Wednesday, February 4, 2009

More Talk of Super Bridge

In today's Province newspaper Kent Spencer talks about the possibility of a single "super bridge" to replace the 45 year old Port Mann Bridge as I had blogged about the other day. Spencer writes

"For the past 20 years there have been no dedicated bus lanes on the Port Mann.

The government last week agreed to borrow $500 million to assist a group of private companies hired to build the bridge and operate it afterwards.

Tolls are set to be $3 each way. The bridge is scheduled to be completed in 2013."

I think we need to replace aging infrastructure and Nathan does as well. I do like the Portland model of providing transit options BEFORE building a news bridge, but again, this is a replacement. One could debate the need for 10 lanes, but I worry more about the roads that feed this bridge now and in the future. As many have pointed out, there never seems to be stopped traffic on the bridge itself. The traffic congestion occurs along Hwy. 1 and the various feeder roads in Surrey. Is the MoT willing and able to expand that infrastructure to support the new bridge?

1 comment:

Nathan Pachal said...

As you are well aware, the Gateway Program includes widening highway one up to 8 to 10 lanes (10 lanes in Burnaby) from the Iron Worker Memorial Bridge to 200th Street. The MoT is definitely doing their part to ensure the highway is wide enough. The problem than become the roads attached to the highway. Vancouver is not adding one more lane of road, as is Burnaby, etc. Surrey isn’t really adding more road-space for the highways either. What you end up doing is shifting the bottleneck around. I guess Surrey could bulldoze all the buildings along 152nd and 104th to make room for a highway (much like is happening for the South Fraser Perimeter Road), but I’m sure that’s not going to happen…

I like what they did why the replaced the Lion Gate Bridge. The made the bridge safer, but they didn’t expand the amount of lanes…

I heard an American planner say that once you get past 4 lanes, the value of expansion exponential decreases.