Editor:
In your recent Op-Ed from CEO Dave Earl of the BC Trucking Association, one can only agree that the morning and evening rush hours between Chilliwack and Metro Vancouver is brutal.
I know this first hand as I commuted this route for 35 years. In the early 1980’s before they added HOV lanes, it was forty minutes from Boundary Road just to the Port Mann bridge everyday.
Unfortunately expanding the highway has brought even more traffic. So why do so many people commute so far everyday? It’s because the price of real estate in Metro is so ridiculously expensive that the average working stiff cannot afford to live there. It was actually cheaper to commute everyday compared to living their.
Also, every time they improve or expand that stretch of highway, the traffic increases. Then you add to that the overwhelming amount of cargo trucks, obviously in a hurry darting in and out of traffic changing lanes like pickup trucks, is a recipe for disaster.
Maybe expanding the highway is not the solution. Maybe what would serve us better, would be a massive expansion of rail and transit solely for passengers and commuting.
If we expanded the commuter infrastructure along with road pricing, we could motivate commuters out of their cars and into rail cars and buses. This would free up highway infrastructure for the transportation of goods and essential services.
This would drastically lessen the 140,000 cars that travel across the Port Mann everyday and making a substantial reduction in carbon emissions and assist to our ongoing fight with climate change.
If we could expand our transportation systems in a pragmatic way that not only gets us to where want to go, but also made it substantially less expensive, we could increase the safe, reliable, and efficient functioning of our multimodal transportation network.
Art Green,
Hope