Carberry hall packed for open house on deadly intersection

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This article was published 17/07/2024 (476 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CARBERRY — How to redesign the deadly intersection that claimed the lives of 17 seniors was the focus of an open house hosted by the province Tuesday evening that packed the Carberry Community Memorial Hall.

Residents, truckers, first responders and local officials engaged in lively discussions on the options displayed around the hall for redesigning the intersection of the Trans-Canada Highway and Highway 5.

“People want to see something done with that intersection,” Carberry Mayor Ray Muirhead told the Sun outside of the hall. “This is not just a year ago — you can’t forget the people who have lost their lives out on that intersection for decades.”

Muirhead wasn’t surprised by the large turnout, saying the intersection and the lives it has claimed have been on community members’ minds long before the tragic crash last June. The town, he said, is continuing to meet with the province as the redesign process moves along.

At a press conference in Dauphin in January, the Manitoba government announced it was committed to spending $12 million to improve safety at the intersection. Premier Wab Kinew and Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Lisa Naylor spoke about the results of an independent safety report on the intersection, which was also released publicly that day.

Three intersection improvement options were presented in the report, prepared by WSP Canada Inc. They included a roundabout, widening the median at the intersection, and a new “RCUT” intersection design that is widely used in the U.S. in which drivers turn onto a main road and make a U-turn at a one-way median.

At the January announcement, the premier said the report showed that the safest option is the roundabout, while the RCUT intersection is comparable to an interchange in terms of safety. He said the province wants public feedback on what model to implement.

“These three options are safe options that were presented by the premier in January,” Dustin Booy, director of highway engineering services for Manitoba Transportation and Infrastructure, told the Sun. “There are other options.”

Booy said the province will take all of the comments attendees recorded on sheets at the open house, along with the feedback received online, and will share them with the public and use them to help inform further design options. Those design options will then be presented for comment in the fall at another public meeting.

“We’ll be evaluating all the options against a certain set of criteria,” he said. “It’s not just safety. Safety is a priority, but we also need to consider things like traffic operations, environmental impacts, impacts to the land, accesses and cost.”

This process will allow the preferred option to become clear, Booy said.

The report found that between 2012 and 2021, there were 29 collisions at the intersection. Forty-five per cent of the collisions involved fatality or injury, suggesting that high-severity collisions are a problem at the intersection. Of the 29 collisions, one was fatal, 12 caused injuries and 16 caused only property damage.

The majority of injury-related collisions had predominant contributing factors of either failing to yield the right-of-way or leaving a stop sign before safe to do so, the report said.

The report also identified seven key road-safety issues at the intersection, including the narrowness of the median, which does not allow transport trucks or buses to stop within the median to cross the highway in two stages, and the lack of ability to make left turns easily.

Long and heavy trucks account for 28 per cent of the traffic and 18 per cent of left-turning traffic in all directions, the report said.

Many who came to open house were truck drivers themselves, or familiar with the trucking demands for farms.

Al Fehr, a resident of Austin who is now retired but was a commercial truck driver for 45 years, said an overpass would be the best option.

He said he’s driven through the intersection thousands of times and that last year’s deadly accident was caused by human error. However, he said the safety of the intersection could be improved by redesigning it into an overpass.

“I don’t like the idea of a traffic circle. It’s dangerous, especially with high-speed traffic coming into it,” he said.

He also suggested a system he has seen in the U.S. that includes a sign equipped with cameras that let drivers know if there’s oncoming traffic.

The province has said that an interchange or overpass could also be built but that it’s seen as a long-term solution with a 20-year-plus timeline and a cost estimate of around $100 million. One of the three options already presented would be a “medium-term” improvement to reduce collision risk.

Others from Carberry, like Stacey Wotton and Ray Tolton, a long-time farmer and truck driver, said that putting a traffic light system in the intersection would help. They both acknowledged, however, that it could back up traffic, especially around harvest.

Wotton works for a potato farming company and said the intersection makes it difficult both for a large truck to stop in the median and turn around without impacting traffic.

Tolton, who used to work the farmland right beside the crossing, said he witnessed accidents at the intersection long before the June 15, 2023 tragedy.

“They would never have done (this redesign process) if it was not for that bad accident,” he said. “I can remember all kinds of accidents.”

Traffic signals and lowered speed limits were options that were considered by the report authors, but evidence in the report suggested those measures would not be effective at this intersection.

Manitoba Transportation and Infrastructure anticipates that the selected intersection layout will be chosen later this year and the functional design report will be completed in early 2025. Work on the intersection is scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2026.

A provincial standards review after the fatal crash resulted in short-term improvements that have already been completed, such as “Important Intersection” signs with flashing amber lights, additional speed limit signs to reinforce the 100 km/h limit, and a refurbishing of rumble strips and pavement markings.

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