Canada, we have an infrastructure problem

Evacuation of Fort McMurray shows what needs to be done

As Fort McMurray burned, the world realized that there was only one road in or out of town. It is commonly known as Suicide 63. And it is an infrastructure disaster.

The statistics on Highway 63 are alarming: In a five-year period, it saw 46 deaths and many more injuries. (One particularly horrific crash in 2012 killed seven people.) According to the Edmonton Journal’s database on the subject, 24 per cent of the crashes are between automobiles and semi-trucks. The winter and holiday months are particularly fatal, as ice and alcohol mix to create a deadly combination. In December 2008, there were five fatalities. The next month, there were seven. According to Coalition for a Safer 63 and 881, an organization that wants the highways to be made safer through a series of improvements, 190 people have died on the highways between 2003 and 2015.

The story of 63 isn’t just about the need for divided highways (though much of Highway 63 is now twinned), or more rest stops, or larger teams of first responders. All of those help. And activists in Alberta have been asking for those things for years, with some success. But as we saw during the evacuation of Fort McMurray, more must be done. Which brings us to the larger problem: infrastructure investment and development.

As American comedian John Oliver pointed out recently, infrastructure isn’t sexy. But it’s desperately necessary. And disasters like the one in Fort McMurray are evidence of that. As the fire encroached on the highway, residents who were performing their civic duty and following the evacuation order wondered if they had escaped their homes just to die in their vehicles. Highway 63 presented a classic bottleneck problem: As the evacuation order expanded, residents further along the highway entered it, meaning that traffic slowed and the evacuation itself crawled.

And Highway 881 took its toll: 15-year-old Emily Ryan and her stepmother’s nephew, Aaron Hodgson, both died in a collision with a tractor-trailer on the evacuation route, just south of Lac La Biche.

Ten years ago, Highway 881 was just a gravel road. The success of the oilsands made it profitable to pave. It runs through both rural communities and boreal forest. According to the Coalition for a Safer 63 and 881, it experiences lower traffic volume, but is the only real detour route when there has been an accident on 63 — or when there is a major evacuation of the oilsands area. In many ways 881 is a natural consequence of the oilsands’ success: What was a local access road became a highway seemingly overnight, and now the highway itself has the worst of both worlds.

This isn’t to say that Alberta hasn’t invested in improving the roads. In 2012, the province pledged almost $1.1 billion to an effort to improve both 63 and 881. The goal was more divided highway segments, more study into the needs of the corridors, and more passing lanes for drivers stuck behind semi-trucks.

However, the province did not fund things such as rest stops, which are crucial to preventing accidents related to both alcohol consumption and simple exhaustion.

Highway 63 is a long, uninterrupted stretch of Alberta wilderness — it’s boring to drive, and that makes it dangerous in terms of sleepy drivers and frustrated drivers inclined toward lead feet. The province wanted to wait for the free market to handle the job, meaning that they depended on the divided highway to draw developer dollars. By contrast, Ontario’s ONRoute system of rest stops is a public-private partnership between the province and hospitality management providers.

As more boom towns arise, provinces all over Canada must take infrastructure into the equation. It’s not a sexy problem. But it is a dangerous one. And building, maintaining, and renewing infrastructure is a series of shovelready projects that can only do good things for Canada’s economy. And its people.