S-bend on Highway 20 is deadly, residents say
Speed often a factor on ‘dangerous’ curve
THOROLD — Alysha Browning has long been concerned about the roadway behind her house.
For the last seven years, she’s lived on Clifton Street, tucked in a small residential community between the Allanburg Bridge and the S-bend of Highway 20. For the most part, it’s a quiet neighbourhood.
However, at any given moment, Browning knows that quiet can be broken by the screeching of tires, the crunch of a vehicle hitting a guardrail or the thud of one landing in a ditch.
“It’s such a dangerous curve,” she said. “People ignore the speed reduction and come through the bend too fast. It happens too often.”
Browning recalls one night when a car careened into the ditch behind her house.
“I could see it from my backyard and you could hear the radio blaring, but you didn’t know if the driver was hurt or worse. You could just hear the radio playing as if nothing happened. It was eerie,” she said.
In that case, the driver was uninjured.
In September, there were two accidents along that stretch of road — including a fatal one.
On Sept. 7, a 54-year-old Hamilton woman was killed in a singlevehicle collision after she lost control of the vehicle she was driving eastbound on Highway 20. Her Hyundai Santa Fe struck the guardrail and crossed the westbound lane of traffic before coming to a rest in the ditch on the west side of the road.
“It is an area that we have been called out to many times,” Thorold Fire Chief Brian Dickson said, noting the fire department is called out to assist with serious motor-vehicle collisions.
The S-bend on Highway 20 is one of the three most frequent areas where they are called in to assist.
Browning said she and her neighbours have raised concerns regarding the dangers of this stretch of road for years, asking municipal and regional politicians for action.
Three years ago, Thorold Mayor Ted Luciani, Regional Coun. Henry D’Angela and Ron Tripp, Niagara Region’s commissioner of public works, went to the site to hear the neighbours’ complaints.
“It’d be great to see guardrails on both sides of the road, something that draws drivers’ attention to the reduced speed limit, and maybe, if possible, a straightening of the road so there isn’t this dangerous curve,” Browning said. “Something has to change.”
In September 2016, the region’s public works committee received a report outlining three locations in need of review, identified by regional councillors as a result of constituent concerns. Highway 20, between Allanport Road and Centre Street in Thorold, was one of the areas identified because of concerns over motor-vehicle collisions.
“A concern was raised by a local resident regarding the frequency of collisions occurring along this section of roadway. On a few occasions the vehicles have ended up in residents’ backyards,” the report says.
“This has been raised many times at the committee level,” D’Angela said. “As far as I knew, it was in staff’s hands and we were waiting back on an update.”
In June 2017, a report to the region’s public works committee recommended a speed limit reduction on Highway 20 from Allanport Road to 545 metres west of that road. At the time, the posted speed limit for Highway 20 was 80 km/h, with a reduction to 60 km/h and then 50 km/h approaching the Allanburg Bridge and crossing the Welland Canal. However, the transition point for the change in speed was halfway through the S-bend curve.
The report identified that when the bridge was up, queues could often extend well into the section currently signed at 60 km/h, and that section was considered to be insufficient in both length and sight distances to allow for an adequate transition.
“In that report, a couple of things dealt with the issues brought up by concerned residents, including the speed — reducing it from 60 to 50 — and adding a guardrail,” said Frank Tassone, the region’s associate director of transportation and engineering.
Those new speed limits, he said, have been posted in the area.
“At the end of the day, though, it’s about drivers’ habits and that can be a very difficult thing for us to control,” Tassone said.
The region has also installed new LED lighting along the stretch of roadway to increase visibility, and it partnered with Niagara Regional Police on speed and alcohol enforcement within the area.
The request for an additional guardrail was approved in the 2017 budget, Tassone noted, but a contract for that work has yet to be awarded.
“We were supposed to have a guardrail on the north side of those curves installed two years ago,” said Luciani, who as mayor of Thorold also sits on regional council. “As far as I’m concerned, we worked very hard to have that put in the budget; it just hasn’t been done.”
Even with the reduced speed limits in the area, it remains a difficult area to address traffic concerns, he said.
From June 2016 to June 2018, there were 16 collisions on the road between Allanport Road and Centre Street, east of the lift bridge — eight in 2016 and eight in 2017, the region says.
“Even myself as a cyclist who uses the Greater Niagara Circle Route, and I approach the bridge to cross the road to the other side of Highway 20, I see people come flying over that bridge. They’re speeding like crazy,” Luciani said.
“I’ve been after them for years to get things slowed down around there because it’s dangerous for cyclists.”
Browning said with the increase in housing development along Highway 20 in Niagara Falls and Fonthill, there’s been a visible increase in traffic along the roadway. With more cars frequenting that stretch of road, she’d like to see the safety concerns addressed head-on.
“We just don’t want to see any more tragic accidents here,” she said.