Highway policies must move into 21st century

Improved driver training, rebuilding intersections key, says Michael Wright.

The catastrophe at the intersection of highways 35 and 335 has everybody asking questions: Why did this happen? Will it happen again? How can we stop this from happening again?

The Humboldt Broncos tragedy was a natural outcome of how we organize our highway transportation.

Our rural roads and intersections were originally designed and built for horse and buggy, and then covered in blacktop. Our family farm, export-driven culture required that young people be allowed to use heavy machines as soon as they were physically capable, regardless of their level of training.

This heritage combined with modern technology has created an environment where collisions of this type will keep happening.

The changes in technology have been transformative. We move by truck and trailer the same heavy loads that 30 years ago we used to move by train. The trucks are fast, powerful, and unlike trains, share the roads with all of us.

Despite this shift, the training and regulation of truckers is still a shadow of that of railway workers. For most types of trucking, the only legally required training is to pass a road test. This is the similar to the level of training we give 16-year-olds to prepare them to drive the family car. Ontario alone requires mandatory training for truckers. Saskatchewan must introduce similar rules and make our shared roads safer.

Change is hard. Building local training and certification for trucking will not be easy or cheap. Safe transportation is expensive. We will pay more when we go shopping and our exports will be less competitive internationally.

In exchange, those of us who work driving trucks will have safer, higher paid and less stressful lives. The rest of us will be safer on the highway, and our children will be more likely to make it home at night. Change will be good.

But even with the best training and regulation, leaving to fate the decision of a driver to stop or not according to a sign is still a gamble. Onehundred-km/h traffic streams meeting at right angles are inherently dangerous. One solution is to replace the right-angles with roundabouts. Their circular geometry eliminates any possibility of the lethal T-bone collision. Navigating them requires the driver to slow down, by design. Instead of leaving fate to chance, we control it.

Rebuilding our rural intersections will be much harder than regulating trucking. Not because we lack of knowledge or money, but because of the structure of our decisionmaking process.

The intersection of highways 35 and 335 is a local matter. Most of the people who use the intersection live near it. But the decisions about it are not taken by locals. They are taken by civil servants in Regina. As dedicated and caring as they are, they must consider infrastructure decisions from a soulless, cost-benefit perspective. The intersection of highways 35 and 335 will never be a priority. Our government is not capable of undertaking a structural change like redesigning our road network so that it is safe for the 21st century.

Better practices are available, but they require the provincial government to give up some of its power to the benefit of local authorities. Local governments that empower people to take control of their lives are the long-term solution. Communities are where the people live, and that is where control should reside. Our model of governance, developed for a prior society, is badly outdated. We own the intersection of highways 35 and 335, but who is accountable for fixing it? Nobody.

Until we have local governments that are empowered to both make and fund these critical decisions, nothing will change.

Rebuilding our rural intersections will be much harder than regulating trucking.