If only there were an off-ramp. I was talking to someone from East Ladner the other day about the new 80th Street exit on southbound Highway 99. This particular individual works in the northern regions of Surrey and finds the new South Fraser Perimeter Road to be a godsend.
When the 80th Street exit opened last month, he thought this might be an opportunity to shorten his commute further by avoiding the afternoon congestion around the George Massey Tunnel.
As it stands now, he has to take Highway 99 northbound to the Highway 17A interchange, then south on 17A before making the left turn at Ladner Trunk Road. But what if he could jump on Highway 99 southbound from the Perimeter Road, immediately take the 80th Street exit and then head home via Trunk Road? It's not only shorter in distance but would be considerably quicker by not having to get in line with all those headed through the tunnel.
The only problem is there's no way to get from westbound on the Perimeter Road to southbound on Highway 99. You can go north on 99 and obviously straight toward Tsawwassen (you can go south on 99 if you're coming out of Tsawwassen), but there's no exit ramp westbound.
To be fair to road designers, this type of off-ramp wouldn't have been of any use prior to the creation of the 80th Street exit. If you were on the Perimeter Road anywhere east of the Alex Fraser Bridge, you'd take Highway 91 to get to southbound 99. And even if you're coming out of Tilbury, Highway 91 still makes the most sense, so a ramp at the 99 interchange would have been superfluous.
As a result, you can't really blame the engineers, but that doesn't make it any less annoying to see a shortcut that's tantalizingly out of reach.
*** While on the subject of highway quirks, I'm still waiting for the sign on Highway 17A to be modified to reflect the change in traffic patterns approaching the tunnel.
About halfway between Ladner Trunk Road and the Highway 99 interchange there's a sign on northbound 17A that informs drivers both lanes head through the tunnel and into Vancouver. Yet only a few hundred metres past that sign there's an overhead one that notes, and rightly so, that only the right lane will take you to the tunnel.
Most drivers are local and don't pay any attention to the first sign, but given it's been six months you'd think it should have been changed by now.
