day, February 5, 1997 - NS OSHS ridge decision wron Dear Editor: Highways Minister Lois Boune’s tentative decision to choose a bridge instead of she proposed tunnel is a decision to choose per- petual traffic jams instead of the only solution so far proposed to a wide range of headaches facing First Narrows travellers. The decision has nothing to do with logic. She is surrendering to , partisan, civic and provincial politics instead of providing, decisive, pragmatic leadership. Long after she and the self-serving politicos who are leaning on her to choose a bridge are gone, we'll still be sitting in line-ups on cither end of her narrow, inadequate, ill-conceived bridge. The announced bridge solutions are simply too restrictive to handle the existing traffic that now lines up on cither side seven days a week. Tt will never be a solution for the tremendous pent-up demand of waffic that actually wants to move easily between Whisder, Squamish, the Sunshine Coast, West Vancouver and North Vancouver on one side, and Vancouver, the airport, Richmond, White Rock and the United States on the other. Her proposal dooms all truck traffic to use the Second Narrows to get to Cambie Sueet forever. She is deciding that a puny, inad- equate, but new four-lane bridge — replacing an inadequate, ilapidazed, three-lane bridge — will be able to handle that. She is wrong. . Need we mention the normal growth in traffic generated sim- ply by the growth in population on either side of the crossing over The: Best of Both Worlds tncome Plus Fund awa on a 7 prahe } ‘Advisor 925-5568 Toll Free: 1-800-772-9066 9 Advisor before invest ical annual compounded tora! ing cha value and reinvestment of al dividends or distributions. The eunns do into account sales, ion, distribution o¢ option charges pay’ A any seourity holder which will reduce recurs. Grin saue and ylides wel fluc. Suite 334, 100 taate, hance is not necessarily indicative of future petformance, Park Royal, TBLUE CHIT THINKING is a trademark of Midland Walwyn Capital Inc. West Vancouver Blinded the. 50% ovr a Kary Gor more blinils tinebertecive: _ ent additional of : off. . , “Vertical Blinds. OV Mint Blinds ivistie vinesi > Honeycomnd: Blinds (\jppteisiy . EES au ; }hpte ) : ~ AV qtel foroiu. ; - a . “ Mereh drapery sealed. ; M.Coq. 942-3911 Yon. 24-7255 Langhey 832-8899 Squamish 898-5252 Whistler 932-6617 Sie! the next 50 years, the minimum lifespan of'a new bridge? Her deci- sion is ludicrous, not logical. Boone talks about the proposed six-lane tunnel as being too expensive. To whom? Compared with what? She says she’s comparing taxpayer costs for the bridges versus the tunnel. What she’s comparing are apples and oranges. The original runnel concent was to put the natural earth dig from the trench and relocate it just off Stanley Park’s Brockton Point, forming it into a new island. The island, which automatically becomes prime real estate due to its location, is sald to pay for the tunnel. The result: there is no significant cost to the taxpayer for the tunnel. Yes, there are taxpayer costs in re-aligning connections on the north and south sides of the tunnel to fit in with the existing craf- fic grids. But that’s work that needs to be done te solve signiticant existing waffic problems anyway. If Boone’s so cage to spend tax- paver money to build the crossing, the goverame::t could buy the island and tusn it over ro wildlife. Considering it’s next to Stanley Park, would Clark Park be a good name? Boone talks about the tunnel’s troubling environmental impact. On what? Eel grass? There’s no wildlife on the bottom off Brockton Point that’s even close to being endangered. In less than tive years, new and much more varied wildlife, including cel grass, will be sprouting up all tround the new island. Turbidity? There'll ve less mud generated by the runnel’s con- struction than the Fraser River and tides dump into Burrard Inlet at ~N- vet E COMPUTERS | in a single month. The proposed tunnel right-of-way doesn’t cross any existing Indian land, it connects directly the Upper Levels highway on one side, and distributes its waffic throughout the Vancouver city core on the other. Gone would be the Georgia Sucet, Denman Street, Pender Street, Park Roval and Taylor Wav traffic jams with which we are all too familizr. Gone would be the Staniey Park Causeway (replaced by exhaust-free parkland). Gone would be most of the traffic problems of Stanley Park itself. All of the bridge proposals would perpetmate and exacerbate those problems, not solve them like the proposed runnel. Boone talks abour the possibility of rapid transit on the new bridge at some time in the future. Well, the Bentzen proposal already contains an adjacent tunnel for SkyTrain right now. The only thing wrong with the tunnel is that its six lanes are probably not going to be enough before long. Another fact: the fix was in the from the beginning for a bridge. The public information meetings have consistently misrepre- sented the tunnel proposal at every turn, particularly on the issue of cost, and government bureaucrats knew politics, not logical decisions about how best to move traffic across the First Narrows, would call the tune. Ms. Boone (and all of us) has only one chance of doing some- thing right for traffic between the North Shore and Vancouver for most of the 21st century. Instead, for the next 20 or 30 years, it appears that due to Ms, Boone’s short-sightedness, we'll be paving $2 tolls for the chance to sit in the same line-ups we now sit in for free. Ms. Boone's bridge is not a solution, it’s a boondoggle. It’s a perpetual problem machine. Peter Morgan Vancouver COMPUTERS | | EVERGREEN Intels first change to the Pentium in 4 years ... 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