Photo: Landowners and ADI engineers discussed potential Highway 17 upgrades. - Katie Ryan Photo
By Katie Ryan
Portions of Highway 17, north and south of the city, could see several short term and long term improvements.
Taking collisions, traffic volumes and flow into consideration, at the request of the City of Lloydminster, RMs of Wilton, Britannia and Frenchman Butte, and the County of Vermilion, ADI Unlimited prepared a functional planning study to upgrade the well trodden highway.
The study was up for discussion on Thursday at an open house and was of particular interest to landowners bordering the stretches of highway in question.
ADI project manager Don Good said the study focusses on existing and future deficiencies on two portions of the road: Highway 17 north of the city limit to High 45/3 (23 km) and Highway 17 south of the city limit to north of Highway 614 (26 km).
“Safety was a big part of the study,” said Good “The long term objective is to develop a highway strategy that will address increases in traffic over the next 20 to 35 years.”
The study, which was initiated by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure and Alberta Transportation, suggested several improvement options including multiple intersection upgrades, a truck climbing lane near Sandy Beach Lake and slideslop improvements.
For the long term, ADI suggested grade widening and service roads to reduce access points on Highway 17 and potential twinning, within future Lloydminster limits depending on growth.
“People are happy to see that there is some upgrading on some of the intersections because quite a few of them now don’t have any turning lanes whatsoever,” said Good of the well attended open house held at the Civic Centre. “They are happy to hear of some of the improvements with respect to reducing the potential of going off the road by making the slope less steep and using cable barriers.”
Local landowner Don Whiting, who owns land north of the city on both sides of Highway 17 and attended the open house welcomed the new improvements.
“It’s good to have highway safety improvements and there are some things that I think most people would agree that needed to be done, such as intersections, better turn off and turn on lanes – I think everybody supports those,” he said. “The other things that most people were concerned about were addition of service roads in some areas over the long term. If it was tomorrow, it would certainly affect a lot of people – drastically – but the good news is that even if they ever do do it, it’s going to be over a long term.”
Also in attendance at the open house was Louis Genest, RM of Britannia administrator, who said there were more people in attendance at the open house from his RM than he had anticipated.
“I know some our ratepayers took issue with a couple of the proposals there so they identified some concerns and I am going to be talking to them later just to see if there is anything they want the municipality to do on their behalf,” said Genest, referring to several proposed service road locations.
Genest said he hopes the engineers at ADI take the “practical advice” landowners had to offer under consideration.
“I think it was important to have that open house because the engineers and the committee take a good look at those things from a technical point of view, in terms of where service roads are needed and where approaches need to be taken out,” he said.
“From what I saw they found some practical advice from people that live out there and why some of the recommendations might not work or why there might be something they could do differently than what they have proposed.”
Good said ADI will now process the open house feedback and submit a final report by April 30, officially signing-off by this summer.