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Redirecting Bridge Funding Could Create Citywide Light Rail for Vancouver

Posted by: Nate Berg
Thanks to: Brent Toderian
27 March 2009 - 8:00am

A public-private partnership that would have built a new 10-lane bridge in British Columbia has fallen apart, leaving the $3.1 billion tab on the BC government. Researchers say that much money could build a 200-km light rail system instead.

"What other transportation infrastructure, they asked, could we instead have for $3.1 billion?"

"By the time Prof. Patrick Condon and researcher Kari Dow at the UBC Design Centre for Sustainability finished punching in the numbers and mapped their results, they produced a startling alternative vision. For the same money, concluded the team, the government could finance a 200-kilometre light rail network that would place a modern, European-style tram within a 10-minute walk for 80 per cent of all residents in Surrey, White Rock, Langley and the Scott Road district of Delta, while providing a rail connection from Surrey to the new Evergreen line and connecting Pitt Meadows and Maple Ridge into the regional rail system."

Full Story: Want One Port Mann Bridge, or a Light Rail Metropolis?
Source: The Tyee, March 25, 2009
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Short of erasing existing political and jurisdictional boundaries, citizens and officials need to develop the capacity to work across boundaries according to the "problem-sheds" of the land and water issues we face in the 21st century.
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