THUNDER BAY – The father of a 19-year-old who died in a highway crash last week believes dividers separating the middle lanes could have saved his son’s life.
Dallas Bailey was killed instantly on the morning of Oct. 17 when he lost control of his vehicle on a slippery stretch of the Thunder Bay Expressway heading south between the Harbour Expressway and Oliver Road, spinning into oncoming traffic and being hit by a northbound vehicle.
His father, Jim Bailey, believes his son would be still alive if there were concrete medians dividing the directions of traffic.
“In the big scheme of things this is not that expensive,” Bailey wrote in a Facebook post published over the weekend that has been shared more than 1,200 times.
“We don’t need any surveys, we need action. Had we already had them Dallas would still be alive today … He would have hit that median and stayed in his own lane instead of getting nailed from behind with a 140-kilometre-per-hour (plus) impact.”
Those types of medians are everywhere on major highways in southern Ontario, Bailey added.
Dallas was on his way to work at the local Bombardier plant at the time of the crash. Bailey described his son as a hard-working leader who was an avid skateboarder, snowboarder and BMX rider.
Bailey has since met with Ministry of Transportation officials but has been told they are not planned for the roadway and that they cause other issues.
“I still believe that with their own set of problems, that set of problems is a lot different set of problems than what we have here,” Bailey said on Monday.
“You may have a bunch of accidents of people losing control and hitting the median but you wouldn’t have this kind of head-on.”
When contacted for comment, ministry officials said concrete median barriers had been previously reviewed but were found not to be feasible with the current design and configuration of the highway.
“A barrier installation would require significant widening of the existing highway (by 6-7 metres) to provide a 3 metre minimum paved shoulder on either side of the barrier,” the response reads.
The ministry has spent years developing long-term plans to divide the highway between Arthur and Balsam streets, with some form of overpasses and interchanges at each of the existing traffic light intersections.
Bailey, who pointed out similar plans have been looked at for decades, said he has been told by ministry officials that it would likely be at least five years at a minimum, if the highway overhaul was to be approved immediately by the current provincial government, before that project could be completed.
