Transportation Minister Claire Trevena announced last week she is shopping for consultants to take a “complete, comprehensive and co-ordinated” look at south Island traffic in general and the Malahat in particular.
When they hire on, their first stop should be the library, because a lot of this work already has been done.
Trevena took the obligatory political dig at the previous government in making the announcement, saying: “For too long, the infrastructure needs of the communities … have been ignored.”
That’s not strictly accurate. The B.C. Liberal government didn’t spend as much as people would like on south Island transportation. But they were enthusiastic about ordering big studies of key problems. There’s enough of them on the shelves to make you wonder why we need yet another.
There was a huge Malahat Corridor Study done in 2007 which is chock-full of reports from open houses, traffic statistics and engineers’ estimates of what to do.
There was a “Malahat Incident Report” in 2011 after the notorious fuel tanker crash that spilled thousands of litres into the river and closed the highway for 22 hours.
There was a Malahat Highway Safety Review in 2012 with another 27 pages of ideas on how to improve the highway.
There are probably a few more internal documents that haven’t seen the light of day.
And away from the Malahat, there have been lots of regional and local traffic studies, assorted concepts floated for the future of the E&N Rail line and the related Island Corridor Foundation, and still more B.C. Transit ideas studied over the years on the south Island routes.
The Capital Regional District completed a huge regional transportation plan four years ago that hits all the points noted by the minister last week and was designed to be valid for 25 years.
If you digest what the minister had in mind when she launched the south Island transportation strategy and then read the CRD plan, it’s clear that a lot of the work she has in mind has been done.
The CRD plan is aligned with an official regional growth strategy and is designed to co-ordinate future growth with a movement network. It identifies priorities, new options for governance and funding and “will inform decisions on roads, rail, bridges, bike lanes and trails.”
If someone at the CRD sent the Transportation Ministry a link to the four-year-old plan, it could save the B.C. government a few hundred thousand dollars in consultants’ fees.
There’s some stress in the ministry’s outline on the “innovative, multi-modal” aspect of future planning. Everything is on the table, including marine-ferry travel and rail. So it has slightly more scope than the regional plan.
But planning future investments can’t be taken as a commitment to actually make them.
Trevena would be better off taking her transportation strategy money and spending it on real transportation. If she needs any guidance, ask any of the three south Island cabinet ministers or the south Island premier where to start.
They know as well as anyone the obvious priorities. Keep working on the Colwood Crawl and the Patricia Bay Highway, grow transit, and arrive at a conclusion about the future of the E&N right-of-way.
Just So You Know: The only specific point made about the government’s new plan is that it will include some work on the idea of a new emergency detour route that could be activated in the event of a Malahat road closure. A report on the feasibility of such an option is expected this spring. The ministry said engineering work could start this summer. More on that later this week.
