A brand-new autoroute that isn’t worthy of the name
BY ERIC BENDER, THE GAZETTE AUGUST 12, 2013
http://www.montrealgazette.com/opini...027/story.html
MONTREAL — Recently my wife and I received an invitation from some old friends who live in Gatineau to spend a summer weekend with them. It sounded like a great idea that would also afford us a first opportunity to drive on the final section to be completed of Quebec’s Highway 50 (the Autoroute de l’Outaouais), which opened to traffic quite recently.
This new portion of Highway 50 connects Grenville (just across the Ottawa River from Hawkesbury, Ont.) with an already-completed four-lane section of the highway at Buckingham, a distance of about 75 kilometres. As an alternative to Highway 417 on the Ontario side of the border, it permits drivers heading to the Gatineau area from Montreal to bypass altogether the often very congested road network through Ottawa.
First, the good news: the new section presents some beautiful vistas of the Ottawa Valley, of bucolic farms and sleepy villages nestled in the river valley below the highway, which has been built through rolling hill country.
However, all the rest of the news is bad. The traveller has virtually no opportunity to enjoy these perspectives because, shockingly, the new stretch of Highway 50 has been constructed as a two-lane, undivided, white-knuckle nightmare for its entire length. Oncoming traffic — including large transport trucks and buses — whistles by at a high speed, making the drive anything but the pleasant, relatively safe experience of other Quebec autoroutes.
Clearly Transport Quebec has recognized the inherent danger of a two-lane autoroute, as it has constructed a so-called rumble strip between the two lanes. Perhaps that’s better than nothing as a safety measure, but not much.
I get it that Quebec is and has been for some time in a financial crisis, but it is unacceptable in the 21st century to be opening new autoroutes that are clearly inferior to those built in the 1960s and ’70s. As a taxpayer, I would rather no new expressways were built than those offering such an obvious compromise on safety and security. On any Quebec highway labelled an “autoroute” one would expect certain minimum standards to be observed. That clearly has not been the case here.
We spent a very enjoyable weekend with our friends in Gatineau. But perhaps it is needless to add that we returned home to Montreal on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River — on a much less stressful, properly constructed divided highway.
Eric Bender is a retired college administrator and school-board commissioner who lives in Kirkland.