At-Grade Crossings of the Trans-Canada Highway From Bridal Falls to Taylor Way (2023-3)

    This week's article is about the many intersections that existed on Highway 1 (and formerly 401) between Popkum and Taylor Way in West Vancouver.

Some notes on the article and commentary:

•     The highway did have freeway sections when it was officially opened. The "Abbotsford Bypass" (Highway 1 from Highway 11 (at the time called 'C Street') to Fraser Highway/Mt Lehman Road) was a freeway. That opened on April 19, 1962. When it was built it had interchanges at all of its present locations. The "Burnaby Freeway"  (which opened on May 1, 1964 some 42 days before the Port Mann opened). The last large section of freeway was the section from the Cape Horn-Mt. Lehman section. The Cape Horn-Mt. Lehman section has an unverifiable opening date of June 12, 1964. Why unverifiable? No newspapers seemed to comment on the opening of this section. They all focused on the Port Mann's opening. It's a ~38.8 km long piece of freeway that is totally unaccounted for. There seemed to be a sense too that the previous openings of the four other sections of the Trans-Canada Highway were just a lead up to the official opening of the whole system. Frontier to Freeway, a government publication on road history seems to take the position that the sections of highway that opened before June 12 were minor. So minor that no dates are specified in it. It also gets the number of previously opened sections wrong! It forgot the Burnaby Freeway. 
• It was a very slow process to remove intersections from the highway. It took until 1999 for the last minor intersection to be removed and 1997 for the last traffic light (Westview). Given the population growth of MV, it's odd how long it took.
• Population: There were far fewer people when the freeway was built around Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. Vancouver. The lower population outside of the Burrard Peninsula probably influenced the decision to include intersections. The 1961 census counted 885,314 people in what's now the Metro Vancouver and Fraser Valley Regional Districts (perhaps missing a few unincorporated localities). Interestingly the project number for the Burnaby Freeway was 885 as well. I assume that the project designers of the time wanted to future-proof it a bit for the areas they knew would grow substantially. It'd be interesting to see how the highway planners communicated with the municipalities the highway passes through. 

Here is the article in PDF:

See Corrections to the article below the PDF too:

CORRECTIONS: 

In the PDF an "intersection #16" is mentioned. The intersection intended to be mentioned was intersection #20 (the dyke driveway at 40157 N Parallel Road). There also appears to be a private drive in the median between the "great separation"  at Barrowtown.  (Nov 16, 2023)

-George