New Port Mann Bridge will cost $3 to cross
 

Commuters will get a new 10-lane “super bridge” to replace the Port Mann Bridge, but the estimated cost is almost $1 billion more than it was eight months ago for a smaller four-lane span.

“This will clear a bottleneck that’s been plugged for years,” Premier Gordon Campbell said Wednesday.

“It will reduce travel times by one-third. We can’t finish it soon enough.” Added Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon: “This is the right bridge at the right time for B.C.”

The new structure will have provisions for rapid bus and light-rapid transit systems in the future.

It will replace the old five-lane Port Mann bridge, which will be torn down after construction on the new crossing is finished in 2013.

Falcon said the capital cost of building a new span has escalated from about $1.5 billion last June to about $2.46 billion today.

He said the increase was due to several factors, including inflationary pressures since 2006, when the original estimate was made.

He also said commuters will be getting a 10-lane bridge instead of a new four-lane bridge.

Until Wednesday, the government had planned to twin the existing Port Mann with another four-lane bridge and retain the existing bridge.

The total cost of the new span, including borrowing, is now estimated at $3.3 billion.

However, a contract with a group of private partners who will build and operate the bridge has not been signed.

The province will borrow $1.15 billion and become a one-third partner in the project.

Falcon said contractors believed it made more sense to replace the 45-year-old Port Mann Bridge because maintenance costs keep going up and up.

But Nemy Banthia, a professor of engineering at UBC, said he was “astonished” by the decision to replace the Port Mann.

“The design life for Canadian bridges is 75 years. After 45 years, it should still have 30 years left if it is properly maintained,” he said.

NDP MLA Bruce Ralston said the almost $1-billion cost increase speaks to “poor management.”

“The tolls are projected to be $3 on opening day, but I don’t believe they will stay that way. There will be escalating clauses, which we haven’t seen,” he said.

Ralston said one of the private partners, the Macquarie Group, appears to be in financial difficulty in Australia.

“What will the risk be to taxpayers if there is a default?” he asked. “This is high-stakes poker.”

Campbell said the government will keep control of the price of the tolls, which will be removed when the costs are paid off.

Eric Doherty of the Livable Region Coalition said “harmful freeway projects” keep people in their cars and cost money which could be better spent on mass transit.

Falcon said the Port Mann is a traffic bottleneck 14 hours a day. He said traffic slowdowns cost the B.C. economy $1.5 billion a year. “Completely replacing the bridge is definitely superior to adding a twin,” said Michael McBratney of Get Moving B.C., a travel-monitoring group with ties to the Liberals.

“It will eliminate the worst traffic bottleneck in the Lower Mainland.”

Construction of the new bridge will create an estimated 8,000 jobs, with some workers to be hired immediately.

The project includes two new highway lanes west of the bridge (one in each direction) and four new lanes east of the bridge (two in each direction).
© Copyright (c) The Province
http://www.theprovince.com/news/story.html?id=1253518

"Campbell said the government will keep control of the price of the tolls, which will be removed when the costs are paid off."



big deep breath .........







BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA yeah i'll believe it when i see it

hmm i think im goin to travel this way

exit to 104 ave, pattulo, columbia, brunnette, then back to highway 1

doing it that way will be longer but it also saves me $6 round trip. $6 of gas can get me around 50-100km

wait till gas prices rise again, more fuel taxes, rebuilding of patullo, there is no escape. i hope they toll every exit. :D

they took to tolls off the coke they will take them off the bridge in 40 years im sure

I hold them to that. They removed the tolls for the coquihalla. I think replacing the bridge is a bit extreme, and I disagree that its a bottleneck 14 hours a day.

KEVIN FALCON FOR PM!!!

i love this guy -- he's no nonsense, common sense.

ok i dont get it...a 10 lane bridge

does that mean all of hwy 1 from vancouver will then be 3 lanes + HOV, and hwy 1 from port man to abbotsford and beyond will be 3 lane + HOV ?

:werd: I ain't paying to use no bridge that i've been using free for years. If they made another bridge and it was tolled from the start then I would pay if I ever had to use that bridge.

I wonder how many people are going to pay the extra what.. $120 a month to use the bridge? Anybody here going to do that?

Ever heard of the coquihala? (sp)

lets hire the crazy guy who tried to burn the pattulo bridge to burn this one too when its built

hmm..I thought the focus was to replace the Patullo since it is older, narrower and more dangerous.

A new bridge is useless unless you add more lanes to the highway. Otherwise we're just shifting the bottleneck point. So this 10 lane bridge merges back to our current 3 lane highway? Doesn't make a lot of sense.

if its supported by wood, im definitely not paying lol

$3!!!! that's a lot considering if you must cross that bridge twice everyday for 365 days a year for the next 10 years or more?

GG.......

Hm.. is it possible to bargain with the guy sitting inside the toll??

toll guy: "That will be $3 please"

driver: "Oh sorry, I only brought $1.50 with me. Can I just give you $1.50 and get by? There's a line up behind me."

toll guy: "Do you have credit/visa/master cards?"

driver: "Nope"

toll guy: "$2.50 then"

driver: "$2 + the piece of gum i'm chewing?"

toll guy: "Look $2.50 is the lowest I can, or you will just have to go back."

driver: "$2.25 + a top secret porn site address?"

toll guy: "look, $2.50! if you save 50cents here and 50cents on the way back for 3 consecutive days, you will have $3 so that mean you can get 1 free crossing."

does anyone remember the speaches that Kevin Falcon was giving about toll bridges when the topic first really started to gain media attention? he was saying something like there would never be a toll bridge only option for people and that it would only be used on bridges where there was an alternate travel route that was easy to use. I am paraphrasing A LOT here but that is the jist of it iirc. It seems to me that he is back tracking on what he said here as the Patullo is not much of an option for people and what he is doing here will simply cause even more traffic back ups in surrey/new west going over an already over used and dangerous bridge. bad move liberals, I may vote NDP because of this.

10 lanes bridge may sound nice but if the hwy is still stuck with 2 bullshit lanes and a useless HOV lane this plan is a major fail.

I dont even understand why the fuck we use HOV for. HOV is useful when we get enough lanes for the traffic to move, but we dont!!! so wtf

same with Barnet hwy from port moody to Burnaby north. 6am to 8:30am HOV occupies?? which means there is only one lane to travel? wat kind of bullshit is this? u cant even pass someone if there is a slow mofo sitting in front of u driving below speed limite. fuck even the normal roads gets two lanes, what kind of hwy only runs with one lane? fuck

:rolleyes:

So you create a bigger bridge to help traffic, then slow traffic down to stop so they can pay the toll for it? Im not sure I get the point here......

Being that the only other way around this is pretty far away, I can see people (including myself) getting REALLY upset about the "toll" bridge.

lol I just got a Coquihalla hwy flashback.

It said that they are going to add 2 lanes on each side of the east side of the bridge and 1 addition lane on each side of the west side of the bridge.

So that is good.

I like the idea. I haven't cross to surrey for years so why should my tax dollar go towards a bridge I will never ever use?

Let the ppl who use it pay for it.

I got into this debate in another thread on here but everyone East of the fraser could use the same argument for every provincial dollar spent West of the river. Rav line, 80 million in seismic upgrades to Lions Gate, Second Narrows and Burrard bridges. How do those things benefit me in Langley?

I use the Port Mann bridge and if it's tolled it's not going to cost me anything because my work will pay when cross but that's not really the issue. I don't even really have that big of an issue with the toll.

The whole argument of why should MY tax dollars from people East of the fraser who think their holier then thou really irks me. People that live on this side of the river are tax payers to and our taxes are always helping fund projects that we won't benefit from but you don't see us crying about it.

always got this question in mind, anyone knows why they redraw the lines on hwy 1 starting around SFU area going west and canada way going east ???
i thought they were expanding to 4 lanes, they made the road all crooked

kinda like how the kok tolls paid off the highway years before, but they just kept charging the toll...