A 2021 report indicated that 1.1 per cent of motor vehicle collisions in the Timiskaming District were fatal. The provincial average is 0.3 per cent.
Forty-nine per cent of those crashes occurred on Highway 11, according to the 2021 Vital Signs report, a communities’ health and well-being document released by the Temiskaming Foundation.
The causes ranged from inattention (50.4 per cent) to speed (25.4 per cent) to animal-related collisions (21.0 per cent) to alcohol (3.2 per cent).
Between 2003 and 2019, people within the Timiskaming Health Region made more trips to the emergency room from injuries suffered during vehicle collisions, at a rate per 100,000 population, than the rest of Ontario.
Those telling statistics are unacceptable to Mark Wilson and the GEMS (Going the Extra Mile for Safety) group in Temiskaming. The committee of the local chamber of commerce has been campaigning for safer highways in northeastern Ontario since 2015.
“Pretty significant,” commented Wilson, a highway safety advocate and Temiskaming Shores municipal councillor. He was president of the Temiskaming Foundation when the report came out.
The provincial road safety reports that he wades through usually contain stats that are two years old. But through his own research, Wilson said the current picture on Highway 11 hasn’t changed.
“Locally, we are still seeing regular head-on, crossover crashes that have taken people’s lives,” said Wilson. “People are still getting killed and seriously injured in these types of crashes and it is still much too regular.”
The path toward safer highways in northeastern Ontario took another piecemeal step forward last week with the award of $6.5-million environmental assessment and design study contract to AECOM Canada for an upcoming pilot of a 2+1 highway design. The two locations for a pilot on Highway 11 were selected by the Ministry of Transportation (MTO) back in 2021.
An MTO spokesperson said the EA and design study should take two years to complete. After that, the next stage is detailed design, followed by tendering and awarding a construction contract for the pilot.
The pace of progress suits Wilson just fine.
“We’re really pleased that this contract’s been awarded,” he said, adding hat the ministry is sticking within the timeframe that’s been discussed.
If the government follows through, this will be the first 2+1 system in North America.
Over the years, Highway 11, north of North Bay and all the way west to Nipigon, has increasingly become a hazardous two-lane stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway. There’s been a dangerous mix of long-haul truckers and local traffic, complicated by speed, inclement weather and slippery road conditions that have caused frequent crashes, closing the highway for extended periods — with no detour.
The MTO wouldn’t support regional calls for a four-lane highway since the daily traffic count doesn’t meet their criteria for a divided highway.
In lieu of that, Wilson and his committee pitched a 2+1 model that he’d observed in Europe, a three-lane road with continuous and alternating passing lanes every two to five kilometres, which are longer than the intermittent and standard 1.6-kilometre passing lanes in Ontario. The added feature is a median that separates traffic going opposing directions.
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The whole idea behind 2+1 is to eliminate head-on collisions from vehicles crossing the centre line, and thus increase survive-ability.
“It gives drivers a clear direction and makes them do the right thing,” said Wilson. “A roundabout is a classic safe system design. It takes speed and kinetic energy out of crashes. That’s a whole principle around this. You’re trying to take energy out of a crash so humans, who are fragile, can survive.”
The MTO initially rejected 2+1 but persistent pressure on the province by the GEMS groups and the Ontario Good Roads Association was enough to sway the politicians to reconsider.
By December 2021, the ministry was willing to test-drive the concept with a pilot at two places on Highway 11, putting out a tender for consulting engineers in highway design.
Two plus one was introduced in Sweden more than 20 years ago as part of zero-fatality highway initiative. The successful model has since been adopted by many other countries in Europe and Australia. The Swedes have modified the design in transitioning away from a steel cable barrier system to a semi-rigid steel one.
Demonstrating a more than 50 per cent safety improvement in their rural road system, the Swedes now have have 3,000 kilometres of 2+1 roadways.
“Although there was resistance to it (in Ontario), they saw the data and they recognized it was a more efficient way to build a safe highway in our environment,” said Wilson, who served on a ministry site selection committee for the pilot.
Though he didn’t have a say on where the trials would take place, he acted as a resource person to connect Ontario bureaucrats via Zoom with their counterparts in Sweden, Ireland and Australia.
The site selection committee has now disbanded and Wilson came away “impressed with the process,” crediting ministry staff with the “very balanced perspective” they took in identifying sections of highway in Ontario that would be suitable for the trial based on safety performance — meaning the number of crashes.
How long the pilot program will last and what specific measurables will be taken, Wilson couldn’t say. The design will be modified to suit the regional environment and Ontario standards.
The MTO presented some insight on its plans for 2+1 during a webinar for the Transportation Association of Canada back in May.
“We want this to be another model in the highway system in Ontario for rural and Northern Ontario,” Wilson said, particularly for those highways where four-laning wouldn’t be considered.
He believes 2+1 roads can be made just “as safe” as a four-lane divided highway, built at a lower cost, and without resorting to extensive blasting.
As a member of a local road safety committee connected to the health unit, Wilson suggests more should be done to address the speeding issue by introducing automated enforcement using cameras and speed-measuring devices to detect and capture images of vehicles travelling in excess of posted limits.
“If we took 10 kilometres off driving speeds, we would see a tremendous drop in fatalities. It’s not just the impact of the crash but the reaction time.”
Unfortunately, there’s an acceptance in Ontario to go faster than the posted speed, Wilson said. The culture needs to change, he said, by designing safer roads in such a way that it gives drivers the “proper direction to do the right thing.”
