BACKGROUND

The South Fraser Perimeter Road (SFPR) is a proposed 40km, 4-lane freeway that would go from Deltaport Way in South Delta out to Highway 1 in Surrey (Figure 1).The SFPR is part of the Provincial Gateway Program, which is a project intended to improve the movement of goods and traffic throughout the Lower Mainland. The Provincial Gateway Program is part of a Federal strategy to develop the West Coast of Canada in order to increase trade with Asia. This primarily consists of increasing exports of coal in British Columbia in return for cheap consumer products. The SFPR, which is currently in its preparatory stage of construction, is one of many freeway construction projects taking place throughout the Lower Mainland (Figure 1). For this project, we have chosen to focus solely on the SFPR as its environmental impacts would be the most severe.

Although the community and environmental impacts of the SFPR would be far-reaching and broad, for this project we have chosen to focus our attention on air pollution. The Provincial government’s Local Air Quality Impact Assessment for the Gateway Program predicts an overall decrease in emissions throughout Metro Vancouver, premised upon the idea that technological advances will decrease tailpipe emissions in future years, and that a new freeway will decrease the amount of vehicles stuck in traffic. This assessment does not take into account the lag time between the development of new technologies and their implementation, nor does it have any basis in solid facts. Furthermore, there is an abundance of research (see Conclusion) showing that new freeways are not only an inadequate solution to congestion, but that new freeways in fact increase car dependency and thereby congestion. In addition, the recent announcement by the BC Provincial government that several previously planned interchanges will now be intersections along the route of the SFPR makes a decrease in congestion even less likely.

The SFPR is intended to be the main transportation corridor for container trucks coming from Deltaport, reducing heavy truck traffic in residential neighbourhoods and roadways. However, as evident by the maps of current trucking routes (see Results), the SFPR often does not offer a shorter route for trucks, whose driver’s work on the clock. Seeing as there is currently no legislation in place to ensure trucks take the route of the SFPR, it is likely that air pollution from container trucks in Metro Vancouver will become more dispersed. Combine this with increased car dependency and suburban sprawl due to investments in new freeways instead of alternative transportation options, and there is much reason to be concerned about future levels of air pollution in Metro Vancouver.

oUR PROJECT

In our project, we wanted to map and conduct a spatial analysis of the impacts of air pollution that would occur as a result of the construction of the SFPR. Traffic emissions contain the following harmful pollutants: Nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and particulate matter (PM). Traffic emissions have been associated with pulmonary and respiratory disorders, lung cancer, childhood cancers, adverse birth outcomes, strokes and cardiovascular mortality.

Our project consists of three components. First, we wanted to look at the different community assets that would be vulnerable to air pollution from the new freeway. For this part of the analysis we looked at the proximity of parks, schools, care homes/hospitals, streams, protected agricultural lands, and Burns Bog in relation to the SFPR. We also looked at the proximity of children and seniors populations to the freeway, as these populations are the most vulnerable to air pollution. Second, we wanted to look at environmental justice, to see if there was a correlation between the route of the new freeway and high immigrant and/or low income populations. Environmental justice is the equitable spatial distribution of polluting developments among populations that differ in terms of race, class, ethnicity and country. This involved mapping the SFPR in relation to immigrant populations and income. Third, we wanted to map and predict how NO2 levels would likely change with the construction of the SFPR. For this we used a raster model of NO2 levels in Metro Vancouver to compare the level of NO2 along existing truck routes compared to current NO2 levels along the proposed route of the SFPR. 

Go back to Entrance