Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Money for Infrastructure

Well as you as well aware, the Province and Federal government launched the South Fraser Perimeter Road yesterday. I was looking at a map of the project and found it interesting that once the SFPR is completed Burns Bog will be completely surrounded by freeways. Anyways, the $401 million 2001 dollar project is now $1 billion dollars or more. Just think about how much light rail that would build…

Meanwhile, the $1.2 billion dollar Evergreen Line might actually be getting built. According to an article in the Tri-City News, a project office has been setup outside the Coquitlam transit centre. These projects are all P3, so construction is dependent on private dollars to get started.

It looks like transit is being taken more seriously at the federal level. The federal government now requires that all new buses that have federal dollars attached have “Canada Building Transit Together” stickers on the fare box. Winds of change I tells ya… What we really need is a stable transit funding program in Canada and a shift away from the various one-off infrastructure funding programs.

With that, I was pleasantly surprised to find an article in the Surrey Leader about municipal funding wish-lists.

From the Township of Langley:
-Expansion of lateral road network reaching from Surrey to South Langley, on to Abbotsford Airport and to Chilliwack.
-Light rail following those routes.

Today's post is brought to you by the phase: "shovel-ready."

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