CREDIT: Peter Battistoni, Vancouver Sun (In the search for consensus, Port Mann Bridge is the bottleneck)

B.C.’s most monumental highway-building project since the days of Social Credit premier W.A.C. Bennett will be unveiled in August.

It’s called the Gateway Program and it promises to be one of the Lower Mainland’s most volatile political issues for years.

Indeed, whether and how the Gateway Program is built will shape the future of Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley for decades to come. Some say for better, others for worse.

Everyone agrees that Greater Vancouver has a serious traffic problem that is slowing the movement of goods and commuters to a crawl, and that something has to be done.

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Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon, the man behind the project and a champion of Surrey‘s right to control its own growth — there is a connection — says it will be built.

Falcon said a long-awaited project definition report that nails down exactly what the government wants to build is due in August. It will constitute the starting gun for the next round of project planning, consultation and, of course, politics.

Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell mutters that if the Liberals build this project over municipal objections, they had better enjoy the next four years because they won’t be in office after that.

Campbell did not say whether he personally plans to climb the ladder to provincial politics to enforce his verdict.

Gordon Price, a former Vancouver city councillor and a close ally of Premier Gordon Campbell when he was mayor of Vancouver in the 1980s and helping shape the region’s planning priorities, says the Gateway Program signals a 180-degree turnaround from those priorities.

– rice, who now lectures and consults on urban planning, has joined the Livable Region Coalition to oppose the Gateway Program which, he says, means giving up Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley to the automobile, and to urban sprawl.

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The Gateway Program is a grand plan for solving Greater Vancouver’s major traffic problems — especially the highway congestion that is slowing goods-moving trucks in and out of the region’s ports but also the ever-slower highway commutes between parts of the region — in a single, multi-billion-dollar stroke.

It includes:

– The twinning of the Port Mann Bridge.

– Widening the Trans-Canada Highway from Langley to Vancouver.

– A new four-lane South Fraser Perimeter Road.

– A new North Fraser Perimeter Road.

It appeared on the provincial agenda several years ago and appeared to be a wish list for the region’s ports and transportation industries, which estimate the economic cost of goods languishing in backed-up traffic has reached $1.5 billion a year. It did not have much of a profile.

Last year it fell into place with an audible click, like the last piece in a big jigsaw puzzle. Some of the other parts:

For three decades or so, the Greater Vancouver Regional District has tried to encourage development in town centres strung along transit routes, especially in the northeast quadrant of the region.

The idea was to prevent sprawl, preserve green space and farm land, and encourage compact development, jobs located near homes and travel by transit.

Its success has been limited. Growth did occur along the route of the proposed northeast rapid transit line. But south of the Fraser, Surrey and others were often criticized for approving office parks and subdivisions in places unforeseen by the regional plan, at densities difficult to serve by road and impossible by transit.

With population growth came increasing political clout for Surrey, and resentment of what was perceived as pious prattling by smug Vancouverites.

The provincial election of 2001 and the municipal elections of 2002 changed everything.

The Liberals turfed the NDP out of office, Gordon Campbell became premier and Falcon, the MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale, emerged as a force in cabinet. In 2002, new municipal councils sent delegates to regional bodies who handed the influential chairs of the district and TransLink boards, both long held by Vancouver, to Surrey Coun. Marvin Hunt and Mayor Doug McCallum.

TransLink switched priorities and the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver line vaulted to the top of the agenda, ahead of northeast rapid transit.

There were bloodbaths at TransLink board meetings as some directors held out for different routes and cheaper technology. Twice, they voted against the RAV Line, and Falcon threatened to take back the province’s $450-million contribution. He had a better place to spend it.

That’s how the Gateway Program got on the table.

The RAV Line was resurrected on the third vote, but Falcon wouldn’t put the Gateway Program back on the shelf.

If we want to deal seriously with congestion we have to build it, he insisted Tuesday.

“I have to make decisions based on the reality of growth in this region, not on the basis of a model which many municipalities aren’t even following or adhering to, and which hasn’t been updated — the Livable Region Plan,” Falcon said.

“The reality of what’s happening is that Surrey is the fastest-growing city in the province, and within the next 10 to 15 years will be larger in population than Vancouver.

“The Port Mann Bridge is the most congested corridor in the Lower Mainland, in fact, in the entire province. Nothing else comes close. You can’t ignore that.”

For Gordon Price, a member of several centre-right Vancouver city councils who favours “sustainable” planning, alarm bells are ringing.

“Why are they locking us into a form of development that everyone acknowledges doesn’t work?” he asks, referring to studies that show other cities have invariably failed to build their way out congestion.

The studies show new road capacity fills up, often quickly. The result is the same level of congestion but with more vehicles on bigger roads and therefore, more air pollution.

“It creates a way of life that even to the people who are going to live [in Surrey and the southern Fraser Valley] will be expensive, frustrating and will take us in the directions that everyone acknowledges we don’t want to go,” Price said.

“Once you’ve spent that three to five billion dollars and you’ve clearly said, ‘We are building an automobile and truck future,’ there isn’t much left to talk about.”

He argues that freeways that are meant to bypass congestion attract the very type of development that creates congestion — big-box stores, shopping malls, theatre complexes and the like — and the roads quickly fill with cars making short trips from one parking lot to another.

– rice also wonders about suggestions — by Falcon and others — that there might be tolls on lanes for high-occupancy vehicles or trucks on the twinned Port Mann Bridge.

There’s only one reason anyone would pay tolls to drive in a special lane, he says: the other lanes are congested. That’s not a good signal to send before the project is built.

Ultimately, Price thinks Campbell has to have the last word.

“I think the premier will really have to clarify what he believes the future of the Lower Mainland is. That’s the stakes we’re really talking about.”

Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell takes a similar tack.

“We know we have to have roads built to move goods from the port and from the airport onto the highway and wherever they’re going,” Campbell said Tuesday from Montreal. “But twinning the Port Mann is just not on, period. It makes no sense at all.”

Campbell says he’d rather run light rail all the way from Chilliwack into the SkyTrain system. “That would take cars off the road, which then would allow trucks that have to be on the road more opportunity to get from Point A to Point B.”

If the province insists on building the project it probably can, he said, but not without a fight.

“Municipalities are not going to put up with bullying from Minister Falcon, and that’s what this really is.

“It’s my intention to talk to the premier about it. There’s no sense in talking to Minister Falcon.”

Falcon said the blustering doesn’t bother him.

He’s used to municipal politicians who want to “cherry-pick” projects and just have the parts built that they have a stake in.

“Doing one piece of the puzzle isn’t adequate. We have to move forward with all of the pieces.”

He said the government won’t be dropping the South Fraser Perimeter Road off the program, even though it has been signalling recently that the road now depends on new federal funding.

Falcon did not disagree that there is federal money up for grabs and B.C. wants a piece of it; the perimeter road is a good candidate because it will be moving goods from federal port facilities. The road will still be built if the federal money doesn’t materialize, he said, but it might take a little longer.

Falcon reiterated that he’s on the side of the angels when it comes to development.

“You cannot build your way out of congestion,” he said. “I am a strong adherent of that philosophy.”

He promised that the government will not only twin the Port Mann, it will also study “how to get people out of their cars and into other options.”

That might mean putting transit over the new Port Mann, dedicated lanes for commercial vehicles and “a whole range of demand management approaches to traffic, so we don’t just build and expect that’s going to solve the problem.”

He’s not worried about opposition to the plan, he said, because that’s “the reality of the Lower Mainland. No matter what you plan on doing, you will always have opposition.”

Some of the opposition will come from New Westminster, where city councillor Chuck Puchmayr is the new NDP MLA.

– uchmayr agrees Greater Vancouver needs to free up truck traffic, and he thinks the South Fraser Perimeter Road will do the job. It would take pressure off the Port Mann, give trucks easy access to the Alex Fraser Bridge, the Knight Street corridor and Richmond, and eliminate some of the cross-town traffic that now ties up downtown New Westminster.

Twinning the Port Mann and widening the Trans-Canada, however, will just open the floodgates to more traffic, which will create rebound congestion, which will further foul the region’s air, Puchmayr said.

“People as far east as Hope are sometimes instructed to stay indoors because of the poor air quality. Are we going to double the volume of single occupancy vehicles in that corridor and sacrifice the health of people living in that airshed?”

– uchmayr said the government should stop insisting it’s going to build the project before it has even started public consultations.

“I’m hoping they will listen to the opposition, listen to the communities and work towards achieving something that works for everyone.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005