Do you cringe when you think about your daily commute to and from work? Ever secretly wished all the roads were just for you? You’re not alone. For many of us, bumper-to-bumper commutes are a painful reality of our work week. Believe it or not, if you don’t live in Alberta’s Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB), your rush hour commute might seem like a Sunday pleasure cruise compared to what this community endures most days.
Bumper-to-bumper commutes, a reality for most Canadians, are also common in the oil sands region. Photo credit: iStockphoto
While those who live in the oil sands region enjoy abundant job opportunities and the nation’s highest per capita incomes, many get caught daily in one of Canada’s worst gridlocks, be it on the roads or in the air.
Over-stretched infrastructure and social services are an unfortunate consequence of a decade of rapid growth. Development brings prosperity for communities, but it also places tremendous pressure on roads, housing, schools, and hospitals (something OSQAR has touched on before).
Why is it so challenging in Wood Buffalo? For one thing, despite being larger than Nova Scotia the region has only one major highway. Wood Buffalo’s Highway 63 carries the heaviest loads per kilometre in the country, even though it’s still not entirely twinned.
Getting in and out of the region by commercial air service can also be difficult. Fort McMurray’s airport is the busiest of any small or medium-sized city in Canada. According to the Fort McMurray Airport Authority, the facility handles more than 700,000 people each year, even though the terminal was designed for 235,000 (a number it reached – and passed - back in 2005). The airside building is designed for a peak-hour maximum of 200 passengers, but it already needs to handle at least 300, and ideally 400.
As key players in the oil sands region, Suncor and industry are committed to working with government and other stakeholders to help address and resolve transportation issues.
And befitting the can-do attitude of Albertans, stakeholders aren’t just sitting around waiting for someone else to do something.
To better accommodate oversized trucks, a new five-lane bridge has been built across the Athabasca River flowing through Fort McMurray. The structure can hold more than 12 times the weight of a typical bridge.
Diversified Transportation Ltd. is operating buses that deliver thousands of workers to and from oil sands sites every day, significantly reducing the number of vehicles on the road, improving safety and lowering the environmental impacts.
The airport has started a rebuilding program that will finally triple the terminal’s size. When finished, it will be able to handle up to one million passengers a year.
There’s renewed interest in a Calgary-Edmonton-Fort McMurray rail corridor, effectively linking the oil sands hub with Alberta’s two largest cities to the south, as well as talk of reviving transport on local rivers.
It’s a great starting point for the recently-created Athabasca Oil Sands Area Transportation Coordinating Committee. Featuring representatives from the municipality, the province and industry, the committee’s mandate is to seek ways to further improve roads, transit, rail and air traffic. (The group’s first chair is Suncor’s own Heather Kennedy, an oil sands business veteran and long-time Fort McMurray resident.)
The new committee is a step in the right direction, as we think transportation, like other challenges created by oil sands development, is best tackled in a collaborative way.
We’re encouraged by what’s happening on the transportation front. It is progress like this that gets us to practical solutions rather than daydreaming about jet packs, Floo Networks and time-travelling DeLoreans (although, admittedly, they’d be pretty cool.)
