Finally … someone – in this case, Metro Planning manager Gaetan Royer – connects the dots, as quoted in the indispensible Novae Res Urbis today:
Additional road capacity provided by the Gateway Program in the Greater Vancouver area is undermining efforts by regional officials and TransLink to boost transit use, the manager of planning at Metro Vancouver says.
Gaetan Royer told a forum on Metro Vancouver issues Saturday that the Gateway Program is making it more difficult to get people out of their cars and on to buses and the SkyTrain.
… the Gateway project will open up five additional lanes of traffic on the new Port Mann Bridge, plus three to four additional lanes of Highway One, between Surrey and Boundary Road, on the eastern edge of Vancouver. …
At the same time, said Royer, a financial crisis is forcing TransLink to scrap 300,000 hours of proposed bus service expansion.
“So you combine those things together,” said Royer, “and I’m afraid as a planner that we may lose some of the gains we have made in terms of additional transit users in the past decade.”
**sigh….**