From the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce:
We stand at a turning point for US transport. Real gasoline prices have already surpassed the peak levels that followed the second OPEC oil shocks, and even when adjusted for potential fuel efficiency improvements, have increased to the point where they will dramatically change driving behaviour in America.
Gasoline consumption is ultimately about how many people drive, the distance they drive and the type of vehicles they drive. On all three counts American face a massive change.
Us too. But we’re going to spend our billions on widened highways, new bridges and plans to extend the freeway network to every part of this region.
UPDATE: Sun writer Pete McMartin added the following at the end of his weekend column:
… it doesn’t look like gas prices will be falling soon, if ever — then governments are going to have to reconsider their infrastructure priorities. Why invest billions in twinning a Port Mann Bridge for car traffic, when what the Fraser Valley suburbs will desperately need in the future is rapid transit rail and bus lines, not more freeways?
What are the economics of building the premier’s vaunted Gateway Project and environmentally irresponsible perimeter roads when rising gas prices might render them economically unviable? Why consider road expansion of any kind when there will be fewer and smaller cars on the road?
BC Liberal government corruption is the only answer I’ve come up with.
There is no logical rationale in Gateway, in comparison to realistic alternatives, such as a multi-faceted approach including congestion pricing, increased transit (queue jumpers and new rapid transit lines), and converting the centre bridge lane to a reversible HOV/transit lane AT THE SAME TIME (not each in isolation, as the MoT thinks is clever). Too bad the MoT had no interest in seriously evaluating any alternative that wasn’t designed to fail (p. 3):
http://a100.gov.bc.ca/appsdata/epic/documents/p247/1195062711931_a824a20bbcd7416f8b1d888c3e4d6941.pdf
While I agree the government should re-think the scale and scope of Gateway, and perhaps the timing of some projects, I think certain infrastructure still needs to be built.
First, Highway 1 and the Port Mann needs more capacity in order to allow for express buses (not possible with current congestion, which won’t get better unless people have a transit alternative since population growth will continue south of the Fraser even with high gasoline prices). Making any new capacity toll space (or all of it toll roads) and/or restricted to transit and commercial vehicles will mean that someone in Surrey will be able to commute downtown in an express bus in a fraction of the time it takes individual drivers. The express buss will not meet any congestion.
Second, better flow for trucks from Deltaport to Richmond, Surrey and Langley and beyond needs to happen. Container shipping and logistics business will still be big in this area in the years ahead. While each of us might be consuming less in the future, the population in Metro Vancouver will grow substantially over the next 20 years since it’s a compact area in which you can easily choose to live without a car if you pick the right community. Not many North American cities can say this now. So we still will need the ability to move goods including food and clothes as well as other consumer products.
Sound a lot like our Columbia River Crossing project down here in Portland/Vancouver USA.
Stuck in 1960s “highway engineer” design mode.
Spend $4 billion US to build 12 lanes of concrete monstrosity for no real reason?
All of the alternative options get ignored and basically they go for the “build the biggest bridge you can think of for cars” approach. When what we need is better transit, better interchange, smaller local arterial bridges, better freight rail, commuter rail on the rail bridge, and tolling. Many small options add together to make a much better solution than the massive proposed projects.
Sounds strangely similar, these two projects. Your Gateway, and our CRC… In fact Bert described a process that if you took out the name of the projects and committees you could think was about our CRC!!!
Note that the 5th lane (HOV lane) on the Port Mann is a dedicated eastbound lane because the eastbound truck traffic entering the highway from the Pacific Reach Industrial Park must climb a relatively steep grade at the bridge approach and cannot achieve highway speeds when they enter. That creates a backlog at that location and slows traffic. So the extra lane was allocated as a dedicated eastbound lane.
The answer to your question turns in part on whether one thinks that the most likely transportation substitution (in face of high oil prices) will be smaller cars or mass transit.
Smaller cars are something the individual can do. In the Seattle area it is well-demonstrated that we are not currently able to do very large social projects such as public transport system, so people will be forced to go to the smaller cars because the public is not able to provide an alternative.
Doubling vehicle mileage is well within (easily in fact) our technical abilities.
Doubling vehicle mileage effectively halves the cost of oil.
Halving the cost of oil preserves (to a significant degree) the suburban way of life.
Does that mean I don’t favor massive increase in spending on public transit? No. Nor does it not mean that we should facilitating all sorts of adjustments such as suburban infill and redevelopment of shopping centers.
But faced with massive increase in energy cost — uh…to the level Europeans have been used to for years — North American consumers will find it easier to shed their 5-10 year vehicle investment than to divest themselves of their housing investment which is built to last a 100 years. Looking at it from a social perspective, that makes sense to me. Our massive real estate investment in the suburbs can be useful to us for decades; our fuel-inefficient vehicles cannot.
I don’t know the specifics of which you speak, Gord, and Gateway may well be a dumb plan. But an enormous number of private vehicles will be with us for a very long time and they will need roads.
I realize that you are not saying NO ROADS, so the question is just the degree and timing of road vs. public transit expenditures. That’s one of the reasons I am in favor of the minimal repair option for Seattle’s Viaduct until we start to develop a real public transit network.
Wendy, here (in CAPS) is the Port Mann Highway 1 (PMH1) Project Rationale from the MoT with my responses beneath (mostly from Chapter 3.1 & 3.2 of the report, http://a100.gov.bc.ca/appsdata/epic/documents/p247/d24665/1189028149107_a472fd1478e9414c83aed4d70a214df5.pdf ):
SERVE EASTWARD DEVELOPMENT & GROWTH
> it will certainly spur development, but the form of development a freeway enables is urban sprawl, not compact growth, which gets dumber by the day as gas prices rise and environmental pressures grow. Serving existing dispersed commuting patterns with more auto infrastructure will only entrench the automobile in our region, taking us ever further away from sustainability
DECREASED CONGESTION AND THE SAFETY BENEFITS THAT COME WITH THAT
> studies have shown that building freeways results in decreases congestion for, at most, 10 years – it’s a short-term solution with irreversible consequences on the pattern of urban development
http://sightline.org/research/energy/res_pubs/climate-analysis-gge-new-lanes-10-07/resolveuid/10c360fe2a9090abda846927b76c45ee
Even the MoT indirectly acknowledges there may be long term problems with congestion: “an extension of the existing HOV system to 200th Street in Langley will ensure that these benefits to transit are sustainable for the long term” (chapter 22.2.5).
http://a100.gov.bc.ca/appsdata/epic/documents/p247/d24668/1189115608711_65f2b7388b1244eabac18a14e7eb370f.pdf
DECREASED POLLUTION FROM DECREASED CONGESTION
> this goes hand-in-hand with the above; the Sightline study shows that each extra lane-mile of highway produces between 116,500-186,500 tons of CO2 over 50 years, which suggests that PMH1 alone will push greenhouse gas levels up by tens of millions of tons over 50 years. That’s perhaps an additional year’s worth of CO2 over that period, based on the GVRD’s greenhouse gas inventory (22.8 Megatonnes/year as of 2005)!
http://www.gvrd.bc.ca/air/pdfs/2005_LFV_Emissions.pdf
FOSTERING TRANSPORTATION INDUSTRY GROWTH AND FACILITATING INCREASED GOODS MOVEMENT
> While there are benefits to facilitating goods movement, building more general use road capacity is one of the costliest and least efficient ways of doing it, especially in consideration of the harm it does in other areas. Congestion pricing should have been looked at much more seriously, no rail-based alternatives were even looked at, and very few measures have been put in to protect goods movement capacity from eventual re-congestion. There are many more reasons why I think there are better alternatives for growing business (even goods movement), several of which I’ve recapped in this post:
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showpost.php?p=3601165&postcount=143
ECONOMIC BENEFITS OF BIG PROJECTS LIKE PUTTING MORE PEOPLE TO WORK
> We could achieve the same benefits with alternative big projects, like transit lines
PERMITTING TRANSIT SERVICE OVER THE BRIDGE
> people will use LESS transit when the freeway is all clear, while they would use MORE if we instead made the HOV lane reversible and expanded rapid transit, since this produces shorter relative trip time vs. the automobile – it’s a matter of utility. See this post for the reasoning:
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showpost.php?p=3614278&postcount=180
Let’s keep in mind that there are several other flawed assumptions made regarding the level of induced traffic PMH1 will bring.
Also, there are at least two major environmental changes which the PMH1 studies did not take into account: 1) Gas prices have nearly doubled from 80 cents/L used in the study to $1.50/L today, and 2) congestion pricing technology has improved significantly in the past couple years – it is now both significantly less costly and more flexible than even London & Stockholm’s new systems
http://frumin.net/ation/2007/12/congestion_pricing_is_a_technology.html
(not that the MoT even seriously considered system-wide tolling at all in the first place – their report essentially rejects it based on no increase in transportation capacity; that is, they did not merge alternatives together, like adding transit AND implementing system-wide tolling).
This project is completely wrongheaded in achieving what it sets out to do. The fact that the BC Liberals didn’t even attempt to study alternatives in a meaningful way leads me toward thinking that corruption is one of the main sources still fuelling this project.
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Ron, it seems to me that is a small engineering problem (relative to twinning a bridge). In fact, the MoT document I linked to (Chapter 3.2.5.7) doesn’t even mention it in their dismissal of the reversible HOV lane alternative, which may be telling, considering how many minor excuses they pulled out to dismiss all the single-pronged alternatives.