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The conquest of travel
Tisdale- Saturday December 1, 2012
by:Timothy W. Shire

I think, we all take for granted the whole concept of travel. We who live in a very large and sparsely populated country realize that goods, services and economics dictate that we must be able to make our way from one place to another just as products and commodities must also be moved both long and short distances.

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One of the big milestones in every Canadian's life is reaching that age when they can move from a passenger seat, to behind the steering wheel. Since the advent of the automobile, North Americans associate freedom of movement and personal transportation with the ubiquitous motor vehicle. The day I got my drivers licence was a huge event in my life, even though it would be three agonizing years until I had my own car. During those three years I crossed the Saskatchewan prairie as a hitch hiker, a train passenger and in the city, I got around by bus and even taxi, sometimes. The facts of life are such that, with home being one hundred twenty miles from college and jobs often just as far away, life in Saskatchewan pretty much focuses on transportation. That was true in the fifties when rail transport still operated, but it is even more so today, with the centralization of those things we depend upon, located in the few urban areas of the province.

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I grew up in a village and I just can't visualize myself moving to a city, so if it is shopping, attending a concert, paying a visit to a medical specialist, or even visiting my immediate family, we are looking at a two, or three hour trip by car. Bus service is not really an alternative, as that turns a one day trip, into a three or four day journey. In the late eighties we had an aircraft to get around, it had served us well as the family transportation machine when we lived in the Yukon, but in Saskatchewan, the hassles of airport to services, meant that the 150 mph travel machine was inefficient, simply because of the lack of city and town public transportation. No matter how you cut it, Saskatchewan is organized with the car or pickup.

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From my experience, it seems that this is the case in most of Canada, with the exception of a very few major urban centres, where public transportation actually is available, or you live close enough to things, that you can make do with a bike or on foot. That seems to be the case in the United States as well. Cars and pickups are graphed into our culture and with them, highways, streets and millions of miles of pavement.

In these last three weeks, we have had to travel to and from Regina three times. That's six hours travel each trip and since the reason for the travel is problems I am having with my eye sight, my partner has had to be the chaffier. That has given me time to ride and consider just what we are doing. Fortunately, we have a fairly efficient vehicle and each trip costs about $60 in gasoline, but there is an added cost, one that is much harder to measure. Each trip takes a lot out of not only the driver but the passenger as well.

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The first of these three journeys was on Friday, November 17 when we made our way through a very nasty winter storm. Then on the return trip, with me holding my breath and my wife performing a miracle of navigating on sheer ice about an inch thick, from Regina to the edge of the Qu'Appelle valley. Time from Regina to Southey is normally just under half an hour, but on that trip, it took over an hour and we were most grateful that we had even made the trip without slipping off into the ditch or oncoming traffic. Good driving and winter tires had made that possible.

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So far this year, more people have died travelling on our roads and highways in Saskatchewan than the number of Canadians who were killed in the war in Afghanistan.

The cost of living in the luxury of small crime free rural community is the need to travel. My vision is steadily improving and I am confident that I will be able to continue to enjoy this kind of lifestyle. My father has lost his vision and with it, his ability to drive a car. It was a serious blow to him when he realised that he would no longer be able to get around on his own. He lives in a city so there are means for him to get around independently, but he definitely mourns his loss of personal transportation freedom.

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Now in the video that is at the bottom of this page, you will see the mixture of traffic that we encounter in a typical trip down to Regina on highway #6. Of course, the video has been edited, but with your private vehicle you have to share that narrow strip of pavement with vehicles that are doing the work that was at one time handled by the railways. Notice how many of the big trucks are "B" train grain haulers and consider the cost to all taxpayers to maintain roads that will stand up to that kind of traffic. I have heard that the passing of a single eighteen wheeler is about the equivalent of more than seventy passenger cars.

In my meditation on this issue, I have come to the conclusion that we as a society have not thought through the sharing of the road ways all that well. Big trucks can't stop and they are travelling the same speed as other, much more controllable vehicles. In Saskatchewan, level crosses of other highways and railways are incredibly dangerous. Our neighbours to the South do not have these intersection on their main highways, but have over passes and cloverleaf interchanges to reduce the kind of crashes that are so common in this province. Keep in mind that Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota all have smaller populations than does Saskatchewan. To get "t-boned" in those states, you have to go to one of their small cities or towns to get into an intersection crash.

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The difference of course is that all across the United States the interstate highway system was built by their federal, hugely in debt, government. In Canada, railways were within the jurisdiction of the national government, but our highways, even the cross country ones that carry traffic from one side of the country to the other, are almost entirely funded by the provincial governments. That means; good ones in Alberta, poor ones in Saskatchewan, degraded ones in Manitoba and the main Trans-Canada highway in Ontario is a two lane narrow strip of pavement cut through the outcrops with an 85 Km speed limit. Heavy coast to coast semis make up the majority of the traffic on highway #1 and #16. #1 is now four lanes of traffic from Alberta to Manitoba and the slow process has begun to double the size of #16.

In the mean time, we are all moving around on our highways. We need to do it with the realization that many drivers may not value their lives as much as they should and they will drive onto highways without stopping, expect that; they will drive faster than the visibility or stopping ability allows, expect that; they will ignore emergency vehicles and their flashing lights that require travel at 60 km/h, expect that; and they will exceed the speed limit by about 20% much of the time and law enforcement will ignore that, expect that. In general, the responsibility you have to your self and your passengers demands that you drive with the awareness, that you are limited in your driving skills, your vehicle is limited in its ability to protect you and there are drivers who may try to kill you. That means no distractions like cell phones, or even the radio in bad weather, stop frequently to relieve fatigue and give yourself safe space in which to see, stop and avoid.