Residents voice views on highway redesign

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This article was published 17/07/2024 (472 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CARBERRY — Residents packed a community hall Tuesday evening in the town near the infamous intersection on the Trans-Canada Highway that claimed the lives of 17 seniors in June 2023.

The open house focused on how to redesign the intersection of the Trans-Canada and Highway 5 to prevent a similar tragedy.

Residents, truckers, first responders and local officials engaged in lively discussions on the options put forward by the Manitoba government.

“People want to see something done with that intersection,” Carberry Mayor Ray Muirhead said. “This is not just a year ago — you can’t forget the people who have lost their lives out on that intersection for decades.”

Muirhead said he isn’t surprised by the large turnout. He said the intersection and the lives it has claimed were on community members’ minds long before the tragic crash. RCMP announced last month that charges wouldn’t be laid against the driver of the minibus that transported the seniors because of his traumatic brain injury.

The government has promised to spend $12 million to improve safety at the intersection in the short term.

Premier Wab Kinew and Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Lisa Naylor spoke in January about the results of an independent safety report on the intersection.

Three intersection improvement options were presented in the report, prepared by WSP Canada Inc. They include a roundabout, widening the median at the intersection and a new “RCUT” intersection design that is widely used in the U.S. in which drivers turn onto a main road and make a U-turn at a one-way median.

The premier has said the report shows the safest option is the roundabout, while the RCUT intersection is comparable to an interchange in terms of safety.

Tuesday’s meeting is part of the public consultation process.

“These three options are safe options that were presented by the premier in January,” Dustin Booy, director of highway engineering services for Manitoba Transportation and Infrastructure, told the Brandon Sun. “There are other options.”

Booy said the province will take comments gathered at the open house, along with online feedback, and will share them with the public as well as use them to help inform further design options. Those design options will then be presented for comment in the fall at another public meeting.

“We’ll be evaluating all the options against a certain set of criteria,” he said. “It’s not just safety. Safety is a priority, but we also need to consider things like traffic operations, environmental impacts, impacts to the land, accesses and cost.”

This process will allow the preferred option to become clear, Booy said.

The report found there were 29 collisions at the intersection from 2012 to 2021. Forty-five per cent of the collisions involved a fatality or injury, suggesting that high-severity collisions are a problem at the intersection. Of the 29 collisions, one was fatal, 12 caused injuries and 16 caused only property damage.

The majority of injury-related collisions had predominant contributing factors of either failing to yield the right-of-way or leaving a stop sign before safe to do so, the report said.

The report also identified seven key road-safety issues at the intersection, including the narrowness of the median, which does not allow transport trucks or buses to stop within the median to cross the highway in two stages, and the lack of ability to make left turns easily.

Long and heavy trucks account for 28 per cent of the traffic and 18 per cent of left-turning traffic in all directions, the report said.

Many who attended the open house were truck drivers or said they were familiar with the trucking demands for farms.

Al Fehr, a resident of Austin who is a retired commercial truck driver, said an overpass would be the best option.

He said he’s driven through the intersection thousands of times.

“I don’t like the idea of a traffic circle. It’s dangerous, especially with high-speed traffic coming into it,” he said.

He also suggested a system he has seen in the U.S. that includes a sign equipped with cameras that lets drivers know if there’s oncoming traffic.

The province has said that an interchange or overpass could also be built but that it’s a long-term solution with a 20-year-plus timeline and a cost estimate of around $100 million.

One of the three options already presented would be a “medium-term” improvement to reduce collision risk.

Others from Carberry, like Stacey Wotton and Ray Tolton, a longtime farmer and truck driver, said that putting traffic lights in the intersection would help. They both acknowledged, however, that it could back up traffic, especially around harvest time.

Wotton, who works for a potato farming company, said the intersection makes it difficult both for a large truck to stop in the median and turn around without impacting traffic.

Tolton, who used to work the farmland right beside the crossing, said he witnessed collisions there long before the June 15, 2023 tragedy.

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“They would never have done (this redesign process) if it was not for that bad accident,” he said. “I can remember all kinds of accidents.”

Traffic signals and lowered speed limits were options that were considered by the report authors, but evidence in the report suggested those measures would not be effective at the intersection.

Manitoba Transportation and Infrastructure anticipates that the selected intersection layout will be chosen later this year and the functional design report will be completed in early 2025. Work on the intersection is scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2026.

A provincial standards review after the fatal crash resulted in short-term improvements that have already been completed, such as “Important Intersection” signs with flashing amber lights, additional speed limit signs to reinforce the 100 km/h limit and a refurbishing of rumble strips and pavement markings.

— Brandon Sun