Pattullo Bridge Rehabilitation Project

[Large Cat]

If tolling wasn't on the table, I would be totally against adding extra motor vehicle capacity on the new bridge, given the travel habits such capacity tends to encourage in commuters and the demand for more road width after and before the bridge that these habits appear to induce. But I think the move toward tolling and especially the condition of future road pricing will offset most of the serious environmental, economic, health, and aesthetic problems of the extra lanes, because it counterbalances the possibility of this demand leading to increased road width, or even the maintenance of the current road width, on either side of the bridge (Whalley Blvd, McBride, etc). Both New West and Surrey need some serious road diets, and the toll should actually enable that to happen. And there is not as much problem with added capacity on a bridge, as the space it takes up in itself literally can't be used for anything else, at least where it is over water (although we know e.g. on the new Massey Bridge the ramps over land will eat up a huge chunk of the ALR). It's the effect on surrounding communities in terms of the space-consuming logic a larger bridge enforces that's the biggest problem. And a regional turn toward tolling should, I hope, make that logic unintelligible.