In this space, I have spilled more than enough ink lamenting the frankly terrifying stretch of the Trans Canada Highway east of Regina. Everyone hates this piece of road, it’s among the worst roads in the province, because it’s high traffic, high speed, and inherently unsafe.
Attempts to fix it have just made it worse, because the attempts to fix it have a fundamental misunderstanding of why it’s unsafe. The attempt to reduce speed with lower limits just means that if you attempt to abide by the new, lower limit, all you get is a rear window full of speeding, angry F-150.
The provincial NDP, to their credit, understand that this is an inherently unsafe stretch of highway. To their detriment, they’re proposing the worst possible solution to an already terrible situation. They want traffic lights down the highway, a proposal that removes the grille of that F-150 from your back window, and then neatly places it in the back seat of your car.
The problem comes from the fundamental problem with the highway as it is – it’s a relatively open roadway with few landmarks, but a lot of level crossings on it. The result is that you have a roadway where nobody really wants to abide by the speed limit, and as a result does not. Even with a high collision corridor sign and threats of photo radar, people still drive quite quickly, and the flow of traffic is relatively fast. That makes it very difficult to access the highway for people coming in off of a side road, which is why people keep driving into those people.
Take a road where everyone drives too fast, including many large trucks and semis, then force them to stop at several points on the road. What you get is not a safe driving utopia for creatures big and small, you get people who are unable to stop in time and drive into other people. This is naturally exacerbated in the winter, where people also have ice to contend with, which doesn’t help with the sudden stop they will now be expected to do quite quickly.
You could argue that people shouldn’t be driving so fast anyway, that this is the source of all our problems. This is fine, in theory, but in practice nobody is going to do it. What we need, and what is being proposed with the Regina bypass design, is to get fewer level crossings and reduce the amount of traffic disruptions on this stretch of road. The project has become extremely expensive, hitting $1.88 billion, and it’s going to take time to implement – the first phase on this stretch of road will not be finished until 2017. But the approach of focusing on overpasses is, at a minimum, the correct one.
I can appreciate that the provincial NDP wants to make the stretch of highway safer, I do too. We can agree on the fundamental point that there needs to be a massive design change to this stretch of highway for the safety of everyone who travels it. Where we depart is in how this stretch of road can be fixed. Going slower has made it worse, discovering how close a full size truck is willing to get to your rear bumper is not a fun experience. Adding stops will make it worse still, because they will not stop quickly enough, and will cause accidents. The Regina Bypass is going out of control, cost-wise, but going with traffic lights is more dangerous than doing nothing at all.
