If you are a driver who insists on doing the speed limit while travelling along 16 Avenue, there is a good chance you will hear the honking of horns from motorists behind you and see their headlights flashing in your rear-view mirror before they blast past on a do-not-pass stretch of road.
The speed limit along 16 Avenue is 60 km/h, but according to one study, 85 per cent of the drivers are doing 80 km/h or more.
Residents of the area describe 鈥渕aniac鈥� motorists 鈥減ractically breaking the sound barrier鈥� in their haste to get through a two-lane rural route with narrow shoulders and steep ditches that leave little room for error.
As the road becomes more congested, people are getting more impatient, and the result has been more crashes.
A study of 16 Avenue by 91原创 Township, Abbotsford and Surrey along with the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, ICBC and TransLink declared that the 16 Avenue corridor 鈥渉as a history of safety and traffic operation issues,鈥� and 鈥渟peeding is reportedly a problem.鈥�
The road, which is a designated truck route and part of the regional Major Road Network (MRN), has seen traffic increase roughly two per cent every year, going from 8,880 vehicles per day to 12,400 vehicles in less than 10 years.
About 13 to 16 per cent of that is truck traffic, more than the average arterial road, which carries five to 10 per cent trucks.
No surprise then, that a recent survey of residents found safety and traffic congestion were their top concerns.
So now, in an effort to address those concerns, slow down traffic and reduce accidents, there are plans to put traffic lights at several intersections along 16 Avenue in the Township.
There has been some resistance to the proposal from people who have warned the signal lights will increase traffic congestion along an already-clogged artery and with it, the frustration that leads impatient motorists to take risks.
A better solution, some have said, would be to upgrade the road to four lanes, as the long-range plans for 16 Avenue call for.
They are not wrong, but that will take a long time, almost two decades according to one estimate.
In the meantime, something needs to be done right now to reduce the carnage, and while traffic lights are, perhaps, a less-than-ideal interim measure, they will help.
