Anyone who has ever been stuck on the Sea to Sky Highway following a major crash knows that traffic delays can last hours.
A review of those incidents conducted for the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) says there are better ways to deal with unexpected road closures.
There were 396 unplanned closures on the Sea to Sky Highway over a five-year period from April 2011 to April 2016. None of them were related to rock slides.
Ten per cent of those incidents were full road closures. On average, each closure lasted 1.77 hours.
“There is an economic loss associated with that, there’s an opportunity cost associated with that,” Whistler Mayor Nancy Wilhelm-Morden said of the closures.
Whistler council recently hired transportation consultants to examine what could be done to better handle closures along the Sea to Sky.
The study suggested laws stipulating that major highways be reopened within 90 minutes of an incident or less.
Similar laws exist in some U.S. states.
“They do have that 90-minute key performance indicator,” Wilhelm-Morden said.
“The roads can’t be closed any longer than that. So there were actually a lot of things that our experts found that the western states are doing that we ought to be doing here.”
The study also recommended situating crash site experts such as collision analysts and coroners on the North Shore or the Sea to Sky corridor so they could respond to road closures more quickly.
The report will be delivered to the Ministry of Transportation.
— With files from Ted Chernecki