I have been travelling the Sea to Sky Highway for 19 years. For the last six, I have called Squamish home. In that time, I have driven this corridor thousands of times as a commercial driver, a commuter, and a resident. I am in the tourism and transportation sphere, evaluating and training drivers, and I sit in the same traffic as everyone else.
Most people in the corridor know me, if they know me at all, as the admin of the Sea to Sky Road Conditions Facebook group. What they may not know is how that happened.
When I came on board as an administrator a few years ago, the group had about 45,000 members and was overrun with spam. Bot accounts were flooding in by the dozens every day. Inappropriate spam posts would come in, Hundreds, eventually thousands of accounts had to be removed by hand. I put up public posts calling on the original admin to let me help figure out what settings needed updating. Facebook evolves constantly, and groups that were set up once and left alone fall apart. I was trusted to take care of it. Over time, with the help of other volunteers, we built a structure: bot verification questions, keyword alerts, and admission rules. If you do not answer the questions and agree to the rules, you are not admitted. The internet may be a lawless place, but because people’s lives and livelihoods depend on this group, this group is not. It throws people off, and the comments towards the volunteers sometimes are wholly inappropriate.
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Today, the group has more than 93,000 members. In a perfect world, it would have zero posts, because zero posts would mean zero incidents. But when incidents happen, we want one place with factual, chronological information so people can make their own decisions. During a major event, we will shut off new posts and funnel updates into a single thread so the information stays organized. We have more reach on the social media of the districts involved.
The problem is that we are often the fastest source of information in the corridor. DriveBC is slow to update and provides almost no context. The RCMP posts on X (Twitter?). We rely on all of that, plus eye-witness accounts, to piece together what is happening in real time. Meanwhile, thousands of people are sitting in their vehicles being strung along with messages that another update is coming in an hour. Five or six updates later, they have been sitting through an entire work shift. Some are without insulin. Some need baby formula. Some miss their flights. Commercial drivers go over their legally permitted hours of service. Companies lose employees for the day. Families lose their evening.
Just this past Sunday, a head-on collision between Squamish and Whistler closed the highway for nearly eight hours. It was the same issues, again: no divided highway barrier that could have prevented the collision entirely, no communication telling people to turn back, no one stopping vehicles from departing Squamish or Whistler (after the incident occurred), only for those drivers to sit in the dark and cold for hours. Why allow thousands of cars to queue when you could block traffic at the source and send people back to town?
I have met with Chambers, Businesses, and Politicians of Municipal, Provincial, and Federal flavours. I have collected more than 4,400 signatures on a petition. One response came back from the Ministry — a form letter, “Thank you, we understand, this is a local issue, and that is where it should stay” was the summation of it.
I have people message me privately or post on the group with their experiences. Some of them are with ministry staff, some just explain why they don’t use the highway at certain times. I know the tourism industry dreads sending things on Fridays and Sundays because of the uncertainty.
But the province owns this highway. The province funds the contractor who maintains it. The province decides whether to install speed cameras, build turnaround gates, or station an ICARS reconstruction unit locally so investigations do not require a team to drive up from Surrey. These are provincial decisions requiring provincial money for the major fixes. But in the immediate future, far less could be spent to decrease delays and risk right now.
This highway is not the same as when the updated design was made and submitted for the Olympic proposals 25 years ago. Why are we still doing the same things?
Many things could be done, from more frequent and more detailed updates, new road lines, new road lighting, automated speed enforcement, on-demand turnaround gates to allow road services to more quickly detour folks, tire checks in West Vancouver AND Alice Lake, blasting out and widening Porteau Cove and Murrin, and a myriad of others. Some of these are pricey, some are simply a policy change. Imagine the police coming through an incident and telling everyone to pull to one side or another so there is a clear apathy for other services. Does it happen? Not that I’ve seen, but it may. Instead, what I see is them trying to scramble by in a haphazard fashion because people aren’t communicated with what is best for them to do to assist others.
To be clear, my issue is NOT with those maintaining the roads. Those folks do great work. I grew up with a father who’s a road maintainer back east. I spent many a snowstorm in a grader or plow clearing snow. I know what those nights are like. They aren’t the issue here. It’s the policymakers in Victoria.
Also, this isn’t limited to one political party or another. Different provincial parties have had this responsibility under their portfolios, and we are still here.
I am one person. I will keep showing up. But data, not just signatures, is what moves policy. We are working to gather information through surveys to present to the decision makers, but in the end, it still requires action for the Ministry.
