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Editorial: Failure on the highway

The call for a new corridor to address chronic safety issues on Highway 101 got fresh impetus last week after a tragic death on 101 at Largo Road in Roberts Creek.
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Memorials at the scene of the May 26 fatal collision on Highway 101.

The call for a new corridor to address chronic safety issues on Highway 101 got fresh impetus last week after a tragic death on 101 at Largo Road in Roberts Creek.

The danger posed by the high number of public and private access points along Highway 101 has always been one of the major reasons for rejecting the status quo. What makes the case of Largo Road really stand out is that it was approved only late last year as a through road between the highway and Lower Road. And it was approved at the same time that the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure was working on the “problem definition phase” of a still-delayed Corridor Study.

In other words, even while the ministry was “defining the problems” on Highway 101, it was creating new ones. And now we see, possibly fatal ones.

It’s not that they weren’t warned. Residents vociferously opposed the decision to open up Largo Road to through traffic, and the Sunshine Coast Regional District backed the residents’ position. MOTI went ahead anyway.

Advocates for a new highway felt similarly ignored after they presented a 6,400-signature petition to Transportation Minister Claire Trevena in March 2019 and she responded with what seemed like a cut-and-paste version of the letter she’d sent Sechelt council six months earlier.

After glibly dismissing the need for a new highway, Trevena’s letter suggested the existing corridor had been well looked after during the previous decade. The letter didn’t mention that most of that decade had been under a B.C. Liberal government.

“Over the past 10 years,” she wrote, “the ministry has invested $5.3 million towards improvements along the Highway 101 corridor... Some of these improvements include new crosswalks, cycling signs, shoulder widening, widened transit pullouts and enhanced signs and road markings along the corridor. Our data shows that during this time, the safety performance on this route has improved significantly, with a 26 per cent reduction in the severity and frequency of collisions through the communities.”

Way to go, Liberals.

In her letter, Trevena did make two promises.

One was that her ministry would continue to monitor traffic volumes and work with the community and developers to “identify future safety and capacity improvements on the existing Highway 101 corridor.” Largo Road can be taken as an example of that handiwork.

The other promise was the Corridor Study, which she said should be completed by the end of last year.

Fortunately, no one’s holding their breath waiting.