Alarming frequency of turnovers
Although an important corridor for the oil & gas and forestry sectors, Highway 88 was never designed for the present volume, size and quantity of industrial traffic. It’s an extremely narrow roadway with nearly no shoulders.
For the sake of safety alone, we need to address these problems now.
Scarred surface
Much of Highway 88 is riddled with potholes, crumbling shoulders, and cracking & heaving asphalt.
Inches to spare
With minimal shoulders and only one lane in each direction, Highway 88 is as far too narrow for fully-laden log trucks and super B tankers to pass one another.
Most of the time, seasoned drivers manouver past oncoming traffic with mere inches to spare between the vehicles. Sometimes, they do not — resulting in near misses, oveturned loads, or worse.
Not all traffic is the same
Just one 18-wheeler at its maximum capacity causes the equivalent damage of 9,600 passenger vehicles weighing 4,000 lbs traveling in the same direction. Highway 88 was never engineered to withstand the sizes and weights of today's commercial vehicles and their payloads.
An escalating toll
As the tally of turnovers, collisions and ditched transport trucks continues to climb, so too do the resultant impacts to industry, working families, and the environmental stability of our boreal region.
This problem is not going to get better; the highway will not somehow fix itself or be utilized less. It will continue to worsen — to the detriment of industry, the local economy, and Alberta’s bottom line.
Ninety two
In the past two and a half years, there have been 92 collisions along our stretch of highway 88; some resulting in serious injuries and fatalities.
The way forward
The MD continues to lobby the provincial government to commit to sensible, substantive improvements to Highway 88 — not just a fresh coat of asphalt.
This heavily-utilized highway must be brought up to modern standards. It must be widened. It must have shoulders and safe merging & turnoff lanes. Highway 88 needs to be seen for what it is: an economic corridor that produces a multitude of benefits for the people of Alberta.
Presently, there is no substantive provincial plan to properly fix Highway 88. While the Province benefits considerably from our region’s energy and forestry sectors, the primary thoroughfare for these activities continues to deteriorate.