Must be a Better Way to Report Highway Conditions

(Aired on August 19, 2010)

It's time in this world of electronic communication that we did a better job reporting highway conditions in our area. We have a web site in the province that should be the perfect vehicle for giving motorists updated information. But it's reliability in emergencies is very poor, and motorists often wind up getting into bad driving conditions or into long lineups after accidents even though the information is available to avoid the problem.

A perfect case this morning. A bad accident on the Coke north of the Logan Lake turnoff around 5:30 this morning. Logs spilled all over the highway. No southbound traffic getting through. It was almost two hours before Drive B.C. could get updated information onto its website. Information that was available well over an hour earlier.

What is wrong with emergency crews, whether they be ambulance drivers, police officers, road maintenance crews, radioing in a report right away to whoever controls the website and the electronic road signs, saying traffic is halted, alerting motorists and the media immediately so that the message can get out. Instead, we get backed up traffic like we did this morning, a backup that could have easily been avoided.

It's the same in winter. I don't know how many times we report information from the Drive B.C. site, when a motorist will phone in and ask us where we get our information because we've just said the Coke is good, and they're driving through a blizzard. It's unacceptable in this time of modern technology.

We need to do a better job of notifying motorists. Traffic backups may not seem too terribly bad, but try telling that to a family with two or three kids under three years old, waiting for hours to get through. In the winter, try telling a family who has gone off the road that you should have been able to update the conditions an hour earlier, but didn't. It's a situation that's easily resolved, and for the life of me, I can't understand why we have to put up with this crap year after year. Time to make some changes.

Coke Toll Revenue Could Be Helping BC Right Now

(Aired on May 25, 2010)

Driving home from the coast yesterday, I couldn't help but reflect on the vast increase in traffic on the Coquihalla Highway. I've driven the highway extensively the past three years, at all times of day, in all seasons of the year. The volume of traffic is up substantially. Heavy truck traffic has really climbed. In fact yesterday, it was as busy between Kamloops and Hope as it was between Hope and Vancouver.

While I was driving, I wondered how many lives we could have saved in B.C. hospitals, or how many kids we could have given a proper education to, if we had not removed the tolls on the Coquihalla Highway a couple of years back. In retrospect, it was one of the stupidest moves ever by a government bent on trying to get votes for re-election. The money lost from the tolls on the highway, millions and millions every year, was lost because the government decided votes were more important than using the money for the good of the province. What if we had taken that money and used it to provide services in our hospitals, or kept more teachers on the job. Wouldn't that have been a great thing?

I know it's just another form of taxation, but it's no different than the tax on booze or cigarettes or gas, or any of the other hidden taxes we have to pay. But I would certainly rather pay the toll and have health services than not. The other side of the coin, of course, is that many of these taxes simply go into general revenue, and I'm not in favour of that. I prefer taxes go to specific items, like that transit tax on the Lower Mainland.

The government has put itself into such a hole economically, and much of it they've dug themselves with poor planning, and politically expedient moves like the removal of the toll on the Coke. They really could do a lot better.