Northern Ontario politicians are urgently appealing to the federal government for help during one of the deadliest winters on record along 2,000 kilometres of highway between Nipigon, Sudbury and North Bay.
In a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney, the Northwestern Ontario Municipalities Association (NOMA) is urging the government to designate the stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway — both Highway 11 and Highway 17 — as dual-use national infrastructure.
That would tap into the federal government’s plan to spend more on defence-related infrastructure while fulfilling a years-old request from northwestern Ontarians to shore up the sole land connector between Eastern and Western Canada.
“We need to get the attention of the federal government to say: listen, we need you to invest,” said Rick Dumas, the mayor of Marathon, Ont., and president of the Northwestern Ontario Municipalities Association (NOMA).
It could be that now the highway closes to try to lower those numbers. Per article it says you’re 3 to 9x more likely to die on northern Ontario.
11 deaths this winter with all the closures we have had- That is wild.
I don’t think their solution of making another lane will fix this problem. If you’ve seen how plowing works here when there is 2 lanes in one direction, you’ll know only 1 gets cleared. Plows can’t keep up with a 2 lane Highway. A 3 lane Highway just means that one lane will get ignored till the snow storm stops.
My experiences are mainly from near the northeastern corner of 11 in the 1990s (and yeah, I drove through some bad shit a few times). Evidence of anyone plowing into the banks or through them into the ditch along that stretch was pretty rare back then. Of course, that area may not be representative even for that time period.
I suspect that one of the things that’s changed is training of transport truck drivers and enforcement of laws pertaining to transport trucks. Hell of a lot of those vehicles turn out to be overloaded or defective when they do run an enforcement blitz, and many of the drivers these days come from countries without significant snowfall and should be explicitly trained on how to handle our crappy weather before getting their licenses—but it isn’t a requirement, so they aren’t.
According to hearsay (as in, a friend with family in the area heard it from a local OPP officer) there’s a section of 17 out near the Sault which is closed much more often than it should be these days because the firm subcontracted to keep it clear just isn’t up to the work. Either that firm needs to be replaced by someone who can do the job, or that section of road needs to be improved even before we worry about three-laning anything. And I doubt it’s the only spot with those kinds of problems.
Three-laning the highways won’t help with weather-related issues, no. It may help with transport trucks trying to pass each other on inappropriate stretches of highway running people off the road, though, and similar. Widening 11 and 17 has been recommended in multiple government studies for decades.
Which is what happens in most provinces that have white outs. I recently took a trip back to Saskatoon just after the big storm that hit in Feb and it was brutal. Coming back was even worse as I hit a white out starting in Portage la Prairie. All we could do was turn on our hazard lights and hope for the best.
And only 1 lane each way on that fully-twinned highway was open.