Difference between revisions of "Traffic Forecasts"

Revision as of 05:12, 8 August 2010

Traffic Forecasts estimating potential commercial truck traffic for the Bridge, and the associated toll revenues, were produced by PROLOG Canada Inc., a Calgary-based consulting firm. Forecasts were produced in 2002, and again in 2006. 35-year estimates of commercial traffic and tonnage were produced in two scenarios; a "Conservative" forecast and a "Probable" forecast, based on different assumptions of mining and other economic activity.

As a note, while some of the forecast tables mention "one-way trips", and the tonnage figures are northbound, the "Trucks" numbers are actually two-way totals. You need to divide them in half to get the number of one-way trips (as mentioned in Appendix 13 of the Developer's Assessment Report from 2004. Raspberries to PROLOG for the confusion!

Components

Mine Resupply is the freight that is shipped north of Yellowknife on the Tibbitt-Contwoyto Winter Road for use by the various mining projects.

The Community Resupply portion of the forecasts covers the commercial traffic to the highway communities north of the Fort Providence ferry crossing.

Reports

PROLOG produced two reports for the GNWT, in 2002 and again in 2006. Both reports present two distinct forecast scenarios, called "Conservative" and "Probable". Both reports use a similar methodology, but the traffic projection figures differ given the addition four years of available data for the later report.

The "Conservative" report uses lower values for community growth, shorter lifetimes for some mines and assumes some planned projects from the "Probable" scenario (such as the Mackenzie Gas project) won't happen.

In general, the 2006 reports seem to run about 100,000 tonnes higher than the 2002 ones, reflecting both increased mining traffic and greater community resupply. The community numbers seem to have increased by about 10-15% in the actual data from 2002=2006, providing a higher base for the 2006 report, and about 30-40% of the additional tonnage. The rest comes from increased mine resupply - the value used in the 2006 Conservative estimate is about 65,000 tonnes higher than the 2002. Some of this is presumably the Jericho diamond mine, which was new to the 2006 report; unfortunately it ceased operating in 2008.

Revenue Implications

Tolls charged to commercial vehicles crossing the Bridge are to be a major component in its finances. Unfortunately, the recession beginning in 2008 has seriously affected the freight volumes on the Fort Providence crossing. I have not looked into the community resupply side of things - it may be possible to re-estimate this from the publicly available ferry-crossing counts, but I haven't looked into it. My assumption is that the numbers might be somewhat smaller than forecast, but since Yellowknife and the other communities haven't gone anywhere, there won't have been a drastic reduction on this side.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the mine resupply side of things. The group that maintains the ice road provides statistics on its website, and at 121,000 tonnes 2010 was close to a record low for the last 10 years, with 2009 not being much better. Some of this will be due to the closure of the Jericho mine, the rest to reductions by the other operating mines. Whatever the cause, the 2006 Conservative forecast uses 352,000 tonnes as the mine resupply value, a figure that has never been achieved even in the ice road's best year (330,000 tonnes in 2007). Even the lower value from the 2002 report (287,500 tonnes) has only been achieved once.

It would appear that even assuming the 2006 Conservative community resupply estimates are still in the right ballpark, the mine resupply freight will need to drastically rebound to around 250,000 tonnes just for the bridge to break even with the $4 million subsidy and tolls. This would require a doubling of the 2010 mine traffic; I don't know if there are any forecasts out there of likely mine traffic over the next few years.

External Links

• PROLOG Traffic Forecast 2002 - (Microsoft Word format)
• PROLOG Traffic Forecast 2006 - (Microsoft Word format)
• Ice Road statistics

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