Except that the congestion was costing the local economy $1.5 BILLION dollars a year.

The only solution to congestion is road pricing. You cannot build your way out of it. Every attempt to build one's way out of road congestion without road pricing has failed. To insist otherwise in the face of the mountains of evidence to the contrary is what is shortsighted.

Look what road pricing did for the port mann - traffic levels are back where they were years ago, but because our incompetent highway building MoT can't unravel their heads from ever-more-car-trips thinking, we ended up with the world's widest bridge that will continue to be a drag upon the province's finances for years.

We don't need more roads. We need to utilize our road infrastructure more efficiently. Already, we have more roadway per capita than cities many times our size hosting economies much more productive then ours.

Utilizing our existing infrastructure more efficiently means that we have to expect people to take fewer car trips. It's the commuters who are congesting the flow of commerce, not the truckers. You look at the various Port roads in the region, and they're all two lane. It's only when the commuters get in the way that things start to bulge out to ten lanes. By giving away road space to commuters for free, we are actively hindering commerce, and in the process incentivizing more economically unsustainable low density housing developments that will be struggling with their infrastructure bills in thirty years. By contrast assuming that people are just always going to drive more, as the MoT does, we end up only contributing to that enormous infrastructure deficit that is sapping the finances of the government. Public money isn't free, either, and funds spent subsidizing this sort of bad-infrastructure cost the economy dearly.

More low-density infrastructure will not solve this region's problems. It will only add to our long-term financing shortfall.