Somehow not surprising, but still a bit breathtaking is the B.C. Transportation Minister’s pronouncement in the June 15th Delta Optimist that “it is full steam ahead despite mounting opposition from outside Delta”.
Minister Stone has assured Mayor Lois Jackson of Delta that the Province is sticking to its original timeline, and that “We are also committed to continuing to work collaboratively with Metro Vancouver and other stakeholders to ensure that this project will meet the needs of Metro Vancouver residents for generations“.
This letter was in response to a letter from Mayor Jackson who was worried that other Metro Vancouver mayors wanted to delay the project in order for federal infrastructure funding to head towards their wish list of projects.
Most recently a petition has commenced requesting a federal environmental review of the project, suggesting that the bridge “would cause environmental damage and ruin farmland”.
Both the Corporation of Delta and the Tsawwassen First Nation join the Port Authority in strongly supporting the proposed Massey Bridge. The ten lane 3.3 kilometer bridge is scheduled to commence construction next year, and be opened in 2022. The project costs of 3.5 billion include 24 kilometres of Highway 99 improvements.
According to the Province the Massey Bridge project is on schedule and on time.
Delta Mayor Jackson is worried that funding for this monster bridge would be delayed as other Metro mayors wanted federal money to be directed toward their “wish list” of projects.
Population of the densest Metro areas, including the Burrard peninsula, Surrey and Coquitlam: 1,600,000
Population of Delta and White Rock: 120,000
13 : 1
There is no comparison.
Wrong metric. Count winnable votes instead. (Sorry, that’s my cynical voice.)
Count donations to the ruling party from car dealers & road builders & property speculators who own ALR land. #banbigmoney!
Ha! I wasn’t being cynical enough 🙂
Count the dollar value of goods moving by truck.
At the same time, count how many trucks use this crossing compared to private vehicles. Ministry figures show trucks are less than 5% of the total vehicles.
Then multiply by how much more road capacity a heavy truck takes compared to a car or motorcycle…
Wow, that many trucks. Thanks Jeff. That’s over a 100,000 trucks a month. Every few seconds throughout the day another one rumbles through the old tunnel. The volume certainly has grown. Anyone that uses that highway can easily see that the container port and the SFPR are being well used by trucking. The truck traffic up to the industrial areas of Burnaby and to the Port of Vancouver stream continually along Knight Street too. Then there are the trucks heading down to the USA. The trucks from Vancouver heading to the landfill also constitute a massive amount of heavy traffic through the old tunnel.
With the growth of south Richmond and Steveston, as well as the unrelenting growth of South Surrey and Grandview, then the building boom coming as the new Rail Transit is built in Surrey and Langley it’s understandable that the mayors want to make sure this vital link is relieved from it’s chronically congested bottleneck.
We must also remember that the Metro mayors and the exhaustive and massive Mayors’ Plan remind us that there are another million people coming soon to Metro, so we’d better get this new bridge built as soon as possible.
Yes, you could work out a monthly truck volume, but it doesn’t matter. There isn’t a capacity problem other than at rush hour, morning and afternoon. Reported truck volume, from cube vans to heavy trucks, for those periods, is 600 per day. With two new truck lanes, that is one truck per minute over five hours of rush hour. Less, if any of the light trucks use the general purpose lanes.
There is one reason to consider total truck volume. They will all pay the toll.
Yesterday the counterflow lane was active until 6:30pm. It’s used for increasingly longer periods. Almost now up to four hours in the am and over three in afternoons. That constitutes the majority of the workday.
It’s no longer rush hour, it’s now rush hours which are longer than the rest of the day.
Your 5% figure, based on the ministry numbers translates to 4,000 per day. If now you’re suggesting 600 during the rush hours are you seriously thinking the other 3,400 trucks sneak through in the late evening and at night? No they don’t. The construction sites are closed, the city dump is closed. The port reports GPS tracking and at night truck movement drop of through the evening to an average of a tenth of the daytime rate. Those truck are rolling through the day. The only night time trucks of any number are the few long-distance ones that leave to city early for points east and north to get a jump on the daily city congestion.
If you don’t agree with the truck volumes the Ministry has published, you should take it up with them. They say 600 trucks per day during rush hours (both am and pm). I guessed that covers 5 hours. I don’t know how many hours they used for their calculation. If you want to use 7 hours, then you are down to 86 per hour, which is 43 per hour for each of the two planned truck lanes. That is less than one per minute during rush hours using your definition of rush hour.
It seems clear that trucks avoid the rush hour congestion.
If I was building a business case for a new bridge and basing it partly on truck traffic, I would ensure I counted all the trucks.
This only matters because of claims by some posters that this new bridge is all about keeping truck traffic flowing.
Eric, if you want to review the traffic numbers take a look at the Project Definition Report. While I didn’t see a definition of “rush hour”, the graphs suggest they are considering it to be when congestion is over a certain hurdle, and it looks to be about 6 hours per day. 5% of traffic being trucks (light and heavy) is published, but is referring to only during rush hours, it isn’t true all day. The focus on rush hours is because that is when they are capacity limited, they don’t have capacity problems outside of rush hours. We don’t need any lane expansion if you consider other than rush hours. They show 15% are trucks at mid day, and note that trucks actively avoid rush hours. They have an origin/destination map so you can see where the trips are from and to. All at the project web site.
Perhaps I need to buy a new calculator, Jeff. You said 5% are trucks and the Ministry says 80,000 vehicles daily.
Some people might say that trucks are generally 18 wheelers. Especially now that the majority are hauling containers to and from Deltaport. These trucks are more than four times larger than a sedan or an SUV. A statatician would say that if 5% of the traffic are trucks then that 5%, or that 4,000, needs to be quadrupled as a nominal figure to give a more accurate general number of vehicular traffic, rather than just vehicles, passing through the measuring point. Concurrently, any two wheeled vehicles should be similarly pro-rated and their number reduced in the overall tabulation.
Nobody could suggest any close similarity to a simple moped and tractor-trailer 18 wheeler.
Since you are providing the numbers and seem to be very familiar with the logistics and parameters of the Massey Replacement Project perhaps you could do the math and tell us the volume of wheels going through the dear old tunnel and we could then extrapolate as we subjectively wish, to arrive at figures to satisfy our own personal curiosities.
I see that the Port estimates that the recently expanded Deltaport is quite probably going to double in volume again by 2030. So, in keeping with your interest in the 2040 transit plans would you also factor in this number for the port expansion too.
I said 5% are trucks, and clarified that that is during the combined am and pm rush hours. Not all day. Trucks avoid the tunnel during rush hours, as has already been pointed out. If we want to understand delays and costs to businesses, we should focus on those times when there is significant congestion. Not on late night and early morning, when there is not congestion and hence no additional cost to business.
“Some people might say that trucks are generally 18 wheelers” but as already stated, that is not what we are talking about here. Trucks are defined in the Project Definition Report as everything from 18 wheelers to cube vans. No need to speculate, just read the report. If you want to focus on just 18 wheelers, the numbers are, of course, far less.
“We could then extrapolate as we subjectively you wish” doesn’t help, we would all be served by starting from data, as opposed to specious claims.
The growth projections for both SOV and truck volumes are shown in the PDR. Take the current volumes and project them out to 2045. What factors would you include in that projection for technological advancement, fossil fuel impacts, and so on? Just like today, but bigger (quoting from another post)? Or might there be some changes in society that put that projection in the speculative category? And recall that the new bridge isn’t being designed for today’s capacity, but rather that projected volume in 2045.
http://engage.gov.bc.ca/masseytunnel/files/2015/12/GMT-Project-Definition-Report-Dec-2015.pdf
The trucks certainly do become larger as time passes. Buses too are now sometimes double in size. I’d say that sedans are unquestionably smaller than they used to be. Yet many SUVs are more chunky than cars, even if they are are a tad shorter.
Looking forward we can only see that trucks will be gasoline powered for many decades. Natural gas trucks are $50,000 US$ more in cost. Since oil has come down in price this makes the gas trucks even less appealing. As more small vehicles switch to electricity there’s a strong possibility that oil will become even cheaper. Gasoline trucks will be with us for a long time.
With the tenacious adherence to the sacred ALR we can only expect that even more residences will be built in the southern and eastern suburbs. Metro Vancouver tell us repeatedly that a million more people must be welcomed here over the next few years. Many of them will obviously find residences in these suburbs. Since the mayor of Vancouver, who is also on the Metro and other boards, is fixated on building the next subway along Broadway to Arbutus at the cost of over $2 billion, the likelihood of any rapid rail to the southern suburbs in the short term is nil. This Broadway line is still only at the planning stage. Completion is a long way off and federal funding will almost certainly be dependant in the Liberal government in Ottawa being re-elected. Nothing happens in realpolitiks without a carrot on a stick.
In the shorter term, a decade or so, it’s incumbent on the provincial government to relieve the congestion and the pollution from idling and unproductive gridlock. This is what they’re doing.
Let’s not forget the stated desire to dredge the Fraser River and make it accessible to more ships all the way to New Est and Surrey past the Port Mann bridge.. Thus we will see, in time, more trucks on both sides of the Fraser hauling goods to and fro, within Metrovan, to Alberta and east, and Washington and south. Traffic will not slow down, but grow, as population AND commercial traffic grows.
The only other alternative would have been a wider, deeper tunnel. Not sure if that would have been cheaper, perhaps less intrusive, and I can only surmise the smart engineering folks at Ministry of Transport have considered (and rejected) this option. Some analysis of pro’s and con’s would be useful, i.e. new deeper 8-10 lane tunnel vs. 8-10 lane bridge.
SFPR and new Patullo bridge with already congested 4 lanes: a grave mistake. Far too narrow.
Goods movement needs a single lane in each direction with passing opportunities on hills.
Add high occupancy vehicles and tradespeople and you can justify 2 lanes in each direction for highways and major arterials. Every other street would be fine with just the one lane in each direction.
Of course the world doesn’t look like that at all. Local arterials are 4-6 lanes wide and highways up to 10. The 6 “excess” lanes on the Port Mann bridge aren’t there to move trucks, buses, van pools or pickup trucks, they exist because so many people get around in single occupancy vehicles.
People are small. They usually weigh less than 100kg and more than one can fit into a square metre of space. Cars are big. They weigh a couple of tonnes and occupy many square metres when stopped. When moving they occupy hundreds of square metres.
Taking every person and multiplying their weight by 20 and their size by 200 is a ridiculous thing to do, but that’s how transportation planning is traditionally done. That needs to change. We need to focus on moving the contents of the vehicles rather than the vehicles themselves.
We should also be looking at whether those contents really need to be moving so much. Online shopping is one thing that’s reducing trips. Instead of 1000 cars driving to the mall, shoppers make zero trips and instead have their products delivered by a couple dozen vehicles. It’s a massive reduction in road usage. Walkable neighbourhoods also replace driving with walking, an activity that uses far fewer resources and provides health benefits.
Unfortunately many of our leaders approach transportation planning the same way today as leaders did in the 1950s and are beholden to contributors who benefit from 50’s thinking.
Note all the tiny tiny cars around .. this is NOT (yet) Europe !
Astute comments, David.
The dreams of the MoTH transportation planners must still be full of fantasies like
http://a3.files.biography.com/image/upload/c_fit,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,h_1200,q_80,w_1200/MTE5NTU2MzE2MzIyMTA0ODQz.jpg
Blue collar workers with tools and equipment to transport back and forth, mothers with kids, commuters living south of the Fraser or truckers – usually not blogging here – beg to differ !
“beholden to contributors who benefit from 50’s thinking”
Yep. Big oil, big auto, big time land speculators. If they get to decide, humanity’s future may be short.