Dear Editor,
I can’t not weigh in on the bridge/tunnel debate.
What a lot of people are missing (mostly because of misinformation), is that the bridge is not being proposed for people. It doesn’t even have a dedicated LRT lane.
The bridge is intended to ease shipping, i.e. big oil, big gas, big shipping, big coal and land-gobbling, big metro ports.
We commoners, the commuters, are being used as pawns in a Ponzi scheme. The 30,000 or 40,000 people coming to and from Delta/Richmond daily can’t possibly justify a $3.5 billion dollar bridge. It’s simple math.
At one of the bridge open houses I spoke with the lead on the team of the project developer, subcontracted by our government. He told me the main reason a tunnel east of the current channel is not being proposed is because there is a sentimental resistance on the part of farmland lovers.
That is a paraphrase, but you get the point. Funny thing though, the very people who advocate for a second tunnel are those very same farmland lovers, not to mention the mute river lovers, which include salmon, beavers, etc. who were here long before we were. Bridges are messy; tunnels are tidy (and a fraction of the cost — the current one was $28 million in 1959 dollars).
We live in the 21st-century. Let’s be tidy this time around.
Glen Andersen
Richmond
