Last Monday, a truck spilled 200 litres of hydraulic oil onto Highway 1 near Mountain Highway, effectively shutting down the highway’s westbound lanes for a couple of hours.
Think about that for a minute. For a couple of hours, there was a single lane of traffic travelling from Vancouver to the North Shore via the Lions Gate Bridge.
One lane for everything: cars, buses, trucks, emergency vehicles, ferry traffic, traffic to Squamish, traffic to Whistler…
This is hardly a rare occurrence. Much the same thing happened last week when a truck carrying used cooking oil crashed on the Dollarton Highway off-ramp and ignited, shutting down the Ironworkers with the exception of one southbound lane. For hours. Tempers were flambéed.
This is apart from the alarming increase in daily traffic on the Upper Levels that now features bumper-to-bumper traffic on one side of the bridge or the other pretty much all day long. The infamous nine arteries that have served the North Shore since the early Sixties are now officially plugged, and the highway has a weekly heart attack.
If you’ve ever tried to get anywhere other than at three in the morning, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.
It’s a gamble: at best, you’ll inch along in an attempt to get over one of the two bridges connecting millions of people to the North Shore, or at worst, somebody’s beater will stall or run out of gas, and you’re stuck again, like gum on the sole of your shoe.
To address this daunting challenge, officials at all levels have chosen to add even more traffic – in the form of studies about traffic. Now the traffic study lanes are jammed.
First came the Integrated North Shore Transportation Planning Project last year. With broad buy-in from all levels of government, INSTPP issued a report recommending – another study.
Which the province enthusiastically undertook, announcing in May that it will study the technical feasibility of rapid transit across the Burrard Inlet, a most inconvenient body of water if it comes between you and your destination.
Not to be outdone, just the other day the federal government gave $250,000 to the City of North Vancouver to study the economic impact of the traffic snarl and see if there’s a case for the rapid transit already being studied by the province.
Although CNV Mayor Linda Buchanan says this latest study won’t go over ground already covered in the other two, you can bet nothing will happen until after the 18-24 months the latest study is scheduled to take. Meanwhile, we’ll have to keep calm and carry on with various half-measures – the extra Seabus, an increase in express buses, and the apparently endless work being done on the Mountain Highway/Highway 1 interchange.
Just hope you don’t actually have to be somewhere on time. Like the airport. Or the office. Or the hospital.
There was much sage nodding of heads at the fed announcement the other day. You could almost buy into the notion that what we really need is another traffic study.
In fact, the economic impact is already fatally clear. In January 2018 –almost two years ago – 40 per cent of the businesses belonging to the North Vancouver Chamber of Commerce said they were thinking about leaving the North Shore because of the stupid traffic. The head of the North Shore Business Improvement Association can’t get to work on time. Tourist bus operator Landsea Tours won’t come to places such as Deep Cove, Lynn Valley or Lonsdale Quay anymore because they can’t guarantee they’ll get their tourists back to the cruise ship on time. That ship has sailed!
Meanwhile, the politicians are content to go placidly amidst the haste while the heads of the citizens explode as they mark time in traffic hell. I wonder what would happen if a Doug McCallum-type figure (he’s the Mayor of Surrey) emerged from the Sea of Compliance, went against the tide, and unilaterally announced the construction of a SkyTrain extension across the inlet.
So there.
Like McCallum, this hypothetical politician would refuse to listen to reason and would proceed as if it’s a done deal.
I mean, he ditched a fully funded light rail project in favour of pie-in-the-SkyTrain, and promised to kick the RCMP out of Surrey and set up his own constabulary.
Is that what we need to relieve traffic constipation? Would you vote for a self-styled saviour or would you elect to wait patiently for the results of the various studies creeping toward eventual completion?
Think about that as you’re stuck in traffic.
You have plenty of time on your hands.
Journalist and communications consultant Paul Sullivan has been a North Van resident since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Madonna. [email protected]
