A Northern Policy Institute researcher says safer highways around Kenora could be built sooner and at a fraction of the cost of twinning by adding alternating passing lanes and a barrier separating opposing traffic.
William Dunstan, the institute’s vice-president of research, says traffic volumes in the area favour a three-lane design known as 2+1 over a divided highway with two lanes in each direction.
His report, Twin Carefully: Why 2+1 is the Best Fit for Most Northern Ontario Highways, argues the design would provide similar safety and traffic-flow benefits on most northern highways while requiring less construction.
Dunstan said the question is how governments should deliver improvements that northern leaders agree are needed.
“What form should they take?” he told the Miner and News. “So that was the motivation for this study.”
A 2+1 highway has one lane in each direction, with an additional passing lane alternating between directions every few kilometres. A median barrier separates oncoming traffic.
The design gives drivers regular opportunities to pass slower vehicles while reducing the risk of head-on collisions. It generally involves widening and modifying an existing road rather than building a parallel roadway.
Dunstan said his conclusions draw largely on international experience, particularly in Sweden, where 2+1 roads have been used extensively.
He said Swedish experience shows comparable reductions in fatalities and serious injuries when roads carrying traffic volumes similar to those in Northern Ontario are upgraded to either 2+1 or twinned highways.
Sweden also offers a useful comparison because of its winter conditions and wildlife, he said. Clearing snow from a 2+1 road involves more work than on a conventional two-lane highway, but he said the configuration remains less expensive than twinning.
For the Kenora area, Dunstan said traffic would need to increase substantially before twinning became the better investment.
He put average daily traffic on the broad corridor between the Manitoba border and Shabaqua Corners at roughly 3,200 vehicles, with some stretches near Kenora carrying around 5,000. The study uses approximately 15,000 vehicles a day as a benchmark for assessing when twinning could offer better value.
Asked which local stretches should be upgraded first, Dunstan said the institute is working on a separate study examining priorities.
“We haven’t completed that yet, so I can’t tell you too much about prioritization now.”
Based on traffic volumes alone, he said both Highway 17 and Highway 17A near Kenora would likely be priorities for upgrades.
The report’s preliminary estimates put the cost of converting 2,915 kilometres of northern Highways 11, 17 and 71 with fewer than four lanes to a 2+1 configuration at about $3.3 billion. Twinning the same distance would cost an estimated $18.8 billion.
Those figures are broad estimates rather than budgets for individual projects. The 2+1 calculations also assume roads would return to two lanes at major water crossings, reducing bridge replacement costs.
“So, obviously, costs will vary depending on local conditions, local terrain,” Dunstan said.
He said the potential savings could support other northern needs, including all-season roads, remote airports and health care.
Dunstan said the smaller amount of construction required would also allow 2+1 upgrades to be completed much sooner, bringing safety improvements to drivers faster. For people concerned about serious crashes and highway closures, he said, the shorter construction time is another reason to consider the design.
The report identifies four corridors where twinning could be a reasonable investment in anticipation of future traffic: Highway 17 from Greater Sudbury to North Bay and to Sault Ste. Marie, and Highway 11/17 from Thunder Bay to Nipigon and to Shabaqua Corners.
Dunstan said frequent highway closures help demonstrate the need for upgrades and can inform people which projects should come first. However, he argued that closures on existing two-lane roads do not, on their own, establish whether twinning is preferable to 2+1.
He said the research has been shared with decision makers and has already drawn a response from Ontario’s transportation minister, who was asked about its findings at a news conference.
According to Dunstan, the minister said the province would look at a combination of highway twinning and 2+1 roads.
Dunstan said no specifics were offered, but the response was broadly consistent with his recommendation to twin selected corridors and use 2+1 on most others.
He wants Ontario, ideally with federal support, to develop a concrete highway improvement plan.
“What we need to know is that we’re actually going to do it.”
