Louis Shalako: Opinion. Double Highway 40 Already. Louis Shalako.

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

Opinion. Double Highway 40 Already. Louis Shalako.

The north-south axis is what's missing from this social and economic equation.

Louis Shalako

Highway 40 should have been doubled thirty or forty years ago.

It is a kind of ring road, one which with the growth of the city, would eventually bisex it.

(Bisect. – ed.)

It’s a very schizoid little highway, never quite able to make up its mind as to whether it is a four-lane, divided highway, a two-lane, provincial highway, a county road, a quiet residential street, or maybe just a death-trap and a hazard to human health. If it had indeed been doubled, many years ago, the petrochemical industry in Sarnia would have probably still suffered roughly the same decline. The difference, is that we might have had a better shot at some other kinds of industrial development, which does not depend on pipelines and tanker ships full of asphalt…which is, ironically enough, what roads are made of.

It’s not like we don’t have plenty.

The City of Windsor has a huge battery plant under construction, with a huge foreign investment, as well as billions of public money from the federal and provincial governments.

St. Thomas, just south of London, has something similar. There are auto plants in Ingersoll and Listowel. What these places have in common is the Highway 401, which leads to Detroit to the west, and presumably, all the way to Quebec to the east. It is the busiest highway in Canada. Through Toronto, is the busiest highway in the world if you can believe such statements. Sarnia is connected to London by the Highway 402, with the twin spans of the Bluewater Bridges taking traffic over the St. Clair River to Port Huron Michigan, and then it’s roughly an hour to Detroit on the American side. The bridge was opened in 1938 and was a busy corridor for war trade and production during WW II.

The Highway 40 was built to coincide with the construction of the 402. The 402 was built on acquired land, in a process which took years. Essentially, it followed a concession line, where a property on one concession butted up against the back of a property on the next concession. It was driven through the woodlots, which minimized costs and the loss of farmland. Highway 40 followed the path of Modeland Road at the north end, and then kind of hooked into the existing Churchill Road at the south end. It used existing rights-of-way. You can see the evidence of this just west of the Beehive intersection along Plank Road. The extension of Highway 40 goes south to Wallaceburg. That’s the set of stoplights right at the Ineos/Styrolutions plant, recently in the news for benzene levels. Only short stretches of the road are four lanes, divided by a ditch. The rest, for the most part, is two opposing lanes, with a speed limit of 80 kilometres per hour. That means head-on closing speeds in excess of 160-kph in the event of collision. That’s because everyone speeds a little bit, and some folks by a lot—

Then there are those stoplights, advanced green signals, and uncontrolled intersections such as MacGregor Sideroad and Scott Road. There are some concerns…

At the north end of Modeland Road, the speed limit is 50 kph, but this is well away from the high-traffic, commercial and industrial areas of the city. Chemical Valley traffic can be fast and aggressive, which I am always reminded of when I go to the smoke shack on the rez before dawn on a winter’s morn. Honestly, I should plan things a little better, I mean, it’s dark, with snow or drizzle or fog, and it’s like these people aren’t some little old man out for a Sunday drive and a carton of smokes. Quite frankly, some of you guys should get up a little earlier, leave a little sooner, and slow the fuck down—for crying out loud.

But, essentially, we have two issues. The first is Chemical Valley traffic, and the fact that the highway represents the fastest north-south axis, and then there is traffic between Sarnia, Wallaceburg, Chatham, and then on to Windsor—where all the big auto plants are, and then there is Detroit on the Michigan side. At the time of writing, the two halves of the new Gordie Howe Bridge are about to meet above the Detroit River—they’ve actually snagged the two ends together with some temporary girders while getting set up to drop the last sort of pre-fabbed bridge section into the middle…a few boxes of some really big bolts, and that puppy will be all set for the paving, one would think.

Simply doubling the Highway 40 where it is now two lanes doesn’t really solve the essential problem. The highway south of Wallaceburg is two lanes—and the route goes right through the centre of a small town, with small bridges over the Sydenham River.

It would be best to bypass Wallaceburg, and the same is true at Chatham, with the route sort of going through town and hooking up with the 401 south of the city. A technical point, I would bypass Wally-World on the east, and Chatham on the west. This is due to low, swampy ground west of Wally-World and simply shortens the distance by going to the west of Chatham.

Otherwise, there is too much two-lane, two-way road, and too much cutting through a city or a town to make it an efficient route from Sarnia to Windsor, bearing in mind the sort of trucking traffic necessary to put any kind of battery plant or EV vehicle plant in Sarnia—we’ve long missed the boat on that one. If one does consider the possibility, it makes more sense to build parts and accessories in Sarnia, and then ship them over the Bluewater Bridges, use the double-stack rail tunnel, or the 1-95 Interstate Highway to get them to Detroit. Detroit—not Windsor.

There is your conundrum. The distance from Sarnia to Detroit is simply shorter than the distance from Sarnia to Windsor. From Sarnia to Windsor, on the Canadian side, is an easy ninety minutes—by car. A big transport truck is just a lot harder to drive, and arguably, slower as a consequence. A four-lane, divided Highway 40, bypassing smaller centres, is a desirable thing in its own right, and it does open up certain possibilities, because it would eliminate one or even two border crossings, for trucking traffic between Sarnia and Detroit, or even Sarnia to Windsor using the I-94 through Michigan…two border crossings means two administrative roadblocks, as all paperwork has to be cleared, some random number of vehicles will be pulled for inspection. It means two security roadblocks, and often huge backups of traffic, at the bridge. This is especially true on holiday weekends. There have been too many accidents along that stretch of the 402, westbound, leading up to the border already. The fact that an all-Canadian route might be a little longer in terms of physical distance, balanced against the hurdles of a double bridge crossing, is a kind of economic and social equation, in which we measure the costs versus the benefits. I see it as economically strategic. The east-west axis is served well enough, it is the north-south axis that has been missing for many years.

An obvious first step would be to double the Highway 40 from Lambton College to South Indian Road. The obvious second step would be to double the highway all the way to Wallaceburg. This could be done in two to three short sections, as the budget and the season allows. Traffic would be slowed by construction, but only for the summer months, and quite frankly, it’s slow enough already. Four lanes all the way would alleviate that and bring important economic benefits all along the line, including Wallaceburg, Chatham and points in between.

There are some other projects which might tie in, just as the original Highway 402 and the Highway 40 tied in with each other, at the time.

It has always baffled me as to how we expect to attract new industry to Chemical Valley, when South Vidal Street is in such poor shape in relative terms. There’s all kinds of industrial space along there, and yet Vidal Street is the first thing prospective buyers see when they go to look at a potential industrial site.

Also, as long as we’re looking at building roads, why not extend Wellington Street all the way to Blackwell Sideroad, which would also require upgrades. This can be seen as an alternative or emergency route when the next big accident closes the Highway 402 and traffic is backed up way out to the airport or even further. This would only be used by heavy trucks in an emergency, but the road surface would be engineered with this type of occasional duty in mind.

It would also tend to take the east-west load off of London Line/Exmouth Street, when people just need to bypass the bottleneck and get to the other side of the city. The only other east-west roads that cut through the entire town would be Lakeshore Road, Michigan Avenue, and Confederation St, with Confederation the only one rated for heavy vehicles.

Anyhow, it’s something to think about. As for the provincial government, they’ve been thinking about it for a long time.

The time to act is now.

END