It was tragic, but not necessarily surprising.
The crash earlier this month that claimed the life of a 37-year-old man from Coaldale took place along a stretch of Highway 2 that has seen more than its fair share of carnage. The area in question has become so prone to accidents, in fact, that the provincial government announced last year that it would be closing the medians at 306, 338 and 370 avenues this summer in an effort to reduce collisions.
Those closures didn’t go ahead as planned, the government saying they have been postponed due to stakeholder feedback. So, we’ve got a situation where government officials identified a dangerous area of highway, came up with a plan to address it, but shelved the initiative when a segment of the population pushed back, likely because closing the medians would have caused an inconvenience.
And now that treacherous stretch of road has claimed another life.
It’s not difficult to draw a straight line between that intersection being closed and the driver of the Aug. 1 crash still being alive, a conclusion that’s more than likely to form a legal case against the province sometime in the future. After all, it's one thing to be unaware of a potentially deadly situation, but it’s quite another to identify it, as well as a solution, but then decide to do nothing instead.
There’s absolutely no doubt that closing the medians at the three intersections in question would make things difficult for those with a need to cross the highway on a regular basis, but that in itself isn’t adequate justification for keeping them open. Surely safety must trump inconvenience.
The obvious answer is an interchange, which would solve both issues, but that project hasn’t even reached the funding stage yet, let alone the lengthy construction phase that would follow.
That's time we don’t have on our side.