Graham MacKenzie was supposed to be at a wedding in Duncan Saturday afternoon.
Then came word that a 9 a.m. crash had closed the highway through Goldstream Park. The road wasn’t expected to re-open until late afternoon.
The alternatives weren’t much of an alternative. Finlayson Arm Road was choked with an hours-long tailback. The twisting, turning route through Port Renfrew and Lake Cowichan was more than 200 kilometres long. The little Mill Bay ferry was overwhelmed; it carries just 22 cars and takes an hour and 10 minutes to shuttle to Brentwood Bay and back. The Malahat sees 25,000 vehicles a day. You can do the math.
So MacKenzie and three friends jumped in a truck and made for Swartz Bay, paid $84 for the Fulford Harbour ferry, drove up Salt Spring, caught another boat to Crofton, then headed south to Duncan in time for the reception. “We missed the ceremony.”
Plenty of others were in the same boat, literally. The Crofton ferry was dotted with well-dressed passengers trying to get to weddings.
Weddings, doctors’ appointments, flights — thousands of people with places to go were stranded by the hours-long highway closings that followed three serious crashes on the Malahat this weekend. Many wondered why the cops did not just drag the damaged vehicles onto the shoulder and unplug the bottleneck.
The short answer is that they can’t do that. “We have a legal and ethical responsibility to investigate each of these crashes like any other potential crime scene,” writes RMCP Cpl. Darren Lagan in an opinion piece on page A8 of today’s TC. The police don’t want to spend any longer working a rain-soaked, gory accident site than they have to, but serious collisions demand serious investigations involving techniques that are both painstaking and time-consuming.
The same approach applies no matter if the crash is on the Malahat, the Pat Bay Highway or in downtown Victoria, the difference being that when the Malahat is blocked, there’s no easy detour. A 2007 study done for the Transportation Ministry concluded the Malahat isn’t particularly crash-prone for a highway of its type, but when it is closed, Vancouver Island’s lifeline is severed.
It might not happen as often as you think. There is, on average, an accident a week on the 20-kilometre stretch between Bamberton and the West Shore Parkway, just south of Goldstream Park, but the Transportation Ministry said Monday that since Sept. 1, 2012, only 10 of those — including the three this past weekend — were serious enough to close the highway for more than an hour.
The longest blockage was in April 2011 when a fuel truck spilled 42,000 litres of gas into the Goldstream River, closing the Malahat in both directions for 22 hours. In July 2000, another fuel-truck crash, this one fatal, shut the highway for 19.
The government keeps tweaking the road, trying to make it safer. The ministry just spent $15 million widening the highway and adding a concrete median barrier to a 2.3-kilometre stretch — including the notorious NASCAR Corner — between the summit and Shawnigan Lake Road to the south. Design work to complete the barrier section between Shawnigan Lake Road and Aspen Road is underway. Median barriers now divide more than half of the Malahat.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Big Fix, though. That 2007 study examined 19 options — everything from building bridges to double-decking the Trans-Canada — but discarded all as too expensive, too goofy or too politically unpalatable. Even if the public were willing to accept the environmental cost of widening the highway, blasting a $400-million hole through Goldstream Park, it would still leave drivers with no alternative route when the highway is closed by a crash.
A bridge to the Saanich Peninsula would cost between $700 million and $1.2 billion, and wouldn't take drivers where they wanted to go. A new highway through the Sooke Hills Wilderness Preserve could cost $400 million. Building one west of Victoria’s watershed would cost up to $1.4 billion. A Duncan-Victoria rail link would cost $140 per passenger per trip. Those are all 2007 figures.
The province says its 10-year transportation plan recognizes drivers’ frustration and that it is “committed to working with provincial policing agencies and our other incident-response partners to reduce the duration of highway closures after crashes and other serious incidents.” Might be easier said than done.
