Last year, Premier Campbell claimed that the Gateway highway expansions would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This intentional distortion was perpetuated in the Throne Speech, claiming that an expanded freeway will reduce idling by getting cars moving and so reducing emissions. But a recently released Ministry of Highways report states that the Gateway program is expected to cause an increase of 124,000 tonnes CO2 emissions per year. The Ministry describes this as a "net increase in total regional GHG emissions of 0.3%". It gets worse.

A new report from the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation (SPEC) shows that the Ministry cooked the books to minimize the apparent effect of the Gateway Program. SPEC examined the Ministry’s report and found that it actually predicts an overall increase of on-road GHG emissions from 4.3 to 5.7 million tonnes per year, or a 31% increase.

How did the Ministry manage to describe this as “net 0.3%”? Easy: they included Whatcom County emissions when calculating the baseline, and left them out when calculating the impact of Gateway.

They also ignored the impact of sprawl: more highways always cause more development, and modern traffic modeling programs account for this effect. But the Ministry used an old version that ignores this effect. And they assumed that transit service and ridership would not increase substantially.

The SPEC report points out that the GVRD has already shown it is possible to reduce GHG emissions by 45% by 2020 with strategic investment in transit. The difference between the with-Gateway scenario and the transit strategy is shown below in the accompanying graph.

For over a year, SPEC and The Livable Region Coalition have been advocating a suite of cost effective transit investments to reduce traffic congestion and GHG pollution . A region-wide program to replace the Gateway Program could be modeled on Zürich, Switzerland which sets the gold standard for cost-effective public transit.