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I would suspect you could shorten your life span in some way just by driving across it. I could come up with something more definitive if I were any good at crunching numbers but it’s so easy to see the big bold writing on the wall: The Pattullo Bridge is Deadly [wiki ^[2]]

If you have ever driven over this bridge you’d know how scary it is to hit that almost-hair-pin curve especially if you’re stuck in the middle lane. It’s not that I don’t trust myself enough to stay in my lane and go the speed limit, it’s that I don’t trust other drivers and the oncoming traffic. So many of the accidents are in THAT spot and they involved head-on collisions.

The Pattullo Bridge was built in the late 1930s. It carries more than 79,000 vehicles a day over the Fraser River between Surrey and New Westminster.
Eighteen people have now been killed in accidents on the bridge since 1990, most of them in head-on crashes. [cbc ^[3]]

In 2005 they changed the speed limit from 60 km/h to 50 and installed those little flexible plastic posts (that have give) along the centerline of the 4-lane bridge. But that doesn’t stop the accidents.

That CBC story was from January of this year and there have been many accidents since [canada.com ^[4]]. The latest being today on the Surrey side of the bridge, so far there are reports that one person has been killed and the bridge has been closed all morning.

There have been talks of installing medians between the lanes on the already cramped-for-space-bridge. When elected, Surrey Mayor Diane Watts said that those would not be good enough and I think everyone agrees.

Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan, who chairs the regional district’s transportation committee, said there is no choice but to replace the Pattullo Bridge. “It is far too old,” he said. “It needs seismic upgrading. It is not safe in an earthquake. And putting in medians is not going to solve the problem that the lanes aren’t wide enough to accommodate the traffic.”[canada.com ^[4]]

Now they’re twinning the Port Mann [sun ^[5]] to allow for a better flow of traffic but what about saving lives? When will something finally happen to make this bridge a safe crossing?