What is a life worth?
There’s no doubt twinning a Nova Scotia highway would save lives, but at more than $220 million, it would blow the province’s budget
Joe MacDonald had seen enough. It was Feb. 5, 2014, and the chief of the Barney’s River, N.S., volunteer fire department had spent the better part of a cold, grey-skied afternoon at an accident on Highway 104, prying the body of a 17-yearold from the twisted wreck of a minivan.
Christopher Karam had graduated from high school five days earlier. He worked at a Swiss Chalet, had a girlfriend, a twin brother, a mom and a dad, and was headed to Newfoundland’s Memorial University in the fall to study engineering.
Then he hit a tractor-trailer head-on and now he was dead.
Karam was killed on a 38-km stretch of single-lane highway between Sutherland’s River and Antigonish. It winds through scenery locals refer to as God’s country, with green hills rolling for miles, onto the sea, but all MacDonald ever sees when he drives the road on his way to work are the bodies.
There have been 14 since 2009, a parade of dead faces and devastating highway scenes that he carries around in his head and that compelled him to come home, on that February day in 2014, and write to Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil.
“How many more people need to die?” MacDonald wrote in an email, urging the province to twin the highway, whatever the cost. “I don’t know how many more people we can scrape off this highway.”
Chief MacDonald had long pleaded with officials the province needed to fix his deadly stretch of road. (There have been more than 321 accidents there since 2009.) A Facebook group and online petition sprang up after the email, calling for similar action.
McNeil’s Liberal government recently announced an engineering firm is conducting a feasibility study into twinning eight sections of single-lane highway throughout the province — 301.2 km in total, including the section that keeps MacDonald awake at night — and turning them into toll highways.
The problem? Money. Twinning would cost $1.5 billion. That is a steep capital outlay for a government projecting a $98-million deficit for 2015-16.
With bottomless riches, governments can, in theory, fix everything. With limited funds and, in Nova Scotia, an aging tax base, they must pick and choose, and every decision has repercussions. Unpopular decisions — a poll of 400 Nova Scotians from November 2014 revealed 51.9 per cent were not in favour of toll highways — can lose elections.
So while the stories Joe MacDonald and the families of the crash victims tell are of unspeakable heartache and loss, there is also the question of public policy, priority and political will. What it can be reduced to is: how much is saving the life of a 17-year-old worth?
Paul de Leur, a road safety engineer, attempted to answer that question in a report completed in 2010 for the Capital Region Intersection Safety Partnership, an Edmonton-based organization committed to enhancing road safety. De Leur broke the cost of fatal accidents into two categories: direct and indirect.
Direct costs included property damage, emergency response and medical services, legal and funeral costs, lost productivity at work, travel delay and environmental costs. Calculating direct costs involved the simple adding of numbers. For the greater Edmonton area, it was $181,335 for each fatal accident.
Indirect costs are much more complicated to quantify, since they encompass all those messy human emotions — pain, suffering, grief — most deeply felt after the tragic loss of a loved one.
What de Leur found was our “willingness-to-pay,” that is, the amount of money an individual would be willing to pay to reduce the risk of death for themselves and others, worked out to $5,362,458 per fatality. To avoid injury, the number was $95,032. To protect property: zero dollars.
Which brings us back to Nova Scotia, a cash-starved province with a deficit problem. Geoff MacLellan, the transportation minister, comes from Glace Bay, Cape Breton, and commutes home weekends from Halifax, driving the route monitored by Chief MacDonald and the other volunteer firefighters in Barney’s River.
MacLellan has dri ve n through snow, sleet, in the dark and in the howling Nova Scotia wind, and believes, “without question, a straight, divided highway is your best option for engineered safety.”
But he also knows the numbers. His department’s annual highway budget for capital projects is $220 million, while the preliminary cost estimates for twinning the stretch between Antigonish and Sutherland’s River would “be north of $220 million.”
In other words, if twinning happens, the province won’t be picking up the tab, hence all the talk of tolls, which can be an uncomfortable topic in Nova Scotia political circles.
The province has one twinned toll highway, the Cobequid Pass, between Thomson Station and Masstown. Twenty-five years ago, the area was regarded as a “valley of death” for drivers and the scene of 52 fatal accidents in a decade.
Then-premier John Savage’s Liberals championed the privately funded project to twin the highway, which opened in 1997. The voters of Cumberland County then repaid the government for what many viewed, and still do, as a punitive local tax through tolling — $2 each way — by not voting a Liberal into the provincial legislature for the next six elections.
But MacLellan remains undeterred.
“Fundamentally, if you want to drastically increase safety and take away the ability for those catastrophic head-on collisions and fatal-- ities, then you have to look at large-scale twinning — and our only option is to look at introducing tolls,” he says. “It is a taboo in this province, but ...”
But Chief Joe MacDonald isn’t a politician. He is a people person, and would happily plunk $2 into a toll bucket twice a day not to have his pager go off at noon, say, on an otherwise perfect Nova Scotia summer afternoon, and feel a chill as he climbs into his truck and heads to the 104 to deal with another crash.
“These aren’t just statistics we are talking about,” he says. “These are lives, because we are not just talking about the deaths, we are talking about life, and how each death changes a family.”
Sandra Carver got to work on Friday Oct. 17, 2014, and was peeling through her todo list as the recreation coordinator at a seniors’ home while thinking what she always did on Fridays: her husband, Ben, would be coming home to her and the boys in Sheet Harbour from his job in Antigonish that night.
Then her boss came around the corner. An RCMP officer was waiting to see her. Ben Carver had been killed at 5:30 a.m. in a head-on collision on the 104. The road was wet and foggy. He was 37.
“My two boys are what keep me going now, and I have my moments, but I have to be strong for them,” Sandra Carver says, her voice cracking. “I loved everything about Ben.”
She sees him in both the boys. Austin, now 10, is always fiddling with things, trying to figure them out. Alex, a year younger, is full of mischief and fun. They always think of others first, just like their dad always did.
Carver would give anything to have him back. Wouldn’t you?