Stephen Rees's blog

I think one of the biggest takeaways from this morning’s Government Announcement is that you should not summon the press to a briefing and stage an announcement when you have nothing to announce. The incoming NDP government was quick to announce the cancellation of the previous government’s massive new bridge proposal. They also appointed Stan Cowdell P Eng to conduct a review. He submitted a substantial report this summer and today there was a briefing for the press with a summary of that report. At the time of writing only the Province has anything of substance on that, though I expect more will be available once they all get back to their desks.

I wish that I had been wiser than to agree to go on the CBC call in program. At least there did seem to be more understanding of the need for transit. The point I was trying to get over was that after all this time just promising to have more consultations and a decision by the end of 2020 wasn’t enough. They could have had something to say if they had a greater commitment to transit. Claire Trevenna was able to talk about the immediate spending of $40m on the intersections at each end of the tunnel, improvements to lighting, signs and road surface. All things that highway engineers at MoTI care about. And there was a brief reference to Translink – but nothing of substance.

In the longer term the options are still more general purpose traffic lanes – instead of a 10 lane bridge, 6 or 8 lanes might be considered – or the same in new immersed tubes and possibly a different alignment. But consideration of transit was vague and ill defined – and according to The Province

The review also recommends that the province consider eliminating HOV or transit provisions at the bridge median in favour of lower-cost alternatives.

Which is not at all what I wanted to read!

There are double decker buses on order. Translink is increasing services in general. It has run into opposition in West Vancouver for a bus lane and cross municipal boundary B Line for the North Shore, and is scrambling to revise its work program to meet the changed priorities for Surrey – which also includes more rapid buses. It is a “feature” of our system that it is the region that will bear the brunt of increasing bus service – the MoTI has probably done most of what can be in the way of bus lanes along Highway #99. I will once again re-iterate that buses are now 1% of the vehicles but carry 26% of the people. It is a real shame that there wasn’t more said about what can be done to increase that market share in the very near future while we are waiting to find out how many more lanes MoTI engineers will get to build – which is all they care about!

(One thing that did occur to me was that no-one talked about the “need” to remove the tunnel identified by the Port!)

Here is the pdf of the complete review

George-Massey-Crossing_Independent-Technical-Review_FINAL

Or you could go to the MoTI web page if you prefer