The Sea to Sky Highway can be a scary drive, with people barreling up and down the road, even in wet conditions like the ones that have been witnessed on B.C.’s South Coast in recent days.
The mayor of one community along the highway has an unconventional solution: raise the speed limit, at least in one section.
Coverage of the Sea to Sky Highway on Globalnews.ca:
Near the Village of Lions Bay, about a half-hour drive from downtown Vancouver, the speed limit is 60 km/h.
But drivers regularly hit speeds of up to 85 km/h.
Lions Bay Mayor Karl Buhr said firefighters are constantly tied up with accidents.
“We spend far too much time on the highway,” he told Global News.
“When the accidents happen they’re all quite bad, so it’s very costly in human terms, both for the people affected, and for the people who are stuck in one-, three-, nine-hour closures.”
Before the Sea to Sky Highway was upgraded ahead of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games, there were about 94 serious crashes every year.
That number has fallen to 72 serious collisions every year.
The number of vehicles, however, has grown by 24 per cent — roughly 19,000 hit the Sea to Sky Highway every day.
READ MORE: Chaos on the Sea to Sky, Coquihalla Highways as winter storm causes accidents, delays
Police have tried numerous conventional means to make drivers slow down.
Buhr says raising the speed limit near Lions Bay could be a solution.
“[The] Ministry of Transportation is actually looking at removing the 60 and just going straight from 90 to 70 and back to 90 again, with hopes that people find that more believable and actually do it,” he said.
For now, however, Buhr just hopes that drivers follow the rules.