Traffic

There’s about 100,000 people in Fort McMurray so one of the things that I didn’t think would be of concern when I was leaving Australia was traffic. After all, when you think about regional towns in Australia, traffic simply isn’t an issue. Heck, even in Adelaide, with a population of about a million, it’s difficult to consider traffic a significant problem. After all, hasn’t it been known as the 20 minute city?

But this is Fort Mac and everything is a little different here. There’s one main highway through past the centre of town and that highway heads out to all the various sites that are involved in getting oil out of the sand.

A lot of these places have camps where people work rosters and therefore don’t travel to and from site everyday. But there’s also a large number of people from Fort Mac that commute from the town to the various mines and processing sites. And all of these are North of town. So each morning, the exodus begins.

Where we’re living, there’s two ways to go. Thickwood Boulevard and Confederation Way. And the reality is that they are the same road, running in a horseshoe from highway 63 all the way back around to highway 63. So it doesn’t matter which way you go, you end up on the same road going in the same direction as everyone else. At the same time.

So this small country town has some of the worst traffic that I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing quite like coming around the corner and seeing just how far its backed up from the lights onto the highway. Yesterday it took me 40 minutes to get through from the back of the queue to the lights. Because some hours before they malfunctioned and the impact carried on for hours.

Last week, on a trip to Firebag, which is a 2 hour drive if all goes well, it took us an hour to get to the high way. Because there’d been an accident. There was no sign of it by the time we got there of course, but that didn’t stop us from getting to spend 3 hours in the car to travel about 120 kilometres. That’s ok, but on the way home, along the dirt road, it pissed down with rain and it took us over 2.5 hours to make the return journey. That’s too long to spend in the car on a commute in any one day. Hell I could have almost made it all the way to Pt Augusta and back in that time.

Traffic isn’t helped by the fact that there’s only one bridge (well technically two … one for each direction of traffic, so let’s say one location)) that enables you to cross the Athabasca river. There’s two lanes in each direction, which should provide for a nice smooth flow of traffic. After all, we’re talking about something in the order of 300m spans in a straight line. But that wouldn’t be allowing for the truck-driving Fort Macians who have managed two rear end collisions on the bridge in the last week alone. And each one of those backs traffic up to ridiculous levels.

I mean, its not even winter! There’s signs up warning you about icy bridge decks and don’t change lanes and so on, but these’ people can’t even manage to do this in summer! What hope is there I ask you?