After years of congestion on the Cut, District of North Vancouver council is calling for a new eastbound lane on Highway 1 between Lynn Valley Road and Mountain Highway. Coun. Jim Hanson is pitching the idea as a relatively simple and inexpensive solution to separate local traffic from bridge traffic.
We get it. We share in the frustration over congestion. At one point in the design phase of the Lower Lynn interchange project, separated lanes were on the table.
But we can disabuse Hanson of those simple and inexpensive notions right now. Traffic systems are highly complex, riddled with knock-on effects and unintended consequences despite our best intentions in armchair-engineering. And anything involving highway construction comes with an absolutely eye-watering price tag.
We are one of the most car-reliant communities in Metro Vancouver, and the province likely isn’t interested in further accommodating single-occupancy vehicles – the least efficient form of transportation.
Already, the three North Shore councils are going hat-in-hand to the province and feds asking for money to build rapid transit to the North Shore (which those senior levels of government can show up with any time now). The likelihood of getting tens of millions more for highway infrastructure to benefit drivers from the relatively sparsely populated Seymour and Deep Cove areas is slim to nil.
With reducing our reliance on fossil fuels near the top of the government’s priority list, this idea doesn’t make the cut.
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