Transportation Impacts on Growth

Popular myth to the contrary, freeway expansion will encourage more growth in the suburbs of the Fraser Valley. This will occur because improved access makes this area more attractive to buyers and developers. This attractiveness pushes up the value of the land, increasing the pressure for its development. [1]

 

That highway expansion will encourage suburban growth has been confirmed by the Real Estate Investment Network.  Its recent report argues that land values in the Fraser Valley will increase from 10 to 20 percent as a result of Gateway-related highway expansion.[2]   "What the twinning of the Port Mann and other projects will do is physically bring the suburbs closer to the central business district," states the report’s author.[3]   A similar assessment is made by realtor Ron Antalek, who “noticed a distinct increase in interest in the Ridge Meadows area by first-time buyers and commuters once Translink’s $650-million Golden Ears bridge was confirmed.”[4]  Clearly highway expansion, through improving access and making the valley more viable for commuters, is going to encourage suburban growth.

 

Transportation Impacts on Land Use

This suburban growth will not be concentrated in town centres as the Livable Region Strategic Plan calls for.  Freeway expansion will encourage automobile dependent, sprawling development.  This occurs since freeway expansion reduces the costs of automobile transportation compared to other modes, such as transit, walking and cycling.  This encourages more people to drive. 

Ease of access across large areas also makes low density, single use development more viable from an economic standpoint.  With lower transportation costs, it makes economic sense to allow the segregation of housing from other land-uses including schools, business, industrial parks, recreational areas, and shopping malls.  By encouraging driving, municipalities will have no fiscal incentive to create higher-density, complete communities that encourage walking, cycling and transit, as envisioned in the regional town centres.  Given that low-density sprawl is the dominant pattern of growth in the Fraser Valley, we can expect more of the same as freeway expansion encourages more suburban growth.

 

Transportation Impacts on Land Use- The ALR

 

 

As highway expansion pushes land values in the Fraser Valley up, farmland becomes more valuable and more vulnerable to development.  This will occur despite the fact farmland is technically protected by the Agricultural Land Reserve.   As the recent David Suzuki report on the ALR has stated, the higher the value of the land, the larger the profit there is to convert the land.  This incentive encourages landowners to go through the process of excluding land, which involves hiring consultants and soil specialists and pushing the approval through the municipal government first and then the Agricultural Land Commission.  Often, municipalities will favour exclusion as they benefit from increased tax revenue developed farmland presents.  This was the case of the recent decision to exclude almost 200 hectares of land in Abbotsford for industrial uses.  Unless the ALR exclusion process is amended, we can expect to see more land taken out of the ALR as landowners respond to the profit motive of higher land values that is the direct result of highway expansion.

 

Land Use Implications and the Economy

 

Highway expansion does not increase economic activity on the regional level. Studies have shown that highway expansion simply diverts economic activity from existing urban areas to outlying areas.  While the affected suburbs may receive a benefit from highway expansion, this is usually to the detriment of economic activity elsewhere in the region, primarily the downtown core or regional town centres.[5]  With highway expansion, we can expect to see a shift in economic activity to the suburbs and away from the vibrant downtown core and regional town centres, undermining the progress our region has made in downtown revitalization and town centre development.

Through encouraging sprawl, highway expansion will entail other costs to the economy, many of which are difficult to quantify.  One of these costs will be air pollution.  Through encouraging more automobile-dependent sprawl, it is all but certain that air pollution is going to increase in the long-term.  Air pollution entails significant health-care and lost-productivity costs, and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.  Sprawl is also going to have negative impacts on health, given that low density development discourages routine physical activity and results in poor health-care outcomes.  Sprawl also makes transit inefficient, and will increase the rate by which it is subsidized.   There are also long-term costs associated with the inefficient use of land, underutilized infrastructure, and potential redundancy as energy costs increase.  All of these costs will have deleterious but difficult to quantify effects on our economy.