The highway that no one likes to take

“The Quebec Ministry of Transport (MTQ) is a wheel of cement that I have to push with all my strength to make things move forward.”

Coroner Denyse Langelier published her first report on the dangers of Highway 50 in 2013.

For 11 years, she and her colleagues have published 30 of them after each death, according to a compilation from the coroner’s office sent to The Press. Further investigations are still ongoing.

Each time, coroner Denyse Langelier repeats her recommendations to secure the main road link between the greater Montreal region and Gatineau, on the north shore of the Ottawa River.

The more deaths pile up, the harder the coroner’s tone becomes. Highway 50 suffers from “a bad reputation: dangerous and deadly,” she wrote last September.

And she’s not the only one who fears it.

“As little as possible.” “Under no circumstances at night.” “Never.” Local officials, first responders, experts and victims’ families interviewed by The Press also avoid borrowing it.

The provincial government has announced plans to widen the entire length of the highway to four lanes, but warned that it could take another eight years.

“Eight years doesn’t make sense,” the coroner said.

Until then, no date has yet been set for safety work on several sections, including the Laurentians sector where Emmalee Scantlebury-Jacob, 25, lost her life in 2022.

The young mother of two little girls was a passenger in the vehicle driven by her partner. The latter lost control of his car. His small red Hyundai hit head-on a van that was unable to avoid it coming from the opposite direction.

In the eyes of coroner Denyse Langelier, the installation of concrete or cable barriers to separate the lanes where traffic is going in the opposite direction could have saved the mother’s life.

Adjacent roads are present on approximately 94 of the 158 km of this road link. Between 9,500 and 24,300 vehicles circulate there each day, depending on the sector.

From 2012 to 2022, 6,835 accidents took place, including 34 fatal and 81 serious, according to data obtained by The Press thanks to the Access to Information Act.

Mayors at the front

“It’s so upsetting to see children dying because some idiot is in a hurry to overtake while the Ministry [des Transports] “I am studying, and still studying, to make the road safer.”

With each new fatal accident on the Guy-Lafleur highway – the official name of the A50 – the mayor of Grenville-sur-la-Rouge, Tom Arnold, makes it a point to answer calls from the media.

Even if he “has no more patience.”

Moreover, the 64-year-old elected official “refuses to call it a highway.” “We’ve been promised a four-lane highway since the 1960s. My own family was expropriated for that.”

In 1969, his grandfather died in an accident on Route 148 – which connects Laval to Gatineau. At the time, it was the “dangerous” road in the region.

“Everyone was happy when we were told about a four-lane motorway,” he says. But with a “motorway” made up of two narrow lanes where people drive at over 100 km/h, “the danger” has just moved from the 148 to the A50, he explains.

The unloved one

Highway 50 was planned in the 1960s and 1970s to connect the Outaouais to the Laurentians via Mirabel airport, “but initially, not many governments believed in this project, so they never invested the money it deserved,” explains Pierre Barrieau, lecturer in transportation planning at the School of Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture at the Université de Montréal.

“The heart of the problem is there,” summarizes the expert, also president of Gris Orange consultant. The government never thought that there would be the traffic to justify the four lanes, so it made economy of scale measures by just making two lanes, sometimes three [voies]sometimes a central reservation, sometimes not; without continuity.

The choice was “political,” says Marc-André Martin, president of the Professional Association of Government Engineers of Quebec. He consulted with retired colleagues. “The engineers in Outaouais did not recommend a half-highway because they anticipated what was going to happen: that it was going to be problematic to have a highway that meets,” he says.

“Engineers who work in road engineering know that this is not done,” insists Mr. Martin. They were rather in favor of a new national road with wider gauges – where the speed limits would have been lower.

In terms of costs, “if you put two lanes in each direction with a central reservation in the middle, it costs double the price of putting two narrow lanes with overtaking spaces,” underlines Jean-Philippe Meloche, expert in urban economics and local public finances.

A full professor at the Faculty of Planning at the University of Montreal, Mr. Meloche explains that the government has charters to calculate “how much it is worth to save lives on the road.”

A highway widening is “always easier to promise during an election campaign,” says the professor. Because to widen the highway along its entire length, it is necessary to “double all the bridges over all the rivers” and “that costs a lot, a lot.”

Repeated calls to action

As early as 2017, the mayors of several municipalities in the Laurentians adopted resolutions to urge the Quebec government to act. In vain.

Since then, municipal elected officials have been hounding the party in power – first the Liberals, then the CAQ – to secure the Mirabel-Lachute section.

Last April, for the umpteenth time in seven years, elected officials from the MRC of Argenteuil adopted a resolution imploring Quebec to add flexible safety barriers before the promised four-lane widening, similar to the pilot project carried out on the Gatineau-Outaouais section.

A pilot project that has saved lives, they emphasize, stressing the fact that the “road toll continues to worsen” on their section.

The following month, a new tragedy proved them right: three of the four members of a young family from Ontario were killed on this dangerous stretch of road.

Not just statistics

“These are not just statistics, these are children who lose a parent; a woman who becomes a widow,” adds coroner Denyse Langelier.

During each of her investigations, she calls the family of the road victim to explain the circumstances of the death. And each time, her heart sinks. “If the highway had been properly secured, this would not have happened,” she has to explain to them too often.

Those who remain are “branded,” she insists.

In 2013, the coroner met with an MTQ engineer who gave her a report dating from… 2008 concluding that the configuration of the A50 on sections where the lanes are contiguous contributes to the severity of accidents.

In other words, the MTQ has recognized the problem since 2008.

The coroner does not attribute malicious intentions to MTQ officials, but the “bureaucratic machine” is “so heavy” with all its criteria and standards to be respected, she says, that the concrete wheel on which it has been pushing for 11 years has barely moved.

On a “half-highway,” if we want to install concrete barriers in the middle, from a technical point of view, “it’s not possible everywhere because of the clearance distances, because of the horizontal and vertical visibility distances, in the curves,” explains Marc-André Martin. There are also road drainage issues. “It’s not a viable solution in the short term,” he says.

We then return to the question of deadlines. The Highway 50 file is managed by the major projects office in Montreal. “On day 1 that we start a project, it takes 7 to 14 years on average before work begins,” explains Mr. Martin. And seven years is really ordinary work.”

His solution: to start doing projects in-house again. “We subcontract this out, it’s very, very long. Just the time it takes to verify contracts – I won’t even mention engineering – that’s years more,” explains the government engineer.

Meanwhile, since January alone, four new fatal accidents have occurred on the A50. “As a coroner, you feel helpless,” concludes M^e Denyse Langelier: All I can do is keep hammering away at the same nail until the recommendation is implemented.