Oops. Another shiny new tolled multibillion-dollar bridge, another fiduciary horror story. The twinned Port Mann is better at racking up debt than traffic.

Traffic numbers are in decline. Projections are proving to be works of fiction. Rather than pay the $3 toll — $6 for the day if you expect to get home that night to take the kids to soccer practice — commuters have gone looking for a free ride, as they feel is their right. The Pattullo, decrepit but toll-less, has done a booming trade.

Not only are traffic numbers headed in the wrong direction, so is the Port Mann’s indebtedness. The Transportation Investment Corp., the Crown corporation responsible for the bridge’s construction, is projecting a debt of $3.61 billion. That single, singular sum is equivalent to 48 per cent of TransLink’s entire panoply of transit initiatives that Metro Vancouverites will consider in the upcoming plebiscite.

Gordon Price, urban planner and director of The City Program at Simon Fraser University, was interested in the public reaction to this news, and so he searched the comments on this paper’s website. Price, posting on his blog PriceTags (which can be accessed at https://pricetags.wordpress.com), wrote:

“I wondered if in the comments to the story, Sun readers would be indicting TI Corp and the provincial government for their incompetence and mismanagement, calling for accountability, if not resignations. Imagine my complete lack of surprise to find nothing of the sort; that’s reserved for transit agencies. TI Corp will likely go on to finance the Massey bridge.”

In his post, Price also identified one of the leading proponents who campaigned for the construction of the new Port Mann Bridge. (For the record, both Price and I were against it.) It was none other than Jordan Bateman, the self-appointed leader of the No side in the transit plebiscite. He was on the advisory board of a group called Get Moving BC, which made twinning the Port Mann its Number 1 priority. It got B.C. moving all right, though I’m sure Bateman hoped at the time it would be to somewhere other than the Pattullo Bridge.

There are some instructive lessons here to be learned. Some of them can be applied to the plebiscite, which, as I have stated repeatedly, I support. These are:

1. Stuff costs money. Making life easier for cars especially costs money. That’s why the bridge was tolled. But drivers still expect a free ride, as if driving a car was somehow different than any other public utility. Those days are over, or soon will be.

2. We need a comprehensive plan, not stopgap measures like the Port Mann. Tolling, of the pick-and-choose variety we have here in Metro Vancouver, does not work. A more comprehensive strategy, like universal road-pricing, will come eventually, but not in the immediate future.

3. Comprehensive road-pricing is, at the very least, a decade out, and probably more because of the reluctance of our provincial government to embrace it, and because of the costs of mega-projects like the Port Mann, which have to be recovered. That takes time.