“Most of what we need to make this happen is there already,” Badger told The Sun. The highway — in this case the Fraser River — and the railroad tracks run side by side all the way to Hope.
“What we need is the interface between the two and that is still missing at the moment,” Badger said. The interface would be a series of terminals to transfer containers between ships and rail.
The cost of transferring containers more than once — from deep-sea vessels to short-haul vessels and then to trucks or rail — in their trip from port to market has been prohibitive until now.
As the cost of transport goes up “it makes this kind of operation much more viable,” Badger said.
A series of ominous slides projected onto the big screen at Surrey’s Eaglequest Coyote Creek Golf Club before the meeting began underlined the need to find new ways to move goods. One pointed out that the price of crude oil has risen from $55.98 a barrel to more than $100 since the sustainability dialogues started just last March.
Such a system could vastly reduce the number of kilometres driven by trucks to deliver goods from the port to local businesses, Badger said. Rather than trucking a single container through the most densely populated part of B.C. to get to a warehouse or a Canadian Tire in Surrey. hundreds of containers could be brought to a terminal on the Fraser in Surrey.
“Each barge could take 200 trucks off the road and one tug doesn’t produce as much pollution as 200 trucks,” he said. It is not hard to imagine the impact that would have on local roads and on air quality, he said.
Fraser Docks already handles 200,000 to 300,000 containers a year in Surrey, and Badger says the container traffic on the Fraser is only at 10 to 15 per cent of capacity.
The sustainability dialogue is part of a series of travelling panel discussions being held throughout the Metro Vancouver area.
Much of the discussion at the two-hour session centred on the wisdom of the provincial government’s multibillion-dollar Gateway project to twin the Port Mann Bridge and create a hugely expanded perimeter road servicing businesses and port facilities on the south bank of Fraser River.
Many of the approximately 50 attendees were exasperated by the expansion of the car and truck based road system when the region is trying to encourage denser residential growth and promote transit.
More highway capacity without tolls will encourage more sprawl, more driving and more pollution, speakers complained.
