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November
2002 Newsletter
Safety
in Jeopardy on the Linc
A
major new expressway issue is emerging — the safety
and useability of the Linc. It promises to convince even
more people that a valley expressway would be a big mistake
for Hamilton.
The City has now admitted that up to 6000 trucks a day will
begin to use the Linc if the valley expressway is constructed.
The projections released by the City are vague, but predict
that 3000 of these trucks will be "through trucks"
that use the Linc and Valley expressways as a short cut
between the QEW and the 403 (this route will be more than
30% shorter than going around the City and over the Skyway).
Friends of Red Hill did a 24-hour count four years ago and
estimated that 4500-5000 trucks a day were going around
on the 403-QEW route, so the 3000 estimate looks artificially
low, especially since the City is claiming this number won't
be reached until 2021. Truck volumes in southern Ontario
are currently rising at 3% per year. Along with these through
trucks, the City is predicting that there will also be 3000
'local' trucks.
What will the effect be of adding 6000 trucks a day to the
traffic on the Linc? This is two million trucks a year,
with peak hour flows of likely ten or more per minute. The
Linc is already congested with over 70,000 vehicles using
some of the westerly portions on a daily basis. The interchanges
are close together, and the ramps are very short. What will
it be like to get on and off this highway when the inside
lanes are crowded with 18-wheelers?
We know that the Linc is a popular road, and this has been
used as an argument for building the valley expressway.
Now the truth is starting to leak out. The driving experience
on the Linc will become quite unpleasant and obviously unsafe
if a north-south expressway is built.
For decades the public has been told that the expressways
are for LOCAL traffic. But what exactly is going to prevent
QEW and 403 traffic (both trucks and cars) from taking this
new shortcut? Over 20,000 trucks a day cross the Burlington
Bay Skyway.
However, this problem seems to have not even been thought
about by the City's transportation planners. During the
1980s, the plan was to build a six-lane expressway in Red
Hill, and a four-lane ARTERIAL road across the mountain
with intersections and stoplights. It wasn't until the late
1980s that a decision was made to make the east-west into
an expressway, only a couple of years before construction
began.
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