Rain, snow or shine, commuters on Calgary’s Stoney Trail say crashes on the busy ring road are happening too often.
“Unfortunate accidents have been occurring lately, and I think they’re totally preventable,” said structural engineer Louis Andersen on Tuesday.
Southeast Stoney Trail has been the site of two serious crashes in one week.
On Monday, a man was killed after his truck lost control and struck a concrete pillar. Tuesday, a woman was rushed to hospital after her vehicle went off the road and into a retention pond.
“There’s no crash barriers. There’s no safety guard rail that would prevent a catastrophic type of injury or death,” Andersen said.
The province is in charge of maintaining Stoney Trail and all other provincial highways.
Andersen wants to know why Stoney doesn’t have the same safety features as Anthony Henday Drive, Edmonton’s ring road.
“They have the guard rails, they have some crash suppression devices there and so on,” Andersen said. “That’s something that should have been designed and implemented on Stoney Trail before it opened.”
The province agrees.
“There are plans to install high tension cable barriers (HTCB) on sections of Stoney Trail to prevent traffic from crossing the median and colliding with oncoming traffic,” Transportation Minister Ric McIver told Global News in a statement. “We expect this work to begin during 2019.”
There are more than 330 kilometres of cable barriers on roads and highways across the province, including Deerfoot Trail and the Highway 2.
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