Highway twinning planners use gathered information

The planners are doing their job, and while they may not have much to share with the public just yet, they’re well into the assessment stage of mapping out the best way to proceed with the twinning of Highway 39 and Highway 6 (south).

A trio of open house events in late December allowed the general public a chance to look at various twinning proposals and provide feedback to the consultants, Tetra-Tech Canada.

The public was given to Jan. 5 to respond to the original outlines with the promise of more open house events later this year.

Doug Wakabayashi, spokesman for the provincial Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure, said that while there is nothing to share right now, "the consultants and our representatives have held a number of direct meetings with affected landowners and the urban and rural municipal councils. That has been done in addition to the public open house events."

The planning team is now combining what they've learned at these meetings and events and working them into engineering and economic concepts, Wakabayashi said.

"It's their turn to look at the pros and cons and to come up with a plan," he added, referring to the consulting engineers from Tetra-Tech.

These consultants are joined at the table by a steering committee and that group, in turn, is overseen by the Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure.

"Based on what they've learned and will be using in the planning stages, they'll come up with some preferred options that will be presented to the stakeholders and general public in the spring," Wakabayashi said.

That will be done through the open house events as well as direct contact with the landowners and the 10 or more rural municipal and several urban councils that will be affected by the twinning process.

The original open house events staged in Milestone, Weyburn and Midale in December 2014, dealt with the twinning concept between Estevan and Regina and included a few options that suggested circumventing some communities altogether, or placing the four-lane throughway on a more direct route through the communities.

The planners noted that it is their intention to design a traffic expressway with a 110 km/h speed limit with only a few areas identified for reduced speed.

The twinning of Highway 39 from the Bienfait junction into Estevan is already well underway, with a proposed path now determined for the 14 or 15 km stretch that is one of the busiest transportation corridors in the province.

The highway between North Portal, the main international highway point-of-entry into Saskatchewan from the U.S., will be Phase 3 of the project as it rolls out over the next few years.

In the meantime, construction teams are expected to put some finishing touches to the long-awaited trucking by-pass around Estevan, which is designed to provide some relief to hard-pressed truck routes that have been designated within the city limits for decades.

The planners have already noted the four-lane highway will blend into the Estevan truck bypass route at each end of the city and thus the route for a major four-lane expressway near the Energy City, has already been determined.