A favourite shortcut through the city could either be off-limits to or more expensive for truckers if a Thunder Bay city councillor has his way.
McIntyre Coun. Trevor Giertuga on Monday intends to ask administration to prepare a report on the feasibility of lowering truck traffic on the city-owned and maintained portion of Highway 102, better known to residents as Dawson Road.
Giertuga said there are just too many near collisions and other options available not to at least consider ways to divert trucks, through measures that could include weight restrictions, tolls or speed controls.
“It’s getting increasingly more and more dangerous travelling that route,” Giertuga said on Thursday. “You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who lives in that area who hasn’t had a close call or a near-miss with a transport travelling in the area.”
“We now have a viable alternative route for the transports, which is the Shabaqua Extension that the provincial government has put in place.”
Giertuga said he understands why truckers choose the shorter router, which takes about 10 to 15 minutes less than the Shabaqua Extension, located west of the Harbour Expressway.
“If I was a trucker, I would probably want to take the shortest route from A to B, to want to be home with my family,” he said. “But at the end of the day, we need to divert them any way can.”
For most of its existence the entire highway was under the ministry of transportation banner, but several years ago the province downloaded a portion of the route to the city, providing $3 million to cover ongoing maintenance and snow removal.
“It’s cost us over $6 million and we’ve had to fix it three or four times,” he said, attributing a great deal of the costs to transport traffic and heavier loads.
“At Dog Lake Road it becomes a city road and at that point we can have some options, maybe a toll road can be put in there. We can put in weight restrictions, we can reduce the speed further, but we need to look at something to divert them.”
Officials with the Ontario Trucker’s Association said they would have to investigate the matter further before making comment on the councillor’s resolution.
However at-large Coun. Larry Hebert said he's concerned the plan will simply shift the traffic from one neighbourhood to another, vastly increasing the number of transports flowing through Kakabeka Falls.
"The best traffic solution in the long run would likely be to bypass Thunder Bay by extending a new highway basically from the new interchange at Hodder and the Expressway and have it basically go straight west until it reaches Highway 11/17," Hebert said via email.
"Yes it would interfere with life in Gorham and Ware and some other townships, as well as part of McIntyre Ward, but they are low-density population areas so the impact would be less than some other choices."
