Dear Editor,
On Thursday last week I drove through the Massey Tunnel six times.
Six! First time, from Richmond to Ladner to pick up a special needs friend and take her on errands in Vancouver and back home and later to pick her up again for an evening at the theatre in Vancouver.
In between, I went home to have dinner with my husband.
It was not onerous. For all but one of those trips, ranging from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., I zipped right through the tunnel.
Only the 4 p.m. trip heading home was backed up.
It seems to me a lot of time the tunnel is not “congested,” contrary to what the government and Port Metro Vancouver have been saying in order to sell the idea of a bridge.
It is common knowledge that you can’t build your way out of congestion.
But by building a bridge with long approaches, cloverleafs and on/off ramps, that is exactly what they want to do.
Let’s look more closely at their plans.
For starters, the bridge has to be very tall. This is so Panamax supertankers can get upriver in the near future when the Fraser River estuary is totally industrialized and all the salmon and birds are gone.
Bridge plans indicate it will still be 30 feet in the air (three storeys) at Steveston Highway. Ironwood would become a ghost town, a backwater with bridge columns and abutments being the only view for the new condos at the corner.
Guess where all the worker and business traffic from Ironwood and Horseshoe Way will go?
Right up No. 5 Road, so they can access the bridge once it lands in Richmond, with on/off ramps located somewhere around Francis Road, once it has punched through farmland to Highway 99.
Secondly, they promise a transit line and bike lanes on the bridge to appease the climate change crowd.
Very clever. “On the bridge” means this $3.5 billion project will build the amenities on the bridge but won’t pay for transit and bike lanes to be connected to anything.
That bill will come back to the taxpayers of Richmond and Delta.
And anyway, what was wrong with the fast bus idea? In 2008, extra bus lanes were built on Highway 99 on both sides of the tunnel, but then bus service was cut.
Surely, using dedicated bus lanes, getting people into buses and giving them free parking at King George Highway is a better solution to congestion than a bridge that would only move congestion further north.
Finally, why are they not taking action to reduce congestion by moving container truck traffic into the evening? Truck traffic takes up a lot of space on Highway 99 and the tunnel.
But if Deltaport were open 24/7, like most other ports in the world, trucks would not always have to travel during the rush hours.
In fact, Deltaport is actually closed to trucks from midnight to 8 a.m. weekdays and all day Sunday, so truckers have little choice but to drive along with the daily commuters trying to get to and from work.
In my view, not enough has been done to justify spending $3.5 billion of taxpayers’ money on a new Massey Bridge.
I can think of so many other better ways to spend that kind of dough! How about more affordable housing? Or expanding the SkyTrain? Or more buses on the 99?
It is clear that in this case, the B.C. government is not interested in the little guy.
They have been wooed into selling our river, our climate and our farmland and we, the taxpayers, will not benefit in the end.
I believe we can stop the Massey Bridge before it’s too late.
If you care about Richmond’s future you can write to the prime minister at [email protected] and cc your local MP, urging the federal government to withhold infrastructure funds and to establish a federal environmental review panel to fully investigate this project.
De Whalen
Richmond
