This past week, New Westminster made it clear that it wished to see a North Fraser BRT connecting 22nd Street Station on the Expo Line to Marine Drive Station on the Canada Line.

On paper, this idea makes sense. 22nd Street is a major hub for buses coming in from New Westminster and south of the Fraser River and Marine Drive provides a link to options in South Vancouver and to Richmond and the airport. However, BRT stands for “bus rapid transit” and it’s the “rapid transit” part that has me irritated.

Sometime around 2004 or 2005, TransLink was considering options for the Evergreen extension of the Millennium Line which included a possible use of existing rail routes from what is now Marine Drive Station through New Westminster towards Coquitlam Centre. This would have used DMU (diesel multiple units) along the former BC Electric (now CN) Westminster-Eburne Line.

Instead, an alternate route was chosen for this extension, but TransLink and the City of Burnaby still consider this as a future potential transit link. However, the desire right now is to go with the cheaper option of BRT when in reality, I feel like it’s longer-term a bad idea.

There are cons against this idea of mine of course. For example, the railway link itself is almost 300 metres downhill across a highway from the proposed hub at 22nd Street–the height difference is 50 metres too. This really speaks to the impracticality of having the two points linked I will admit.

However, the pros are numerous. For one thing, we’re away from cars and the area around 22nd Street Station itself is notorious for traffic jams due to its proximity to the Queensborough Bridge.

By instead placing the terminus of this line at New Westminster Station itself (which would be a mere 50-75 metres away), we’d be able to take advantage of a more practical terminus while still connecting to a hub.

As for how active the existing rail line is, the yard near New Westminster Station is fairly active and is so right past the Queensborough Bridge, but around 2020 or 2021, CN put a concrete barrier just as the line crosses over at Glenlyon Parkway. It seems that sometime in the past few years, its last customer for local rail service ceased to be. This and the fact that the Marpole Line which this line once connected to is no more, CN seems fit to just consider the whole right of way fallow.

The Expo Line itself was built alongside a former BC Electric rail line. For many decades after the Central Park Line closed, many governments argued to return local passenger rail service along its right of way (something I am writing about for next week on @VancouverTransit I might add). This is how we ended up with SkyTrain and it has proven to be an integral part of our region.

We now have a disused rail line connecting to major centres (Marine Drive, River District, and downtown New Westminster) which is ripe for the taking. BRT is going to be subject to the whims of Metro Vancouver traffic whereas we could purchase a half-dozen DMUs and run them along this right of way with a lot more frequency. We’re going to need to buy new vehicles for this new rapid transit link, so why not just buy some trains?

Sure. We’re going to have to probably buy rights to the railway or outright buy it. There is also going to be a need to build stations and probably a short rail link to get us to Marine Drive, but the benefits to going this route are huge.

I don’t have hope in this ever becoming a reality, but honestly I think it’s the better idea.

Update (November 17, 2023)

I had to make a trip down to the River District today and opted to snap these photos for a possible future blog entry. In positive-ish news, TransLink did not opt to go with the route I hated.