by Mathieu Powell.
Writing Impacts.
Mac McCleary said, “Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you and scorn in the one ahead.” That’s especially true in a traffic jam.
Life is good on Vancouver Island. We have only one traffic jam, but it’s a hell of a big one. Vancouver Islanders who work in Victoria and live in Westshore communities have angst for just one intersection; the McKenzie interchange.
People from Greater Victoria all the way up to Campbell River have been complaining about this intersection since the eighties, but projects to ameliorate the bottleneck never got off the ground. The intersection is in municipality of Saanich and they have not been willing, rightly so, to foot the bill because commuters affected by the traffic congestion come from neighbouring municipalities. Fast forward thirty years to 2015 and 90,000 cars cram through this intersection every day!
Well, once again, as if by magic, there is suddenly a ton of cash and the political will to fix the problem. The provincial and federal government have earmarked 85 million to build a new interchange at MacKenzie. As BC NDP Leader John Horgan said, “Whenever you see the asphalt truck pulling up, you know there’s an election just around the corner.”
The project will begin in 2016 and take two years to complete. B.C. Transportation Minister Todd Stone alluded to the challenge of what to do with all that traffic while the new intersection is being built. He said moving traffic will be “an interesting and complex project.”
Hmmm. To me, that sounds like code for “you can expect your commute to work and home again to take a hell of a lot longer.”
It will be interesting to see what commuting choices Islanders make when it gets tougher to travel on Highway One. Will BC Transit need to put a few more buses on the route? Will there be an explosion of cyclists as people decide it’s better to keep moving under one’s own power rather than sit in a highway parking lot? Perhaps more of us will decide to jump into our neighbour’s passenger seats? A CBC survey found 83 percent of Canadian commuters drive alone, so if more people carpool – say eleven percent – that would equate to 10,000 fewer cars on the road waiting their turn to get through the McKenzie intersection.
Perhaps our infrastructure improvement will afford an excellent opportunity to improve our health or get to know our neighbours better!