Cancelled 10-lane George Massey Bridge plan was designed to enable future new SkyTrain line

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This previous 10-lane bridge project also included upgrading a 24-km-long segment of Highway 99 from the southern end of the Oak Street Bridge in Richmond to the border of Surrey, as well as the complete rebuild of three major interchanges, and extensive bus rapid transit (BRT) infrastructure — specifically bus-only lanes down the centre median of the highway, BRT stations, and a fully grade-separated flyover connection for buses between SkyTrain Bridgeport Station and Highway 99.

The entire original project carried a cost of $3.5 billion. But in 2017, prior to the election, the provincial government was on the verge of awarding a design-build contract with a fixed price of $2.6 billion, which is $900 million lower than the original estimate.

By Spring 2017, about $100 million had also already been spent on site preparation work in advance of major construction activities.

If the project had not been cancelled by the BC NDP government, major construction would have begun later in 2017, months after the election, for a completion and opening in 2022.

A greater cost, opening in 2030

This past Tuesday’s mayhem in the tunnel during the afternoon peak period has renewed attention on when exactly a safer replacement crossing will be ready. Traffic came to a grinding halt due to a head-on collision between two vehicles inside the tunnel, when one of the two northbound lanes was being used as a third southbound lane under the counterflow configuration. It took over four hours to clear the accident, but delays persisted well into the evening due to the lengthy backups.

At the very earliest, a new replacement crossing will now be built by 2030, based on major construction starting in 2026 and no delays with building the technically complex design of an immersed tunnel on the Fraser River’s bed.

The BC NDP pivoted the replacement crossing project from a 10-lane bridge to a new eight-lane immersed tunnel, with the Highway 99 corridor upgrades between the Oak Street Bridge and Surrey also downsized, such as bus-on-shoulder lanes (cancellation of the previous plan for purpose-built bus-only lanes in the centre median), a street-level bus connection from Bridgeport Road and Highway 99’s southbound direction (cancellation of the previous plan for fully grade-separated flyover directly from Bridgeport Station in both directions), and smaller new interchanges.

A key design difference between the previous 10-lane concept and the current eight-lane concept is the removal of the two purpose-built bus-only lanes, replaced with widened shoulder lanes for bus uses.

To date, the smaller components of the highway corridor upgrades are complete or well underway, such as the bus-on-shoulder lanes, street-level bus connection from Bridgeport Road, and the new Steveston interchange, which is expected to reach completion in 2025.

In July 2024, the provincial government selected a consortium of European companies to build the new tunnel, including a company that was deeply involved in building the Channel Tunnel (Chunnel) between the United Kingdom and France.

Currently, the official estimated cost of the new immersed tunnel and downsized Highway 99 upgrades remains at $4.15 billion. The provincial government has yet to provide a cost update, but the previous $4.15 billion figure is not expected to hold, as it was created in 2020/2021 — prior to the steep pandemic-induced escalation in market construction costs for labour, materials, and equipment.

Virtually all public sector projects budgeted before the recent inflationary cycle have seen costs jump by as much as 50% or more, including transportation infrastructure, sewage treatment plants, schools, affordable housing, and community and recreational centres. For example, the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain, budgeted at $4 billion in 2021/2022, now carries a construction cost of $6 billion, which is a new figure established in Spring 2024 following the selection of the project’s three major contractors.

As it stands, the new tunnel and Highway 99 corridor upgrades will likely cost billions of dollars more beyond $4 billion, perhaps even exponentially higher than the lowest bid price of $2.6 billion for the previous 10-lane bridge project.

Also in July 2024, the new tunnel’s immense costs were hinted by Premier David Eby in a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seeking meaningful federal funding to help cover the project’s costs. This new tunnel is deemed to be the provincial government’s “top transportation infrastructure priority” for federal funding, wrote Eby.

Conservative Party of BC leader John Rustad has suggested that if elected, he would revert the George Massey Tunnel replacement project into a new bridge crossing, but it is unclear if such a move would add to further delays to finally achieve the replacement.

While contemplating building a new eight-lane immersed tunnel during the planning process three years ago, the BC NDP also evaluated the option of building a new eight-lane bridge with a shorter spanning length over the river than the 10-lane bridge concept.

This eight-lane bridge concept carried an estimated cost of $4.22 billion — about $70 million more than the immersed tunnel — but it would be able to begin construction sooner in 2024 (without the need for a more complex environmental assessment process before construction) for completion in 2028.

The decision to cancel the 10-lane bridge and pivot to the eight-lane tunnel concept stems from the BC NDP’s choice to defer to the preferences of municipal governments regarding the new crossing’s capacity and design. In particular, the City of Richmond was vocal in its opposition to the 10-lane bridge and the plan for a significantly larger Steveston interchange, expressing a preference for a tunnel solution.

The BC NDP also touted that their immersed tunnel concept for the crossing’s replacement would be toll-free, unlike the 10-lane bridge.

During his time as the leader of the opposition, BC United leader Kevin Falcon repeatedly promised that his party, if elected, would return the project to a new bridge.

In an interview with Daily Hive Urbanized in August 2024, just days before his shocking announcement to withdraw his party from the race, Falcon asserted that the highway corridor’s capacity would essentially remain the same under the current concept. He also stated that the project is likely to cost billions of dollars more, despite achieving less in construction.

“It will cost billions more, and be delayed years into the future. And worse than that, it will provide the same number of commuter lanes that we have today. You’ll still have three lanes in each direction, which is what you have today with the counterflow,” said Falcon, who directly oversaw some of BC’s largest transportation infrastructure projects during his time as the BC Minister of Transportation from 2004 to 2009.

“When the NDP canceled that, they wasted $100 million and took away the opportunity to fix the crossing much sooner than later with a real long-term solution. That bridge would have been open two years ago. And that is a huge tragedy for all the commuters that remain trapped in traffic chaos.”

Prioritizing provincial-level decision making

Falcon also highlighted the BC Liberals’ previous governance style, which emphasized a broader regional and provincial perspective for making transportation infrastructure investment decisions, in contrast to the BC NDP’s strategy of significantly deferring to the input by municipal governments, which often have a narrower local focus.

If it were up to Metro Vancouver’s mayors, he said, there would be no SkyTrain Canada Line, South Fraser Perimeter Road, and new replacement Port Mann Bridge, and the Evergreen extension of SkyTrain Millennium Line.

“I was very clear. I always worked with the mayors, but I left no doubt that these were projects of provincial interest, and that I would step in if they were unable to meet the needs of the community,” Falcon told Daily Hive Urbanized.

“They were unable to come to an agreement or unable to support the projects that we wanted to get built.”

He pointed to the previous debate in the late 2000s over the Evergreen extension of SkyTrain, where mayors in the Tri-Cities disagreed with the proposed route and favoured a standalone street-level LRT line to Coquitlam City Centre. Despite the provincial government’s business case showing that a seamless, faster SkyTrain extension would attract more ridership, produce more benefits, and cost only $150 million more than the LRT, local leaders still had differing opinions on the technology. Some also preferred a southeast alignment along Lougheed Highway, past Riverview Hospital, instead of the selected northeast route through Burquitlam and Port Moody.

“I had to step in there when we had a local mayor, the mayor of Port Coquitlam, arguing that he didn’t like the route. He thought the technology was wrong,” said Falcon.

“And, you know, I said, ‘OK, well, let’s do a business case and that will determine what we do.’ The business case said, ‘build the SkyTrain using SkyTrain technology,’ which we then went ahead and did.”

Over the years, much has already been said about the Canada Line’s controversies and long-term design deficiencies by Daily Hive Urbanized. The Canada Line was previously rejected three times in the early 2000s by TransLink’s previous elected board comprised of select mayors and city councillors in the region.

Falcon stated that the only way TransLink’s elected board at the time could agree to approve the project was by capping TransLink’s financial contribution to the project’s costs. This way, if there were significant cost overruns, the public transit authority would not be held accountable. Ultimately, TransLink provided about $330 million or 16% of the funding required.

In the end, the 19-km-long Canada Line, which features 16 stations and nearly half of the project constructed underground, had a total cost of $2.05 billion upon its completion in 2009. Adjusted for inflation, this amounts to approximately $2.8 billion in 2024 dollars, a bargain compared to the significantly higher costs of current SkyTrain extension projects.

“They tried to use the lie that somehow the Canada Line would go way over budget, but it turned out it was built ahead of schedule and on budget,” said Falcon.

TransLink’s elected board’s concerns over the project’s cost and disbelief over the high ridership estimate of 100,000 boardings per day soon after opening contributed to some of the Canada Line’s design shortcomings, specifically its short station platforms that limit the length of trains (carrying capacity) and size of passenger circulation areas (waiting areas). But the Canada Line proved to be an immense ridership success, and quickly achieved its targeted ridership projections years ahead of schedule.

“A lesson that I learned there is that the stations should have been even larger. And so, I think that’s something that I would certainly remember as we look at future extensions of SkyTrain,” he continued.

A SkyTrain line along the highway from Bridgeport Station to South Surrey

Falcon also told Daily Hive Urbanized that the previous concept for replacing the aging George Massey Tunnel with a new 10-lane bridge, along with extensive improvements to the Highway 99 corridor, was designed to accommodate a SkyTrain extension along the highway to better serve communities south of the Fraser.

When asked to clarify this concept, he emphasized that the aim was to specifically achieve SkyTrain — not LRT, but SkyTrain.

This would have been a SkyTrain line running between SkyTrain Canada Line’s Bridgeport Station and South Surrey. It would have repurposed the bus-only lanes down the highway’s centre median for the SkyTrain guideway.

“It was engineered to allow for a future SkyTrain to connect Bridgeport Station with South Surrey. It was purposely designed so that in the future, when the time made sense, and we had the budget and the population,” Falcon told Daily Hive Urbanized.

But he did not specify whether this could be a seamless extension of the Canada Line or a new standalone SkyTrain line branching off from the Canada Line.

The replacement Port Mann Bridge is designed for future rail rapid transit as well, but in the form of LRT. Compared to the Port Mann Bridge, the original George Massey Tunnel replacement and Highway 99 upgrades carried more engineering interventions to enable SkyTrain.

Long-term demand for SkyTrain?

In late 2018, a year after the BC NDP cancelled the 10-lane bridge project, a consultant’s initial technical report for the provincial government suggested the extensive bus infrastructure carried an estimated cost of about $500 million, but would achieve only 5% of the project benefits and have a benefit-cost ratio (BCR) of 0.31.

When a BCR is greater than 1.0, it signifies that the project’s benefits exceed the economic costs. However, when a BCR is less than 1.0, the project’s costs outweigh the benefits, and it should not be considered. For a public transit project, the BCR takes into account a combination of factors, such as ridership and fare revenue growth, transit travel savings, auto and truck travel savings, collision cost savings, reliability, and wider economic benefits.

The extensive bus infrastructure provisions had a low BCR primarily due to the expectation that the highway corridor would continue to see relatively low public transit ridership.

But overall, the original 10-lane bridge concept had a BCR of 1.0.

In contrast, the Surrey Newton-Guildford LRT had a benefit-cost ratio (BCR) of 0.69, while the Canada Line was rated at 1.25, increasing over time to 1.53 if its completion were delayed to 2021 instead of 2009. The Evergreen extension has a BCR of 1.27, the Millennium Line’s Broadway extension to Arbutus has a BCR of 1.64, the Burnaby Mountain Gondola to Simon Fraser University’s campus boasts a BCR of 1.8, and the Expo Line’s Surrey-Langley extension’s BCR is estimated at 1.02.

In late 2020, a technical report for the provincial government examined the incorporation of street-level LRT or SkyTrain provisions into the BC NDP’s redesigned project to replace the George Massey Tunnel and upgrade Highway 99.

The report asserted that upgraded and extended bus-on-shoulder lanes along the highway, combined with new bus-priority measures and BRT-caliber operations by TransLink, would more than suffice to meet long-term ridership demand. This conclusion was based on the assumptions that low-density urban uses and agricultural lands would remain dominant, along with slower population growth forecasts. Based on these assumptions, it is estimated that the 2050 bus ridership demand across the future George Massey crossing would reach up to 1,700 passengers per hour per direction, which is roughly equivalent to the current peak hour capacity of the 99 B-Line and about 20% of the Canada Line’s current maximum train fleet deployment capacity.

Furthermore, it suggested that such low-density areas would be better served by improved bus services.

Currently, TransLink buses make roughly 200 trips along the Highway 99 corridor via the George Massey Tunnel, and attract approximately 16,000 passengers per day. The public transit authority in recent years has made investments in acquiring a fleet of double-decker buses, which provide higher capacity and are suitable for longer distance routes. Many of these double-decker buses are dedicated to routes that run on Highway 99.

“With dedicated transit facilities — such as bus-on-shoulders, intersection queue jumpers, and other priority treatments at stations — and larger transit vehicles with uniquely designed stations, the capacity of RapidBus on the Highway 99 corridor can support three to four-times the projected 2050 ridership across the George Massey Crossing,” reads the report.

“In contrast, a fixed-rail link connection to the Bridgeport Stations would require transfers for customers from the South Surrey and would likely result in an increase in transit travel times.”

Both technical reports asserted that eliminating the interim and long-term public transit provisions on the median of the highway (or on the side of the highway), along with the corresponding lane reductions, would significantly reduce the complexity and size of the interchanges at Steveston Highway and Highway 17A, as well as the width of the new crossing over the Fraser River. This change could theoretically lead to lower construction costs.

But given the current market cost climate for construction due to the pandemic’s inflationary impacts, it appears highly likely that the original larger scope of the project built by 2022 with a 10-lane bridge, major interim BRT infrastructure, and long-term SkyTrain provisions would have carried a much lower cost than the revised project in its current form and best-case-scenario timeline of a 2030 opening.

Until then, about 85,000 vehicles per day will continue to use the existing tunnel, most commercial vehicles/trucks will continue to be restricted due to the existing tunnel’s constraints, and cyclists will be unable to access the route without the current bus shuttle bridge service across the river.

It is estimated that 65% to 70% of all morning peak hour trips across the George Massey Tunnel are destined to Vancouver — including 25% specifically to downtown Vancouver — and 25% are travelling to Richmond.

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