It opened 30 years ago with much fanfare and expectation that it would alleviate traffic congestion, but now it's also feeling the crunch.
Connecting North Delta with Richmond and New Westminster, the now heavily used Alex Fraser Bridge officially opened on Sept. 22, 1986.
Delta MLA Walter Davidson had put his seat on the line in 1979 with a promise the bridge would receive provincial government approval, which it did.
Also known as the Annacis Bridge, but officially named after the province's highways minister at the time, the 465-metre span used just four lanes when it opened but it had the capability to convert to six lanes. It didn't take that long for the conversion to happen.
Now those six lanes - or at least the three heading with rush hour - aren't cutting it either. The province last week announced a number of planned improvements to help ease congestion on the bridge and the Highway 91 stretch, including looking at creating a rush hour counterflow system similar to what's used at the George Massey Tunnel.
The longest cable-style bridge in the world at the time it opened, the Alex Fraser was expected to reroute almost 25 per cent of the traffic using the tunnel and the Pattullo Bridge. Some 37,000 vehicles were expected to use the crossing daily with commuters saving as much as 20 minutes each way.
Costing $444 million, the crossing was joined a couple of years later with a new east-west freeway through Richmond. More recently, the South Fraser Perimeter Road was built to also provide quicker access.
When the bridge opened, it was also reported that the "usual morning and late afternoon Massey Tunnel and Pattullo Bridge traffic tie-ups have almost disappeared." However, then-mayor Ernie Burnett said time would tell if motorists would be able to continue flying quickly through the other crossings.
Fast-forward three decades, and he latest available numbers gathered from Delta's engineering department for the Alex Fraser, from 2011, show the bridge experiences the second most volume of any bridge in Metro Vancouver at 117,000 vehicles daily.
The tunnel, meanwhile, has 89,000 vehicles using it daily.
CAO George Harvie told Delta council earlier this year the Alex Fraser is now at capacity during the two-to three-hour afternoon rush. He also noted increasing congestion is making things unsafe as the latest available statistics from 2013 show 179 accidents. That figure doesn't even include collisions on the highway to and from the bridge.
"We don't see any relief until the new bridge over the Deas Island (George Massey) Tunnel is completed. Without tolling or whatever option, we won't see any relief for six or seven years," Harvie said.
Delta North MLA Scott Hamilton said the demand on the Alex Fraser has grown substantially with the rapidly increasing population south of the Fraser.
"I said it before but I'll say it again. When I moved to this community 30 years ago, the Alex Fraser opened two months after I moved here... at eight o'clock in the morning 30 years ago, you could fire a cannon down that bridge and wouldn't hit anything. A lot has changed since then when you think of the growth in Surrey alone," Hamilton said.
