Open response to Coun. Carol Day,
You recently sent a letter to our Delta Optimist newspaper regarding your views on a twinned tunnel for the good citizens south of your municipality.
As I’m a former Richmond citizen and someone who remembers the day the Queen and Prince Phillip opened the tunnel in 1959, I find it odd that you are against a bridge.
Richmond has five bridges. South Delta and commuters south have one tunnel with four lanes, handling 80,000 vehicles a day.
When the Lions’ Gate Bridge was built with three lanes, they did not forecast population growth and you could say the same was true with Delta, and the whole lower Fraser Valley.
If you don’t live in Tsawwassen or Ladner, then you should spend a couple of weeks in our local hotel and experience the different ways we travel daily.
Try riding a bicycle or walking through a tunnel. Take the bus in rush hour when it can take 90 minutes to get to Downtown Vancouver, or midday, when the buses drive through rural Ladner, adding another 15 minutes to the commute, or attend a concert downtown and wait an hour at the Richmond Bridgeport depot for a bus home after 10 p.m.
TransLink is cancelling one of our express buses out of Tsawwassen and, overall, has ignored the citizens of South Delta.
They are trying new routes solely for the benefit of the new mall just built on the Tsawwassen First Nation Lands.
The changes will add another 10 minutes to get to Canada Line.
Commuters in White Rock taking transit arrive in Vancouver 15 minutes before us, who live a half hour (by car on a quiet day) from Vancouver.
The only good idea you have is to restrict trucks during rush hour, but it just doesn’t make sense to scrap the bridge after all these years of planning and the money spent on engineering.
It will take years to plan a new design, while thousands of new homes are being built south of the tunnel adding more commuters.
Our community would love to bike into Richmond and Vancouver, just as we did in our early years, living in Richmond.
Young people want to bike to work both sides of the tunnel and the TransLink busses just do not provide that kind of service. Sixty per cent of vehicles end their trip in Richmond.
Think about that.
Everyone is in a daily traffic jam at the south and north end of the tunnel, not at the Oak Street bridge.
If we have an emergency, and the tunnel is jammed, how do you think we can get to a hospital in Vancouver or Richmond.
What about the airport if the tunnel is jammed with an accident?
You are not going to stop progress so please take our concerns into consideration and start to think of the future and support our good mayor, Lois Jackson, in her cause for our citizens.
Eileen Kuettel
Tsawwassen
