It wasn’t a long weekend or a powder day, yet people heading south from Whistler Village on the second Sunday in January faced a wait of up to an hour just to get to the highway south of Function. This did not spark joy.
I was stuck in it, too, eventually giving up and trying the northbound to Alta Lake Road option to bypass the aggravating mess caused by the two-lane section of Creekside—only to eventually find myself in the longest wait to turn right on Highway 99 that I’ve ever seen. Vehicles were backed up almost to Cardiac Hill.
I do know better than to be caught out in our Sunday traffic, but in this case my daughter was participating in the high school ski races (who scheduled those for a Sunday?) and I needed to meet her afterward to pick up her skis before she bused down to the city where she goes to school. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, you can’t avoid being stuck in our worst traffic.
The problem is we tend to treat our traffic jams as anomalies, something that happens occasionally, rather than as a serious structural problem that happens all the time—predictably, annoyingly, and with real-life consequences for locals and our guests. Imagine trying to get to the airport on time on a Sunday afternoon, not realizing you needed to give yourself eight hours instead of four.
It’s not just Sunday afternoons. Anytime it snows even a little bit, I can’t make a left turn out of Spring Creek unless someone in the solid and unbroken column of northbound vehicles actually stops to let me through at the exact same time when there is no southbound traffic—and there’s a lot of southbound traffic. It’s nerve-racking because visibility is limited looking uphill and by the time you pull out to make a turn a vehicle going over 80 km/h can appear out of nowhere. I’ve had to pull into the yellow lines just south of the intersection to let speeding vehicles go by more than once.
I’m fortunate that I can bike and walk to work some days, but a car is often a requirement for my day job. Transit isn’t an option for me either, and buses get just as stuck in traffic as other vehicles.
We all know there’s a problem. We know we get traffic on Fridays, on powder days and on Sunday afternoons—Monday if it’s a long weekend. We know residents in Brio, Nordic and Spring Creek can’t easily go left when there’s heavy traffic and can barely turn right sometimes. We know the second right-side passing lane that starts north of Creekside causes more traffic and mayhem than it alleviates. We know buses aren’t an option because they can’t get through the traffic either. We know 80 km/h is too fast for the curvy and hilly section of highway between Alta Lake Road and Function.
We’ve known all this for a long time now. The question is whether anybody, anywhere, is doing anything about it. Is this miserable situation on anyone’s radar?
Is the municipality asking the province for help?
Is the Ministry of Transportation finally willing to consider some changes to remedy the issue, whether it’s installing traffic circles and pull-out lanes for neighbourhoods, adding a third lane for buses, policing the lights during busy times to get more traffic through, or building overpasses for pedestrians so we/they don’t have to add to the traffic problems by pressing the walk button?
Is Vail Resorts doing anything to inform skiers about the traffic waits and taking steps to stagger the exodus from the mountains—like extending the day with some night skiing?
By the way, the four-person carpool lots are great and Vail deserves credit for that idea. What other ideas do they have?
One immediate step I’d like to see would be for signs to be posted along the highway asking/telling visitors to yield for local traffic. At least make people aware that people are trying to get to work, pick up kids and in general live their lives around their ski day.
Another is to add more affordable storage lockers around base areas so people can choose to bike or walk to the mountains, bypassing the highway completely.
Another is to get rid of the second southbound lane north of Creekside—splitting the traffic into two just creates longer delays bringing two lanes back to one a few hundred metres down the road. One southbound lane should turn left, another straight, one should be for express buses and buses only (enforced by camera), and one should turn right. After the intersection it would briefly be two lanes for people turning out from either side of the highway.
Going back to three lanes with an alternating middle lane, like we had for the Olympics, may not be viable when there’s snow on the ground but when the way is clear then why not have a middle lane for transit and buses?
I don’t really care what we do as long as we do something. This has been going on for far too long with too little action. Whistler’s well-being depends not only on getting people here, but also on ensuring they can leave.
