No Twinning, More Spinning as Port Mann Cost Doubles

Kevin Falcon, B.C. Transportation Minister, no longer wants to twin the Port Mann Bridge. Unfortunately, it's not because he's had an epiphany, seeing that there's no place for massive road infrastructure projects in a future with peak oil and climate change.

No, he's still trying to build his way out of congestion.

But instead of twinning, he wants to build an even bigger, single-span, superbridge that is ten lanes wide instead of the eight lanes of the earlier twinned bridge design. Planned completion date: 2013.

So here's what I've gleaned from the various MSM reports.

The building work has started apparently: Premier Campbell made a show of driving the first pile into the ground for the bridge foundation today - I think they are worried about what opponents of Gateway will do, so this is just another way of reiterating "the bridge is going ahead."

The revised Gateway Project still involves widening Highway 1 (aka the Trans-Canada Highway) with an additional lane in either direction South of the river. So residents of East Vancouver and Burnaby can look forward to more cars, more congestion, more noise, and more pollution, as if it wasn't bad enough already.

The reason given for not twinning: the old Port Mann would cost too much to seismically upgrade and maintain. Better to write it off.

The cost of the project - a Public Private Partnership or PPP - will now double from its original price tag to $3.3 billion.

The minister is hoping that he can pay off the cost of the bridge over the course of 40 years with tolls of $3 each way. That's a big assumption. But given the bailout culture that's driving government policy and general lack of fiscal accountability these days you might be thinking, 'hey, what's a few billion dollars?'.

It's too much money to mis-spend and takes away resources from where it's needed on the busy Port Mann corridor - a modern transit system.

One side-note: it doesn't appear that there's any extra sweeteners for cyclists in the new announcement - the original $50 million promised when the Gateway Project was announced in January 2006 has not even been juiced up with an inflation-adjusted boost.

So is there anything positive to take away here?

The bridge will be tolled and the tolls will rise each year. Maybe tolling will catch on? After all, tolls in one place will create a new bottleneck as traffic like water flows elsewhere - i.e. the nearby Pattullo bridge.

Falcon also said the design of the bridge will allow for light rail transit to be added in the future. Which begs the question why not put it in now? I don't know the answer, but I guess there's a dollar sign in front of it.

And at a personal level, the portrait in my film of the Liberal leadership as blinkered road-builders still holds true. The film still has a shelf-life, although I wish a green transport revolution had rendered it history.