Watch above: It’s a deadly stretch of road in Saskatchewan’s west central region that is about to become much safer for motorists. Aaron Streck tells us the Highway 7 passing lanes between Delisle and Rosetown are nearing completion.
SASKATOON – Since 2010, traffic has increased on Highway 7 from Saskatoon to Calgary by 20 per cent. Those numbers don’t surprise David Husband, the reeve for the RM of Harris, who sees a constant flow of vehicles whizzing past on the road daily.
“The biggest thing is we see the speed getting higher on this highway and the traffic and over sized loads and nobody seems to want to wait and they’re passing going on solid lines and everybody seems to be in a hurry,” said Husband.
Some of the congestion and hold-ups are starting to let up on the single lane highway as new passing lanes between Delisle and Rosetown are nearing completion.
“It’s been a long time coming, we’ve had some really good improvements like you see the game fence behind us, we think was put in about seven years ago, there had been a lot of deer strikes, now with this, it’s a really good announcement for us, we’ve had major closures here and the highway’s so busy, it’s a bad situation when there’s an accident on this highway,” said Husband.
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The eight passing lanes and 16 kilometres of fresh asphalt came at a cost of $8.5 million, a bill the provincial and federal governments picked up.
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“This is a major corridor between Saskatoon and Calgary, we’re an export province, we need to get our goods out of our province and making this route safer, more efficient is going to help out our truckers and the general driving public as well, it’s a safety issue for them. I’m very pleased with the progress that we’ve made,” said Saskatchewan Minister Highways and Infrastructure Nancy Heppner.
“It’s a great improvement, when you talk about what more can be done it comes with a cost and we all got to pay for that, so this is a big step that’s going to help a lot, twinning would be ideal … but is it realistic,” said Husband.
This warm dry weather means construction of the new passing lanes is about three months ahead of schedule.
Construction on the new Highway 7 passing lanes between Delisle and Rosetown started late last summer. With one of 8 remaining the project is expect to be complete late next week.
The provincial and federal governments are also working together to twinning the stretch of highway between Saskatoon and Delisle.
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