Upgrading the most important road in the Northeast

Highway #3 between Tisdale and Melfort is the busiest stretch of highway in the Northeast. An average of 2,555 vehicles – a number close to four-fifths of Tisdale’s population – travel down it every day.

The 34.3-kilometre stretch of highway also ranks high in the province for traffic collisions.

Out of 112 stretches of road with an average of more than 2,000 vehicles per day in 2015 measured by Saskatchewan Government Insurance for collisions, the Tisdale-Melfort stretch, on average over the five years between 2011 and 2015, is ranked number #21 for its collision rate and number #8 for its collisions causing injury rate. There were no fatal collisions in those five years.

Improving the highway – for both safety and economic reasons – is something the Town of Tisdale has discussed with the provincial government.

“Over the years, they’ve talked about widening part of the highway, reducing some of the hills,” said Al Jellicoe, Tisdale’s mayor. “I know a few years ago they have fixed up a couple of bridges, made them wider, but when it comes to the budget, it’s pushed down.”

Options for improvement

There are three major options available to the province to improve the highway.

The cheapest is geometric enhancement – removing hills and getting rid of turns to make it so that drivers can see further and therefore pass more safely.

The middle option, in terms of cost, is constructing passing lanes, which tend to range in length from 1.5 kilometres to 2.5 kilometres. Similar to passing lanes are climbing lanes, which are built on roads going uphill so that passenger vehicles can pass slower semi trucks.

The most expensive is twinning the highway.

Building passing lanes

Doug Wakabayashi, a spokesperson with the ministry of transportation, said the province is always examining how it can make highways safer through an engineering standpoint.

“We’re looking constantly at the traffic volumes of highways and reviewing the operations of how a given stretch of road is working.”

Wakabayashi said the ministry looks at a number of factors when it’s considering building passing lanes. They include traffic volumes – and the rate at which it is growing, the composition of traffic, the presence of geographic features like hills and curves that limit passing opportunities, and the collision history of the road.

The spokesperson gave examples of two similar rural roads that have passing lanes. Highway #10 between Fort Qu’Appelle and the intersection with Highway #1 has an average of 4,400 vehicles per day.

“Within that, there’s a rather high spike in the summer too,” he said, adding that there’s Echo Lake Provincial Park and cottages in the area.

There’s also Highway #7 between Delisle and Rosetown, which sees an average of 3,070 vehicles per day.

“There’s some curves on the highway but the big thing on that is there’s very peak hour traffic volumes there, like morning and afternoon rush hour. There’s also a significant amount of truck traffic on that road.”

A spokesperson from the ministry of transportation in Alberta told the Review that province doesn’t have many passing lanes with roads that have a traffic volume of around 2,000 vehicles per day. It does, however, have many climbing lanes on those highways.

A lobbying example

Jellicoe said that while Tisdale has lobbied for improvements to the highway, the town didn’t discuss the issue at this year’s Saskatchewan Urban Municipality Association conference, as they didn’t talk to the highways minister. Rick Lang, Melfort’s mayor, said his city also didn’t have any discussion about the highway.

Meanwhile, the Town of Nipawin and The Pas, Man. have been lobbying for highway improvements on Highway #55 between each other for 80 years. The two towns used to be connected by steamboats on the Saskatchewan River until the 1920s.

“Our goal is a 12-month, primary weight, dust-free road between Nipawin and The Pas,” said Chris Hudyma, who was Nipawin’s director of community development.

The highway has an average of 60 vehicles per day traveling between the two towns.

Hudyma said upgrading that highway would mean that canola from Manitoba could be processed at the Bunge refinery, seed from Saskatchewan could be sent to Manitoban fields, lumber and chips could be transported from the Carrot River sawmill and the two First Nations communities of Red Earth and Shoal Lake would have access to more economic opportunities.

So Hudyma set out to prove it to the two provincial governments.

“We hired a consulting company to do a non-biased report on an investment base case. In there, [we had] indicated two scenarios [that showed that] if the government invested in it, this is what we can get in return, from jobs to GDP.”

The report, released in June 2016, estimated that if the road was improved to be accessible for nine months of the year, it would create 1,700 jobs and contribute $194.9 million to the GDP over 20 years. For the improvements that Nipawin and The Pas want, the estimate is that it would generate 12,000 jobs and about $19.3 billion to the GDP over 20 years.

Hudyma said the Saskatchewan government is expressing interest in the upgrade. He said Nipawin is continuing to hold meetings with the two provincial governments.

Human factors

Wakabayashi added that it’s also important to keep in mind human factors when examining highway safety.

“The thing that has the most significant impact on highway safety is driver behaviour,” he said. “In North America, human factors are the major contributing factors to the order of 90 per cent of collisions.”

Those factors include driving too fast for road conditions, driver attentiveness, distracted driving and alcohol.