Quite a bit actually….

All experience with freeway expansion has been shown to be fruitless in terms of dealing with congestion (see for examples http://mobility.tamu.edu/ums/)

The province has also decided – against all the evidence – not to use a tolling strategy to control congestion but rather to stay in line with the outdated notion that tolls simply pay for the new infrastructure – but now with the addition of – and make profits for a private sector partner.

For much more information I suggest you visit the Liveable Region Coaltion’s web site and read the submissions we made to the Environmental Assessment Process

Yes, those are long distance trips made by large numbers of people and goods. There is no especially practical public transit solution for handling these volumes of traffic bottlenecked through four lanes at one crossing before dispersing to an area several times the size of Metro Vancouver.

So Skytrain over that corridor would greatly benefit the thousands of people who live near 152nd and 108th in Surrey, and do almost nothing for the hundreds of thousands beyond them.

Do we need more SkyTrain? ABSOLUTELY! They should run two lines out to the valley, one up the #1, and another up Fraser Highway. Not to mention the planned Evergreen line up the North-side of the Fraser.

Bottom line: When my wife and I bought our new place, we had to move OUT of Surrey and into the ever-more-crowded city of Burnaby (we looked at Vancouver too).

We have cars. Lots of cars, there are more than ever before and we have to deal with that. We’re getting better, more fuel-efficient cars, hybrids, carpooling etc. etc. People love their cars, and as we move forward and even more energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly technologies come to the fore, we’ll have more and more cars they just won’t hurt the environment as much.

There’s no one solution to transit and transportation. If you get enough people going to one place, then you’ll be able to use mass transit options. For the next 20 years, most of Surrey, Langley, Aldergrove, Abbotsford and others will still be relatively low-density areas. Rapid transit, and even buses in many cases won’t be financially viable options. Cars will be critical and we’ll have to build the infrastructure to deal with them.

There are backups, lineups for the Port-Mann bridge Seven Days a Week right now, and it’s purely due to volume. I go back to Surrey on the weekends to visit friends and family and without exception there are lineups for the bridge (and only the bridge) at mid-day every weekend!

So let’s twin the bridge, but let’s also run SkyTrain down that bridge and truly provide an option for people from outside Vancouver, Burnaby and Richmond can have some really usable transit options.