highway widening and interchange improvements will help congestion abate in the near- to mid-term, but that extra capacity and associated time savings will attract people to drive in peak periods who may otherwise have travelled at off-peak times. It will also encourage people to use the upgraded corridor who are otherwise using a less-congested alternative route, and entirely encourage new trips that weren't performed at all as people take jobs and commitments that they would otherwise have not taken due to the congestion and the travel time unpredictability it generates. Furthermore, some trips that were performed in a more road space-efficient fashion, such as car pooling and transit, will transition to less road space-efficient modes, namely single occupant vehicles. The 1% of vehicle trips that transit represents convey (depending on the MOT's changing numbers) between 26% and 17% of people who use the tunnel. If the perception (and reality) is that it is viable to drive, some number of these transit trips may convert to single occupancy vehicles, taking up exponentially greater physical road space. Finally, the perception (and reality) that the new bridge and upgrade highway make it viable and easy to travel along a perviously congested corridor, the value of land in the catchment area of the formerly congested corridor will increase, spur development, and add additional vehicles to the system.

With all that said, while we know that all of these noted steps will occur, we are really bad at modelling those decisions. Both the Golden Ears Bridge and Port Mann Bridge are well below estimates and the break-even number financial models appear to be broken since both bridges are piling on tens of millions of debt per year due to revenue shortfalls without making a dent in the principal. The traffic modelling that underpins the sizing of the facilities and business case versus other alternative configurations is an failure and the fear I have is that the same modelling approach was used for the sizing and business case versus other alternative configurations for the new George Massey Bridge and I expect that we will see revenue shortfalls for that bridge upon completion, further adding to the debt burden of our recent bridge building efforts. Demand may eventually reach the available capacity, but it's foolish to think that the by-then hundreds of millions of accumulated debt incurred by over-building was the best route to go; at the very least we need to adjust the business case methodology to factor in the true cost of over-building.

In light of all of this, I work right beside the George Massey Tunnel and I see daily how absurdly congested it is. It backs up into the business park where I work with people idling trying to get onto Number 5 to get onto Steveston Highway to get onto Highway 99. It's appalling and wasteful and transparently obvious that the current tunnel is inadequate for the transportation demands that now exist. What's frustrating to me is that the Ministry of Transportation has one tool in its tool chest, a hammer, and all problems look like nails as a result. I don't believe that there was any serious consideration for a replacement solution that relied heavily on new transit alongside a new bridge or tunnel, because that is not the MOT's responsibility. Translink is free to add service, but its efforts to plan for this are stymied by the Provincial government, and particularly the MOT. HOV/bus lanes and median bus stops are being included in the plan, which is as expected, but once again, like the Port Mann Bridge, we have a complex regional transportation problem of a congested bottleneck with multiple regional government stakeholders and the MOT is proceeding unilaterally and seemingly without due consideration for regional growth policy and transportation goals and the role of land use and transit in abating congestion. I think that the hugely disproportional investment of transportation dollars South of the Fraser into highway projects is having the effect of locking-in automobile dependency into the fabric of the region, particularly new development areas, and I think that is going to have long-term repercussions for the economic viability and livability of the region.