Pattullo Bridge will be closed for at least one month! Bring on the Interurban!
If there was a compelling argument for the proposed interurban service to connect to downtown Vancouver, here it is. Those who want the interurban service to deadhead into Scott Road Station are extremely short sighted and certainly fail to understand the driving mechanisms in attracting ridership – the seamless or no transfer journey. For the next four weeks, the Pattullo Bridge will be closed to all traffic after a fire has badly damaged a wooden section of the bridge. This just leaves a SkyTrain connection to Vancouver. Already SkyTrain is crowded, leaving Surrey and not able to offerAi??Ai??much inAi??Ai??relief to the commuter. But on the other side of the Pattullo Bridge is the Fraser River Rail Bridge and would not TransLink look good offering quick journeys to Vancouver via the interurban from Langley and Surrey. As one sits in ones carAi??Ai??idling in gridlock for hours, waiting to cross the Fraser, remember the interurban!
Commuters will be faced with extra congestion Monday morning and in the weeks to come as the bridge linking Surrey to New Westminster is repaired following an early morning fire.
A suspicious fire struck wooden trestles supporting the south end of the Pattullo Bridge, a crossing that connects New Westminster and Surrey, just before 3 a.m. Sunday.
By 11 a.m. Sunday, Surrey firefighters were tending to the hot spots on the trestles, which were still emitting smoke eight hours after it was still reported.
TransLink spokesman Ken Hardie said the bridge will be closed to all traffic A?ai??i??ai??? including pedestrians and cyclists A?ai??i??ai??? for four to six weeks while repairs are done on the bridge.
The average traffic volume reaches Port Mann bridge is 127,000 cars a day, while the Alex Fraser bridge sees 98,000 vehicles daily, according to Dave Crebo, spokesman for the B.C. ministry of transportation and infrastructure.
I fully support isrneacing service on bus routes that have high demand, and King George Blvd and Fraser Hwy might be good examples, but I don’t agree that the majority of development is happening along these corridors. Fraser Heights, Cloverdale and Grandview are exploding. I agree that Surrey has increased the density of its suburban sprawl but it’s still suburban, that’s the problem. Townhouses in the fields of Clayton and South Surrey are only marginally better than detached houses. Actually both are probably worse than just leaving it a field. I’d guess that 75-90% of new residential growth in Surrey is farther than a 5-10 minute walk from a grocery store. Something is wrong with the growth patterns. It’s not just about how many people can be crammed into a block.Surrey needs to mix land uses, price parking according to market demand and stop putting jobs and commercial land out in the middle of nowhere. We need employment closer to where people live but instead we make huge swaths of commercial and residential areas that are cut off from one another by highways and arterials that are anti-pedestrian and difficult to serve with transit. Following business as usual, the areas that do permit mixed use developments wont get redeveloped en masse until the City restricts growth in the other areas, something the city has not done yet. The alternative is to wait until or until there is no land left – a much sadder and destructive alternative.People are taking their cars because their homes, jobs and entertainment are scattered all over instead of inside their own neighbourhood. Add onto that the parking that the city forces every employer, store and developer to build. Excessive parking regulations give the impression parking is free when really we all just pay more taxes and higher prices at the cash registers. Transit can’t compete in this environment.