Quote:
Originally Posted by Metro-One
Yeah I laugh at the third wold roads comments as well. The highways are actually really smooth and well surfaced considering how many sparsely populated areas they serve in BC. I was just along the 24 in the Cariboo and not a single pot hole.
The highways in BC are very akin to the quality of Sweden. Major highways near Stockholm and Malmo (akin to Vancouver and the Lower Mainland) with a couple freeways extended a couple hundred km out of the populated area (again, akin to the #1, the Coke, the Sea to Sky) and then 2 lane rural highways everywhere else with the odd interchange near major junctions (again, exactly the same as BC and very similar in quality).
When will people realize the BC is a huge place with amazingly difficult topography and a relatively small population. We do rather well given that we have no true Federal highway program.
For example, how many hundreds of million has the Kicking Hose project cost so far? The Sea to Sky was nearly 600 million. How about the hundreds of millions spent blasting mountains along the Okanagan Corridor (which has improved amazingly over the last 5 years)? What about all of the twinning occurring along the 400km long Cariboo highway (btw was driving there last week and some major sections being twinned right now).
Do people not understand that BC is riddled with canyons, mountain ranges, deep valleys, mountain slopes plunging into fiords, inlets, etc... not to mention that our big city has 2 major Rivers flowing through it (that make anything in Alberta look like a creek) and that the Fraser splits into 3 arms at the Delta, therefore having to spend billions on major bridges that allow river shipping below just to connect entire suburbs that are located on islands) I could go on, but every region wants larger highways, from southern Vancouver Island, Metro Vancouver, the Whistler / Squamish corridor, the Okanagan, the Fraser Canyon, the south east corner, the Cariboo, Prince George to Prince Rupert, the Peace region, etc.... well, without a Federal prgram where do we get this money????
I wish we could just plow over generally flat Prairie, but our topography is both a blessing and a curse. Even building through the shield would be nice, but instead we have to build through countless east / west mountain ranges with valleys, causing our highways to continuously go up to over 1000m in elevation, then back down to 300m, then up to 1200m, then down to 500m, then up to 1000m, then down to 400m, etc... we are given a break a few times, along steep canyon walls! haha!
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The problem is that we have a country to the south with 10x our national population and a federal highway program, so it's easy to compare TCH 1 with I-90 and conclude that we need the same thing in Canada.
I do agree that the Trans Canada needs upgrading, that we need a better federal highway program, and that our national highways are considered some of the worst of the G-8 nations (granted we also have the lowest population density which leads to the above argument). However "3rd World" is exaggerating quite a bit. Just for reference sake, here’s something more akin to a 3rd World highway in Russia:
Source: http://www.ssqq.com/archive/vinlin27c.htm
Even at it’s worse, I don’t think the Trans Canada has ever looked like
that between Sicamous and Golden.
Here’s a couple questions I have about TCH upgrading:
1) How was the Trans Canada Hwy upgraded between Fredericton, NB and the New Brunswick/Quebec border? It appears that the Quebec Provincial government is upgrading Hwy 185 to A-85, but was TCH 2 twinned by federal or provincial assistance?
2) Assuming that BC couldn’t get enough federal assistance to upgrade TCH 1, could they make some exemptions regarding their policy on tolls? Currently there has to be a toll-free option before a route can have tolls, but what about upgrading TCH 1 between Sicamous and Golden and putting a toll on the route? The BC government could then put a toll-free exemption on residents living along the Trans Canada Highway so “local” traffic wouldn’t need to pay a toll. For example, if someone shows their drivers license at the toll booth and the mailing address is Golden or Revelstoke, they would not have to pay. Any thoughts?