We first noticed there was a problem a few months ago. The driver-side front tire was nearly flat. Somehow, we picked up a long screw. Thankfully, the tire shop got us in and fixed just before closing, a fact for which we were grateful.
They pointed out that we would soon be in need of a wheel alignment on my wife's 2009 Ford F-150 Supercrew. This was odd, since the vehicle, despite being five years old, has about 48,000 kilometres on it, of which we have put on only 30,000. Sure enough, the inside of the tire was wearing out quickly.
We weren't able to get around to it until now, but prior to any summer trips, I wanted the truck fixed. When I was a kid the front tire once fell off the family car, and I didn't want a repeat performance, especially at highway speeds.
Sure enough, the lower ball joint was done-for, as well as the upper control arm. Those two items and an alignment later, and we were $700 poorer.
The Ford may be a truck, but it doesn't do a lot of truck things. In the past six months it might have seen gravel three times, and only for a few miles. Almost all of its driving (about 90 per cent) is within the city limits of Estevan, most of it to and from the hospital where my wife works, just a few blocks away.
There's one easily-identifiable culprit for our $700 bill - Estevan roads. The potholes were so bad this spring, following the winter that would never end, that the city actually closed the outer lanes on the four-lane Souris Avenue/13th Avenue that runs north-south through the city. Not everyone followed the signs, however, nor was it always possible. For us, the damage was done before the signs went up. Bone-jarring bump after teeth-rattling, tire-swallowing abyss is the kindest way to describe these potholes.
This abomination of a road has many fathers. First off is the freeze/thaw cycle. There's not much we can do with that - we just have to live with it.
The primary cause is the heavy truck traffic through Estevan. Did you know, for instance, that in recent years rural municipalities who didn't want their own roads beat up by heavy crude-oil tanker trucks effectively forced these trucks through the centre of Estevan by way of road bans? Much of this oil was not even Canadian, but American, hauled up from North Dakota, to the CN transloading station at Wilmar, south of Arcola.
Then there's the little fact that five years after it was initially announced, the Estevan highway bypass is finally, finally seeing action. This is after Yorkton's bypass, which was announced in the same 2008 budget, has had several phases completed and opened. By the time Estevan's is complete, the better part of a decade will have elapsed since the initial announcement.
In the meantime, we've had this little thing called the Bakken oil boom that has seen substantially more heavy trucks working in, around, and through Estevan, utterly destroying the roads. Trust me, it's not the local ratepayer in their puddle jumper, or even their pickup, that's causing this damage - it's the trucks.
Every year or two the city has had to do a "shave and pave," along the truck route in the centre of the city. The paving contractor scrapes off the top layer, smoothing it out, and repaves. The ruts pounded out of the roads are so bad, anyone with a high-end sports car (Corvette or Viper) would likely get hung up or lose their exhaust pipes.
Another father of our $700 front end repair bill is the taxation in Estevan. When I was the city hall reporter in North Battleford from 2003-08, we looked with envy at places like Estevan and Lloydminster, due to their incredibly low residential taxation rates. Even now, five years later, my house taxes here in Estevan are substantially lower than what I paid in North Battleford. Both Estevan and Lloydminster have benefitted from having some of the strongest industrial sectors in the province, providing a much broader tax-base. But perhaps there was too much emphasis in the past on keeping taxes low, and not enough on repairing and building up infrastructure.
As we've found, either you're going to pay it on your tax bill, or to the garage to fix your vehicle. Unfortunately, the garage bill can be a lot higher, and nothing says you won't have another repair next week.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
