The Editor:
I have always said I was a sucker for punishment but today was a new low.
Four years ago, Highway 18 near Beaubier swallowed up by car and crushed in my gas tank. Fourteen hundred for a rental car and $1,000 for a new and two weeks later, my abused package policy saved the day for $100.
Back when I was in high school in the early 1970s, Saskatchewan highways like 18 were cobbled up from old dirt roads and a thin skin of asphalt by those who never felt semi trailers for farms and oilfields should be the way to go. Times changed and most trucking is by semi and those roads could not hold up.
Some thin membrane roads were repaired by adding a layer of clay and sand and new asphalt topping on top of the deteriorating surface and those seem to have held up fairly well. Compared to some roads I travel south of Highway 6 into Montana, where the road has hardly deteriorated at all since the 1960s, ours are in a sad state. Those U.S. folks paid more per mile way back when but those roads have needed virtually no repair for 50 years.
Most folks shun roads like Highway 18 in favor of grids except when it rains too much or the snow blocks the grids. A couple of elections ago, the soon-to-be-re-elected MLA even said in the heat of the campaign that Highway 18 was a disgrace and something must be done about it. But like the passing passions at Craven, the moment passed and nothing was ever done. But that was then and the reality today is that 18 is a mixture of those upgraded sections and "pavement turned back to gravel" that is just a touch better than lunar landscape, which exacts a heavy repair bill from all drivers.
After hitting a gaping hole late on the night of July 1 resulted in tearing off some shielding from the underside of my car, I sadly trotted back to SGI. The new wrinkle is that SGI has found it in their heart to change policy. Now, incidents where highways damage vehicles are now an "at fault" accident with an accident surcharge and six points off the driver's licence. In a community where some larger trucking companies refuse to hire drivers with points on their licence, not having a clean abstract forces a decision to take the abuse of paying a pound of flesh or refusing insurance coverage and paying for everything out of pocket.
Some locals talk about posting pictures of these gaping holes complete with the neon red halos local farmers are now decorating them with on billboards beside major highways entering and the departing the province or getting the class action Tony Merchant style lawyers to do class action suits to recover those damages we jointly suffer for millions of dollars a year.
Ideas such as special municipal, year-round road bans on truck routes except Highway 18, except as allowed by trip permits, so that oil and industrial truckers put pressure on the government to do something with these problem highways.
These things, however, are just wrong and counterproductive, as we are hurting our own self image and self esteem in the process. So perhaps we can crowdsource for new innovative solutions to get things right. Perhaps things such as selling naming rights to large industrial players, to put public profile and pride of ownership into a partnership with matching investment from ministry and build quality roads that might last awhile.
I would challenge us to become our own decision makers be abused or find a way to make those who abuse us a deal they cannot refuse.
It is insult added to injury to sit back and do nothing.
Morris F. Johnson,
Beaubier, Sask.
