I’m an Eagle Bay resident, and I am furious—$3.3 million of our hard-earned money spent on improving the Balmoral-TCH (Trans-Canada Highway) intersection for through traffic, while antagonizing and further isolating the communities affected by this?
I worry for the drivers of our children’s school busses.
This change to the driving pattern is not a change we are eventually going to grow accustomed to. It’s bad. It’s going to stay bad, and we are going to stay frustrated and angry.
Worse than creating less-than-safe-access to the highway for the ever-increasing number of us in the communities who need it, I don’t see this change actually making an overall difference in the safety of the Balmoral-TCH intersection for those turning eastbound.
Visibility to the west is still restricted by the hill, the merge lane is near non-existent and the barricades add a false sense of security to through traffic; potentially making it seem OK to pick up speed and exceed the stated speed limit on the straightaway after cresting the hill.
Read more: Letter: Balmoral Road/Highway 1 intersection “improvements” don’t impress
Read more: Concerns remain for reconfigured Highway 1/Balmoral intersection
The issue with the Balmoral-TCH intersection was more a design flaw with the four-laning, coupled with an increase in speed limit, and less about bad or impatient drivers as many would intimate.
The hill to the west limited visibility, and made it extremely difficult to discern what lane fast-moving, on-coming traffic was travelling in. Add blind spots created by a lamp standard and the A-pillar of our vehicles, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Assuming traffic lights activated by sensor pads were never an option, an over or underpass for the Balmoral-TCH intersection should have been included with the original four-lane highway design.
Simple as that.
What’s not so simple now will be convincing the province that their costly band-aid fix is a dangerous fail.
Sharon Vos