THE Lions Gate Bridge is a wonderful antique. It serves its purpose admirably, given its limitations, and the upgrade carried out by the provincial government some 12 years ago should see the bridge through for at least another 40 years.
There is a slight problem, however, and when that problem enters your life, many irritating things happen: you miss your flight, miss your boat, your concert, your wedding, your job interview - you name it. Or you end up in hospital.
The removal of photo radar by the province in 2001 was a popular change, mainly because we all hated getting speeding tickets in the mail. Voters bought into it, drivers approved, and the Liberal landslide was proof that "you support photo radar at your peril." These days, the NDP won't even discuss supporting its return.
Is there any chance that cancelling it was a "one size fits all" solution? Maybe there are certain places in the province where photo radar is actually a good idea, in fact, a very good idea. Dinner table chat commonly noted that the photo radar era bred much saner drivers and how quickly that sanity deteriorated once the radar was removed.
I feel photo radar should be installed on the Lions Gate Bridge and Stanley
Park Causeway road system. If you were trying to get somewhere on the evening of June 14, when there were three separate accidents on the bridge/causeway system in two hours, maybe you too will want to consider this modest proposal.
On some days I see as many as five bridge/causeway accidents that go unreported: solo cars spinning out, crashing into a median, and driving off because they were able to. If they did not hit other cars who would know? The bridge/causeway averages one accident tying up traffic every day. The causes are the usual, including speeding or texting, but also rubber-necking from the bridge itself. None of the cameras currently on the bridge/causeway system can record accidents - they are "live-feed only."
The traffic jams are a mess for the Burrard Inlet Region; downtown and the North Shore come to a stop as cars back up and try to head for the other bridge. The closures can be as long as an opera. When an accident resulted in the death of a
cyclist in June, the entire bridge/causeway system was closed for four hours.
Here's a solution that requires two things: photo radar on each of the 27 green signal/light bridges on that road, and clear, very LARGE signage explaining to people what the speed limit is, and that they will be ticketed each and every time they pass one of the cameras when speeding - at $100 a pop that might be 27 tickets if you just kept speeding along. Not only would the provincial government get your $2,700 donation, but the savings to the City of Vancouver and the North Shore municipalities would be in the millions. It must
cost a minimum of $10,000 every time the bridge has to be closed, mainly in the time for paperwork, investigations, courts, tow trucks and who knows what else.
I've been told by Vancouver police that during those long closures there is almost no policing capacity left in the entire downtown region. It takes six units out of the eight police units in the area to effect a closure of the bridge/causeway system.
The overall math would probably be like this: savings of more than one million dollars per city annually, and a contribution to government of perhaps another million from people like me from fines. I drive above the
speed limit more often than I should, and I'd say that I need a good reminder of why I shouldn't.
The big advantage to such a program is that if even half the drivers paid attention to the speed limit, all the rest would be forced to drive at 60 kilometres an hour through the park and over the bridge because the lawabiding drivers would slow everyone else down.
The bridge/causeway system is about four km long. If you drive it at 60 km/h, rather than 90 km/h, your trip will take an extra two minutes, and accidents would probably be as rare as intelligent highway or trail signage currently is in this
province.
If we tried it, we might like it. If we liked it, imagine extending it to other commuting pinch points, such as the Massey Tunnel or the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing? Aren't those accidents in the Massey Tunnel just a joy when you are trying to get home or to the ferry terminal? Only when we've had enough will we make some changes. Have we had enough yet? Bill Jeffries commuted to the North Shore between 2001 and 2005. He currently lives above the Stanley Park Causeway in Vancouver's West End.
