Editor:
Re: Bridge is Clark’s $3.5-billion vanity project, Sept. 23
I read Carol Day’s opinion piece with some misgivings.
Her opening paragraph is pure fantasy and was intended, one assumes, to rise ire of readers but without substance of fact[s].
While Richmond may think it is a large city, in reality it is not and comes nowhere near to the size of Los Angeles. Mixing apples and oranges merely results in a fruit salad. Her opening is misleading and tends to suggest, strongly I might add, that she is myopic in her thoughts and/or understanding.
I seem to recall that when the socialists - the NDP style not the Liberal style - were in power in Victoria, they opted to remove provincial highway maintenance responsibility from the provincial government and hand it over to the various municipalities in which those highways traversed. If that policy remains in effect, then highways - such as Steveston Highway - becomes the responsibility of Richmond and not the provincial government. As such, planning rests with the municipality and not as implied in her comment with the province.
She made reference to something that she refers to as "Metro Vancouver's Mayors' Council" and a "transportation plan for an integrated system is better than the George Massey Tunnel Replacement Project." [For edification, the word “better” is a comparative and as such needs one other thing to which it might be compared. She fell into the marketing ploy of using comparatives without making that comparative. Not good.]
Following that, she made reference to two "plans," one each from a former transportation minister and a former premier, both of this province. Just what are those so-called plans? She failed to cite them or to give readers any indication of where one might locate same. Poor, poor and poor.
Ah, yes, the "twinning of the tunnel" and for "more buses." Just how, one wonders, might that be possible when on the north side of the existing tunnel - in Richmond - egress would [based on the existing tunnel] be in, or very close to, existing businesses on the downstream side and an existing vegetable/fruit operation plus farmland on the upstream side.
On the south side of the Fraser, upstream is farmland and farther south, Burns Bog and on the downstream side, a housing development. Just where, do you propose to plunk down the twin tunnel? As to expanding the existing roadways with a twinned tunnel, again, where and how might this be accomplished? Pure folly.
Her reference to NDP Leader John Horgan is superfluous as his quoted comment that "is not a priority for the region" stands in stark opposition to the mood of the majority who reside south of the Fraser River and in whose region the proposed bridge will be located.
She jumps on Horgan's view that the proposed bridge is a "vanity bridge" which suggests to me that she was incapable of coming up with her own definition of same and something certainly much better than what Horgan used.
According to her blurb on the Richmond website, her interest is in environment - possibly and if so, why not see the merit in having traffic moving across a bridge rather than sitting spewing fumes into the atmosphere as is the current situation.
Additionally, what seems to have escaped her myopic view is that Highway 99 carries both commerce and visitors from the U.S. and as such are a benefit to both B.C. and Canada. Perhaps her view is to cut off your nose to spite your face.
One wonders what her thoughts were when the then-premier of B.C. [of the last correct government] Bill Bennett, announced that a highway from Hope to Kamloops would be constructed to aid the transport of goods and services from the southern part of the province to Kamloops and connect with Highway 1. Later, the connector was constructed and nobody has looked back as the economy, both of the Okanagan region and the Lower Mainland, as well as areas north, have benefited from the highway.
Tolls were introduced and then, as promised, removed once the need for them no longer existed. Might not the same be the fate of the proposed Fraser River bridge, the one Day and Horgan refer to as a vanity project?
Perhaps what Day ought to do is shuck her Richmond cocoon and live for a month or so south of the Fraser and experience the north and south movement daily as she drives to work and return.
It's always best [a superlative] to learn something of how the other half [an expression] lives. Try it, you might just get to like it.
Bob Orrick
