The Similkameen News Leader
Editorial
SLOWER TRAFFIC - USE RIGHT LANE
EDITORIAL - March 20, 2007
It was over coffee last week when it happened. An old issue brought back to life and for a change it felt as if the time was right.
Highway 3 needs some work. We're not talking about those weak excuses for upgrades identified as 'cold patching' or 'resurfacing' that slows down holiday traffic and gives flaggers extra time to work on their tans.
Nope, we're talking something that will have an impact that will ripple its way all along the ribbon of cracked and crumbling asphalt we call
Highway 3 and be noticed as far away as the Alberta border.
It's time to dust off that long forgotten major highway program created by and approved by the long forgotten Social Credit party The Whipsaw Project.
If our memory is correct or at least partially correct we seem to recall there was a plan at one time to yank out the Whipsaw Bridge and replace it with a span that would cross Whipsaw Creek in such a manner that the corner would be gone and replaced with a straight stretch of pavement suspended on a pretty cool bridge structure.
That was about as high tech as it got back then - back in a time before cell phones and the interweb.
What happened? Well, the Socred's proved once again they had great ideas but weren't very good at timing.
The plan didn't survive the following provincial election.
The upside was we got to see the government spent a great deal of money on highways even if most of them were in places in BC most of us in the Similkameen don't travel. Even for a vacation.
Now with the Olympics only about 1,000 days away, we think it's about time the old Socred make-work road project once again saw the light of day.
You would think the province builders in Victoria would want to make road travel to the 2010 games as easy as possible for those of us who still travel in cars and throw some serious money at the existing transportation network in the southern part of BC to ensure some of us can safely get to the games before they end.
Only this time around they won't have to slice through a chunk of wilderness to build a brand new highway to feed the province into Vancouver (translation: "Coquilhalla Highway To Be Completed In Time For Expo").
This time around we already have a mighty fine road, it just needs a little TLC and a few million dollars for an extreme makeover.
And with the world coming to BC in 2010, you'd think the time would be right that someone happened to stumble across a wad of pre-Olympic funding for just such projects and used it on something other than creating more tar snakes.
