After years of lobbying and a lawsuit, the province will soon be tearing out the decorative landscaping and installing a 1.4-kilometre concrete safety barrier on a crash-prone stretch of the Sea to Sky Highway.
West Vancouver-Sea to Sky MLA Jordan Sturdy made the $800,000 announcement intended to stop head-on collisions on the highway between Lions Bay Avenue and Brunswick Beach Road on Saturday.
“The ministry has worked closely with the local municipality of Lions Bay to find ways to improve safety for the travelling public along this stretch of the Sea to Sky,” Sturdy stated in a release. “We have recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Lions Bay, outlining the plan to install a concrete median barrier, which will greatly increase safety for all motorists.”
The landscaped median, planted with trees and shrubs, was installed at the behest of Lions Bay council when they were being consulted prior to the highway’s major update for the 2010 Olympics. The speed limit there is 60 kilometres per hour.
Sturdy has been in talks with the municipality in recent years as a grassroots campaign to improve safety cropped up in response to fatal collisions.
West Vancouver resident David Tompkins launched a petition in 2015 calling for a standard concrete freeway barrier to prevent crossover accidents. Today, the petition has 3,328 signatures.
“I think it’s mission accomplished,” Tompkins said on Monday. “It was mostly just started on a whim. I thought ‘What the heck.’”
Following another fatal head-on collision in May 2016, North Vancouver paramedic Tyson Lehmann started recirculating the petition and lobbying government.
“It’s great news,” said Lehmann, who has attended many horrific crashes there. “I assume that these vehicles are going to stay in their lanes. It might cause multiple incidents in the north- or southbound traffic but you’re not going to see these crossovers that lead to these massive injury mechanisms and kinetic forces that lead to these fatalities.”
Improving safety on the Sea to Sky corridor is becoming more and more important as Squamish grows rapidly, Lehmann said. The latest census revealed Squamish has grown almost 14 per cent since 2011 and the traffic on the Sea to Sky has gone up by 25 per cent in the last five years, according to the province.
For Lehmann, the update is an indication that government is working as it should.
“It’s really affirming that we can make sensible change in our communities with a bit of advocacy,” he said.
The province, meanwhile, is still being sued by a crash survivor. In September last year, Whistler resident Olivia Rey filed a civil suit against the province, Lions Bay, and the highway maintenance firm alleging they failed to make the highway safe after it had become apparent the decorative barrier was inadequate.
The province has yet to respond to the suit, according to Rey’s lawyer Nancy Wilhelm-Morden.
Rey suffered multiple fractured vertebrae, loss of the use of her legs, partial loss of the use of her arms as a result of the crash and her friend Marie-Pier Champagne was killed.
“The fundamental issue to this lawsuit is the landscape barrier and the role that it played in the motor vehicle accident, which catastrophically injured Olivia Rey and killed her passenger, so to remove that landscaped median and replace it with concrete barriers is a very good thing,” she said.
