Spear manvoices displeasure with highway woes
Mayor Chris Spearman says repairs on Highway 3 have been poorly considered by Alberta Highways, and are causing substantial disruptions for no real benefit.
“We were trying to encourage (Alberta Highways) that if they were going to repair the bridge, they should be widening it to at least three lanes,” says Spearman.
“The AE Engineering department report of 2009 recommended a third lane on that bridge, but the bridge is only going to be made into a two-lane bridge — basically restoring it to the 1960 conditions ... They had the option of actually addressing the capacity issue of that bridge, and chose not to. And that is disappointing. It’s a major inconvenience, and there will be very little benefit once the work is done.”
Spearman says the delays caused by the bridge work have substantial economic impact, and should only have been timed with a major upgrade.
“On Bridge Drive we have an illegal off-ramp,” Spearman states. “That has been acknowledged. It’s a 25metre on-ramp, and 25 metres is not enough to access an 80 km/h lane highway, and a third lane would have addressed that safety issue. What’s going to happen is we are going to spend money twice in the end to fix that problem ... They could have made a better choice, and we spent most of last year encouraging them to put the third lane on at least the eastbound section.”
Spearman does not know why the provincial government chose to ignore the advice of local officials and the advice of the engineers on this matter.
“You can see all the backup there, all the commercial trucks loaded with goods heading to export markets, and the delays that are being caused,” he says. “Highway 3 is a major component of the CanAmex, and it is disappointing to see the bottlenecks and inconvenience which has been caused.
“And it is going to take four months to do the repair work on that bridge. It inhibits the economy of Lethbridge and southwestern Alberta, and really all of Alberta which uses the CanAmex highway to ship goods through Lethbridge down to the United States.”
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