After years of safety concerns, the provincial government announced Saturday that concrete barriers will be installed along a stretch of the Sea-to-Sky highway through Lions Bay.
The 1.4-kilometre stretch of highway in Lions Bay is used by 19,000 motorists daily. Traffic along this stretch of road has grown by 24 per cent in five years.
The roadway is currently divided by a landscaped median, which will soon be replaced by a concrete barrier designed to prevent head-on collisions.
“You only have to look at the gaps in the median to know how many crossover incidents there are that don’t even result in a call. Now they’ll hit a concrete median,” Lions Bay Mayor Karl Buhr said.
Approximately a dozen crashes have occurred along this section over the past five years resulting in two fatalities.
The provincial government is spending $800,000 to build the concrete barrier. Plants from the existing landscaped median will be repurposed.
“This has been a project a number of years in the making,” West Vancouver-Sea to Sky MLA Jordan Sturdy said. “I think we all recognize that there’s value here and it needed to happen. It just took time to put it into place.”
The announcement comes with the provincial election less than two-and-a-half months away.
“The government is going to be spending a lot of money in the next number of days trying to make us all forget the past 16 years,” NDP leader John Horgan said.
But Buhr insists that “this is not a political announcement, it’s a safety announcement.”
Work on the Sea-to-Sky project begins in April and is due to be finished by the fall.
– With files from Catherine Urquhart
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