The Port Mann Bridge is a bottleneck for commuters and commercial traffic. Twinning is a cornerstone of the Gateway Program.

The remedy to Greater Vancouver’s traffic woes is a bitter pill for some, but the alchemist of the cure says it’s time to swallow. It’s the middle of rush hour on a dreary Wednesday in early February and heavy rain showers are wreaking havoc on Vancouver’s notoriously hellish highway system. All major arteries are clogged and while it’s just a few minutes past 7 a.m., there already have been four accidents, making matters considerably worse.

“It’s slow-going on all the bridges... and 99 North is an absolute gong show,” reports the local traffic-only station. (Its mantra, “All traffic, all the time”, is a fitting description of the area it serves; its very existence a testament to Vancouver’s commuter misery.)

Nowhere is the chaos more evident than along Highway 1 – B.C.’s busiest and most economically vital transportation corridor. A collision eastbound on the Port Mann Bridge has snarled vehicles heading to the suburbs. And westbound travellers aren’t doing any better: a stall in the left-hand lane near 176 Street has them stuck in a logjam extending nearly 15 km to 200 Street in Langley.

It sounds like a nightmare, but the sad truth is, it’s just another day in the life of Lower Mainland drive time. The Ministry of Transportation notes commuting times have increased 30 per cent in the past 10 years, with the 42-year-old Port Mann Bridge congested an average 13 hours a day as 127,000 vehicles crawl back and forth across the Fraser River.

It’s a reality Lynda Catto is all too familiar with. Five days a week, Catto sets out at 7 a.m. from her Aldergrove home and embarks on a 90-minute trip to her job as a legal assistant in a downtown Vancouver office tower.

“It’s awful. It takes me an hour just to hit the Port Mann,” says Catto, who was born in Vancouver and moved to the valley with her family to escape the noisy city life and extortionate cost of housing.

“I would say every day I’m faced with some sort of problem, be it a stall or an accident. It’s so stressful.”

Most south-of-Fraser denizens can empathize. For the brave souls who battle the cross-river traffic tumult daily – truck drivers and commuters alike – the situation has reached a breaking point.

Fortunately for them, the provincial government has developed an ambitious plan to ease the pain. MoT’s $3 billion Gateway Program has been designed to “improve the movement of people, goods and transit across the Lower Mainland.”

Focusing on three “priority corridors”, Gateway will involve building a four-lane perimeter highway on the south side of the Fraser River and enhancements to a truck route on the north side, as well as a controversial plan to twin the Port Mann Bridge and widen Highway 1 from Vancouver to Langley.

While Gateway has been embraced by many people south of the river, it has attracted a legion of fierce critics – most, it should be noted, from north of the river – who have grabbed a lion’s share of headlines arguing the program’s underlying premise is deeply flawed.

One group’s opposition is so virulent, it prompted the launch of a website: gatewaysucks.org
The way out of congestion, opponents say, is not to increase capacity. Rather what’s needed is a more environmentally friendly, largely public transit-based solution.

Few debates in the Lower Mainland are more complex, divisive or politically charged than the one over whether Gateway will succeed. One thing is clear, however: finding a way out of the congested mess is essential to the future of the region.

“The Trans-Canada Highway is the economic spine of the Lower Mainland and it serves no one’s interests to have cars and trucks parked there trying to get across the bridge,” says Paul Landry, president of B.C. Trucking Association.

“The economic and environmental consequences are huge. We need changes now.”
In the past 20 years, the population of the Lower Mainland has increased by more than 750,000, and Greater Vancouver Regional District expects it to spike from two million people to three million by 2021.

Amid that growth, soaring Vancouver property values, a lack of land for development in the city centre and geographical constraints – mountains to the north, a border to the south and an ocean to the west – have pushed droves of home hunters, businesses and industries into the Fraser Valley in search of space and affordable options.

Reflecting this trend, the greatest population surge is predicted for Richmond, the northeast sector, Surrey, Langley and Abbotsford.

The mass migration has catalyzed development of sprawling communities, characterized by strip malls, vast tracts of single-family homes and, perhaps most significantly, myriad remote office parks and factories.

This was not how it was supposed to be. Planning documents dating back to the mid-1970s envisioned creation of compact self-contained communities throughout the region.
A 2003 Royal LePage report claims only seven per cent of new office jobs were based in regional town centres, while nearly 50 per cent went to suburban office parks. Employment in office parks grew by 240 per cent (or 24,000 workers) between 1991 and 2001 and is anticipated to increase 46,000 more by 2021

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Commuting patterns have changed accordingly. No longer is a majority of workers travelling from outlying regions to jobs in Vancouver city centre, following the traditional suburb-to-downtown flow.

It’s quite the opposite. MoT studies suggest nine times more people are driving from Vancouver to the suburbs than those commuting into the city centre. And the rest drive to work either within or between outer suburbs.

“People travel from everywhere to everywhere,” says a 2004 joint study by MoT and TransLink.

“The majority of trips begin and end somewhere in the outer municipalities.”
But as the population fans out into the valley, there has been a marked lack of corresponding increases in road capacity in the last 20 years, save for the Alex Fraser Bridge in 1986 and a smattering of highway widening projects underway in Surrey and Abbotsford.
Public transit investment and supply also failed to keep pace with the diffusion of employment and housing.

In its 1993 long-range transportation plan, GVRD anticipated a transit fleet of 1,800 buses by 2006 (there are 1,325) and three new rapid transit lines (the Millennium and Expo SkyTrain lines constitute only a third of what was predicted; construction on the Canada Line connecting downtown Vancouver with Richmond and the airport won’t be complete until 2009).

Overall, while transit was expected to carry 17 per cent of peak-period trips, TransLink’s own numbers show the system carries only 12 per cent.
The combined result has been seemingly interminable traffic congestion on corridors across Greater Vancouver, particularly at Fraser River crossings.

And it’s not expected to get better. MoT has said up to 115,000 more vehicle trips will have to be accommodated in the morning rush by 2031, with employment in the region expected to increase by 500,000 jobs in the next 25 years.

The traffic is maddening for commuters to be sure, and it has serious economic consequences. Transport Canada estimates congestion costs the region $1.5 billion a year.
“Not only do we lose time, but idling creates more wear and tear on the engines,” says Tony McCamley, president of Langley-based New West Gypsum Recycling Inc.
McCamley figures his fleet loses 1,000 hours a year and 6,000 litres of fuel to traffic congestion – $100,000 in total costs.

Trucks account for only 10 per cent of Port Mann Bridge volume – the bulk of it is single-occupant vehicles – but the B.C. Trucking Association calculates its goods movers are stopped in regional traffic 75 per cent of the time, costing the industry $500 million a year.
“Obviously we’d be more profitable with less congestion,” says Murray Scadeng, president of Langley-based Triton Transport Ltd., whose transit times along the Highway 1 corridor have gone up 10 per cent in the last two years alone.

“Ultimately we have to pass on those costs to our customers and, as it filters down, that eventually adds to the cost of a new house.”

There are additional concerns about how the traffic albatross might affect Vancouver’s ability, as Canada’s principle Pacific port, to compete globally and seize trade opportunities with flourishing Asia Pacific markets.

Asia currently accounts for 35 per cent of B.C.’s trade, 55 per cent of its cargo movements and 95 per cent of container movements through the Port of Vancouver. Between 1998 and 2005, containerized inbound cargo through Vancouver area ports doubled.

Canada is China’s second-largest import market. Exports to China in the last decade have doubled to $7.1 billion, while imports have grown from $4.6 billion to $29.5 billion.

This surge in commerce might bode well for the economy here but, considering half the containerized goods are transported to and from Greater Vancouver’s terminals by truck, it also means significant increases in commercial traffic along local roads.

Vancouver might be well-positioned as Canada’s gateway to Pacific Rim markets, but its infrastructure capacity, road systems in particular, are stretched to the limits.
“We’re seeing a shift in the world with the growth of Asia and India and it’s going to have huge impact on the future of our economy,” Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon says.
“But there is also an impact from doing nothing.”

The environment is suffering because of the clogged roadways, too.
The now-infamous report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in February confirmed global warming is “very likely” caused by human activity, in particular burning of fossil fuels like oil that releases carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Considering that transportation sources account for 40 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in B.C., the UN study has only served to underline the need to find solutions to congestion choking the Lower Mainland.

Fortunately, the pursuit of greener policies is very much in vogue at all levels of government. The B.C. Liberal government’s recent Throne Speech put forth an ambitious goal to reduce greenhouse emissions to 10 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

And the government believes the Gateway Program will be key to that strategy, creating a transportation network that will improve traffic flow, ease congestion and, by doing so, reduce emissions from vehicle idling.

The overall aim is to improve access to economic hubs like ports, industrial areas, railways, airports and border crossings.
“The way I look at it, the priority is the movement of goods. The benefit to people becomes one of those secondary things,” Falcon says.
“These are very long-term, long-sighted investments we’re making – and they’re very strategic.”

The Gateway Program consists of three core components.
First, the $800 million South Fraser Perimeter Road project involves construction of a four-lane, 80 km/h east-west corridor along the south shore of the river, connecting Deltaport Container Terminal and Fraser Surrey Docks and extending to TransLink’s new Golden Ears Bridge connector road at Highway 1 on the Surrey/Langley border.

When it is built, the road will provide a continuous route for truck traffic through an important freight corridor. Key for residents, the road will take industrial traffic off arterial streets in Surrey and Delta – an essential provision in light of the January launch of the Deltaport expansion.

SFPR is slated for completion by 2012. The federal government has committed $100 million to it, a portion of $591 million Ottawa earmarked in 2006 under its own Asia Pacific Gateway program.

On the other side of the river, the $400 million North Fraser Perimeter Road project will involve upgrades to existing roads and bridges, forming a continuous route from Queensborough Bridge in New West to Maple Ridge.

MoT in February announced it secured $90 million in federal money which, combined with $108 million in provincial funds, will finance construction of a seven-lane bridge across the Pitt River – replacing existing swing bridges – and a new interchange at the Lougheed Highway and Mary Hill Bypass.

Ground has already been broken on that project, expected to be complete by 2009 to coincide with the opening of the Golden Ears Bridge.

Perhaps the most publicized and contentious of all Gateway components is the $1.5 billion plan to build a parallel Port Mann Bridge and expand Highway 1 for a distance of 37 km from McGill Street in downtown Vancouver to 216 Street in Langley.

That phase will see upgrades to most interchanges along the corridor, replacement of all overpasses and extension of High Occupancy Vehicle lanes to Langley.
MoT has insisted twinning the bridge will not only ease congestion, by providing four new lanes for eastbound traffic. Just as important, it will enable TransLink to re-introduce bus service across the Port Mann Bridge.

The phase is to be complete by 2013.
The Gateway projects have been designed to complement regional road works across Greater Vancouver. Construction has begun on the $210 million Border Infrastructure Project, widening Highways 15 and 10 in Surrey, with improvements to Highway 91/91A and Highway 11.

But what does Gateway mean for commuters like Catto, who spend a large part of their day in traffic?

A study done for MoT by international transportation consulting firm Steer Davies Gleave estimates Gateway improvements will result in operating cost savings of $8 billion. Depending on the origin and destination, travellers will see time savings of between five and 30 per cent compared to 2003.

To put that in perspective, while it currently takes commuters 62 minutes to get from Langley City to the Port of Vancouver during the morning peak hour, by 2031, with the advent of Gateway, the study estimates that could be reduced to 47 minutes.
From Surrey City Centre to Pacific Reach in Coquitlam, drivers could shave five minutes off today’s drive time of 21 minutes.

“This is a very important program for our region,” says TransLink chair and Richmond mayor Malcolm Brodie.

“That corridor is the most choked up we have in the region, and probably in the province. It’s up to us to do something about it. We need to go ahead with this project.”
Others aren’t so sure.

The bulk of Gateway criticism has focused on the bridge twinning and Highway 1 expansion, with fewer concerns voiced about the perimeter roads. Many accept these as essential to the flow of goods and services in the Lower Mainland and consistent with municipal and regional plans.

(That said, red flags have been raised by North Delta residents who don’t believe the South Fraser Perimeter Road should be allowed to cut through prime residential and agricultural land).

Gateway opponents believe that by widening highways and adding infrastructure, the program will only promote unfettered growth of general purpose traffic and encourage further sprawl.

“If they simply twin the bridge and widen the highway, probably within a matter of months that thing would be full up,” says Gordon Price, director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University and formerly a 15-year Vancouver councillor.

“You induce traffic – traffic that might have gone on a different route or at another time or by a different mode. It takes advantage of all that lovely free asphalt.”
Critics say MoT only needs to look at gridlock-plagued cities like Seattle and Los Angeles to see why expanding road infrastructure isn’t the answer.

“The reality is that nobody has built their way out of congestion in North America,” says Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan, chair of GVRD’s land use committee and outspoken anti-Gateway poster boy.

Like many opponents from the “other” side of the river, Corrigan fears an expanded Highway 1 will act as a traffic funnel into Burnaby and Vancouver – areas he says can’t absorb the extra volume.

“When you build more capacity on one road and there’s not enough capacity on the other roads to accept it, those traffic jams are just transferred,” he reasons.
“It’s a mug’s game and it’s never been a solution.”

GVRD has voiced its own concerns with the program – particularly the bridge-twinning and highway-widening components – arguing it flies in the face of the district’s 1996 Livable Region Strategic Plan, the blueprint for sustainable land use and transportation system design.

“It has not been demonstrated that (the Gateway proposals) represent the most effective and sustainable options for reducing traffic congestion and reducing auto dependency in the long term,” the GVRD wrote in its September 2006 rebuke of the program.

“All major transportation decisions need to reinforce compact, livable communities where people are given practical and attractive choices to use cars less... the vision of the LRSP...”
Other groups, like the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation, have charged that Gateway expansions will lead to higher greenhouse gas emissions than MoT concluded in its own environmental reviews. (The ministry’s preliminary analysis suggested the program would result in a negligible 0.1 per cent increase in vehicle emissions.)

Some have commented more recently that the prime Gateway objective of expanding transportation infrastructure – making it easier to drive around the Lower Mainland – is at cross purposes with the government’s Throne Speech commitment to reduce greenhouse gases. (“Two government initiatives will soon be up and running... right into each other,” opined one columnist.)

SPEC has rejected the plan to twin the Port Mann Bridge, calling instead for a dedicated Surrey-Coquitlam express bus with priority access across the current structure.
In this, SPEC joined its coalition partner, the Livable Region Coalition, in arguing that providing more transit and taking further steps to manage demand is the only real way to ensure a congestion-free and sustainable future for the Highway 1 corridor.
Not surprisingly, such criticism raises Falcon’s hackles.

“If you look back, there is virtually no major infrastructure project you can point to where there wasn’t the same kind of bellyaching, whining and complaining about whether we should do it or not,” he says.

“We have to make sure we listen to the concerns that are raised and incorporate those concerns as best we can — which we have. But at the end of the day, we make a decision and get on with it.”

Addressing the transit-only solution, Falcon points to an independent assessment completed in March 2006 by Burnaby-based Halcrow Consulting Inc. which concluded it would have “low to marginal impacts on the existing Highway 1 congestion problem”, reducing morning peak hour westbound traffic by less than 350 vehicles.

Simply put, Gateway planners believe that until the system is given breathing room through expansion of the highway and bridge, transit initiatives can’t be implemented effectively.
Once there is capacity to do so, however, the Gateway plan is to re-introduce express bus service across the Port Mann – something that hasn’t existed for 20 years along that corridor – with connections to rapid transit lines and plans for park-and-ride lots on both sides of the river.

For its part, TransLink believes Gateway provides “opportunity for an attractive express bus system.”

Its long-term vision is for buses from Surrey, Langley, Abbotsford, Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows to collect passengers, travel to Highway 1 park-and-ride lots. There, they will hop express buses to Surrey City Centre, or New Westminster/Burnaby, and connect with SkyTrain and other transit services.

TransLink has also outlined plans to introduce rapid bus service along King George Highway by 2013.

The pre-design concept for the twinned Port Mann Bridge also calls for foundations to accommodate future light rail rapid transit once population densities in Surrey and Langley justify it.

MoT believes it is bolstering its strategy with plans to introduce HOV lanes and so-called “queue jumper” priority lanes for commercial vehicles and public transit to control volume along the corridor.

Added to that is the commitment of $50 million to expand cycling networks across the new bridge, the new Pitt River Bridge and along the South Fraser Perimeter Road.
“We’re talking about a very balanced approach,” Falcon says.
“Critics of the program are very selective in what they will talk about. They ignore all the other things we’re doing.”

Above all else, Gateway planners view use of electronic tolling as the most effective method of managing future demand and paying for construction of the twinned bridge.
Falcon confirmed last June that commuters on the expanded Port Mann Bridge will pay a toll.
The announcement followed a public consultation which showed of 2,324 people polled, 56 per cent support a $2.50 toll ($1,200 a year) and 70 per cent support a variable toll for peak and off-peak periods. The toll might be higher for trucks, and lower for motorcycles, MoT has said.

“While it’s needed to pay for (construction), what resonated with the public was that tolling is a way to limit future growth and ensure the efficiency of the corridor for the long term,” Gateway executive director Mike Proudfoot says.

“Without tolling, you’re back to the current congested conditions in five to 10 years. So it’s an effective demand management strategy.”
In an April 2006 report, TransLink vice-president of planning Glen Leicester cited tolling as a key condition underpinning his group’s support of the Highway 1/Port Mann Bridge improvements.

But Leicester has expressed concerns that tolling the Port Mann might chase drivers over the 69-year-old Patullo Bridge, considered a more risky route by many commuters owing to its narrow lanes and decaying infrastructure.(Current provincial policy allows for tolling new facilities only, provided there is a free alternative for commuters.)

“Given the current state of (the Patullo) – it’s age and the fact it’s already very congested,” Leicester says, “it’s not something we should be advertising for people to use.”
Leicester has called on the province to partner with TransLink in developing a long-term strategy for the Patullo that could include its replacement before a decision on Port Mann improvements.

In his report, Leicester also raised questions about the fairness of imposing a toll only on commuters who use the Port Mann Bridge – and Golden Ears Bridge – while not charging others across the region who similarly contribute to crowding.

TransLink offers a number of other ways out of congestion. Its OnBoard Program, for example, helps suburban employers identify commuting options for employees, including a discounted annual transit pass through payroll deduction, car and van pooling, car sharing, telecommuting and shuttle buses.

Gateway aims to address issues associated with a growing population, a flourishing economy and, owing in large part to what most agree is a woefully inadequate transportation system, traffic congestion which has come as a result.

Critics charge Gateway threatens to undermine the fundamental tenets of GVRD’s regional sustainability model by failing to offer a workable plan to mitigate this gridlock, outside of expanding roads and building bridges. Doing so, they argue, creates further dependency on automobiles.

In the LRSP, however, GVRD states “transportation choice would be hard to provide without sufficient population densities to support expanded transit service. It is this interdependency and consistency between the strategies which binds them together as a growth management framework.”

With this in mind, some suggest GVRD itself bears responsibility for failing to reinforce the LRSP’s core principle of building compact, livable communities where residents are given practical and attractive choices to use cars less.

“The same people who were busy signing off on permits to produce these great swaths of detached homes, strip malls and business parks, have neglected to cope with transportation issues associated with that,” says B.C. Trucking Association’s Paul Landry.
“So now we really have a mess. We have housing and businesses distributed throughout GVRD in a way that makes it extremely difficult to provide an accessible and performance-oriented public transit system.”

Even some of Gateway’s most fervent critics acknowledge at least that much.
“It’s true several municipalities have moved very far away from their commitments under the LRSP,” NDP transportation critic David Chudnovsky says.

“And it’s shameful the extent to which people south of the Fraser have been ignored when it comes to transit alternatives for their real transportation needs.

“But the question becomes: Do we abandon the world famous-LRSP model? Or do we go back and adjust it in ways that might need to be adjusted and rededicate ourselves both in terms of land use policy and transit to the reasonable and sustainable approach that’s laid out there?”

Some say that’s exactly what has to happen.
“We need to start focusing growth along the arterial roads and major streets in the suburbs to build up greater density and create better transit routes,” says SmartGrowth B.C executive director Cheeying Ho.

“Municipalities have a lot of tools in their power (which) they need to use more strongly to offer incentives to developers to build in existing developed areas... to make it easier for developers to do things in a more sustainable way.”

While regional and municipal leaders bicker over whether Gateway might work, and who should bear the blame for creating or exacerbating congestion and its related problems, Kevin Falcon appears finished with the talking and set on moving forward with the solution.
“There are still people who think we’re having a debate over whether we’re doing this or not,” he says.

“They’re awfully far behind the eight ball. They’re still going to be wondering whether we should be doing this when the spans of the bridge are going up.

“But I can tell you we’re doing it – it’s a fait accompli.”

Which is of some comfort to commuter Lynda Catto, who is almost at her wits’ end with her twice-a-day, 90-minute commute from Aldergrove, across the glacial Port Mann Bridge to downtown Vancouver. As far as she is concerned, those who believe the Gateway Program will make things worse, never drove that 40 km in her shoes.

“I would like these people who are saying it has no merit to come and do what I do for a week and see how they like it,” she says.

“They would think differently. They have no concept of what it’s like living on this side of the bridge. None whatsoever.”

rstarr@businessexaminer.net ________________________________________

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