OSOYOOS TIMES-March 24, 2010

By Paul Everest – Osoyoos Times

Several local leaders who attended an open house on the planned expansion of Hwy. 97 north of Osoyoos expressed concerns about the amount of money being spent on the project.
The provincial Transportation Ministry hosted an information session at the Osoyoos Legion on March 17 focused on the proposal to build four new lanes between Graveyard Hill and Dead Man’s Lake.
Although plans to improve traffic flow on the highway between Osoyoos and Oliver have been in the works for a number of years, a renewed commitment to provide safer passing opportunities for motorists was announced by the province in November when the federal and provincial governments pledged $8 million towards the project.
Right now the concept is to create a new, four-lane stretch of highway roughly 2.3 kilometres in length while turning the existing roadway into a frontage road.
Boundary-Similkameen MLA John Slater has said the main goal of the project is to make the corridor safer by providing separate turning lanes onto the frontage road and keeping farm equipment and other vehicles from properties bordering the highway from entering and exiting the highway at unsafe accesses.
This stretch of road was chosen, Slater said, because there are no highway accesses on the east side of the road and therefore no frontage road would be necessary on that side of Hwy. 97.
The most recent plans include a turnoff between two fruit stands on the west side of the road, an eastbound turnoff at Road 22 and a four-way intersection at 202 Avenue.
The turnoff between the fruit stands was recently incorporated into the highway expansion plans to address the concerns of the stands’ owners who argued that motorists would bypass their businesses if new lanes were built.
Mark Pendergraft, the Regional District Okanagan-Similkameen (RDOS) director for rural Area A, said he had mixed emotions about the highway expansion plan.
He said it was an “awful lot of money to put towards” an effort to get motorists where they’re going 15 to 20 seconds faster and added that the cash could have been used for other needs in the area.
Pendergraft also said, however, that he was happy that the concerns of the fruit stand owners were addressed in the most recent plans.
Osoyoos Mayor Stu Wells said he feels the project could be “creating accident situations rather than solving one,”  since people will have to merge back into two lanes at a dangerous corner at the north end of the corridor near Dead Man’s Lake and on a stretch that is notorious for black ice conditions at the south end.
He added that “six lanes of asphalt with dividers and barriers is an awful large footprint for a greenbelt area” and could alter the character of the South Okanagan area.
The $8 million, Wells said, could be spent on an aquatic centre shared by Osoyoos and Oliver or on upgrading local hospitals.
The biggest problem with the highway expansion plan, Wells said, is the trails component.
The ministry has pledged to build a two-metre-wide trail next to the shoulder of the road on the east side of the highway and leave space along the rest of the corridor for the trail to be expanded down the road.
Wells said it’s “completely unacceptable” that the ministry won’t commit to building a trail the full distance of the corridor since hiking and biking trails could help with tourism efforts in the area.
“Why on earth, when they are there with the equipment and the fill, would they not create that trail?” he said.
Allan Patton, rural director for Area C (Oliver) and chair of the Okanagan-Similkameen Airshed Coalition, said he was concerned the expansion project will eventually lead to the construction of four lanes from Penticton to the U.S. border, something that would “destroy” downtown Oliver.
He said the $8 million committed to the project could go towards purchasing 16 buses and improving public transit in the South Okanagan.
“We should be talking about ways to reduce traffic,” he said, adding that the coalition is seeking the support of the ministry for more public transit and less highway expansion projects.
Patton and Wells also said the corridor of Hwy. 97 in question is not unsafe and the crash rate there is actually below the provincial average.
Tom Freeman, a project development manager with the Transportation Ministry, said the accident rate for the Dead Man’s Lake corridor is 0.54 accidents per million vehicle kilometres while the provincial average is 0.61.
According to Transportation Ministry statistics, there were 40 collisions between 1999 and 2008 on the stretch of Hwy. 97 from the north end of Osoyoos Lake to Dead Man’s Lake, including one fatality, 13 injuries and 26 cases of property damage.
The fatal crash happened on Oct. 15, 2006 at 6:15 p.m., roughly 90 metres south of 204th Avenue.
Freeman said this stretch of road “wasn’t showing up as a collision-prone location,” but added that the expansion plan could still reduce the collision rate by 35 per cent.
Freeman said, however, that the collision rate for the highway just north and just south of where the expansion would happen is 0.85 accidents per million vehicle kilometres which is above the provincial average.
He added that the purpose of the passing lane is not just to reduce collisions, but to relieve congestion.
Ministry personnel also used the open house as an opportunity to provide the public with information about what environmental effects the expansion project will have.
An environmental assessment carried out by the province in 2005 indicated that tiger salamanders and Great Basin spadefoot toads were present in wetlands near the intersection of Hwy. 97 and Road 22.
Environmental coordinators working with the Transportation Ministry said the ministry is taking a “cautious approach” when it comes to the wetlands.
New, larger wetlands will be created away from the intersection and there will be strict policies on where construction machines can go in relation to environmentally sensitive areas.
The ministry’s environmental coordinators said machines will be cleaned to prevent invasive species from entering the wetlands, multiple spill-cleanup kits will be placed at the construction site and equipment will be checked daily for leaks.
Work on the expansion project could begin this spring.
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