Changes down the road?

CHARLOTTE PETRIE

Iqaluit East MLA Ed Picco is on the war-path, and it leads straight to the intersection near the federal fisheries building in Tundra Valley.

Concerned about the risk to drivers turning on and off the bypass road, Picco sent a letter to Iqaluit city council. He asked council to review the location and either turn the bypass road into a one-way street going south or add another stop sign.

“I’ve had several cab drivers, constituents – people actually coming to my house asking why this is going on. So I wrote the mayor and council and made them aware of it several weeks ago,” Picco said.

But Jim Grittner, the city’s director of public works, says the change is unwarranted.

In a memo to the mayor, he wrote: “When a vehicle follows the rules of the road, stops at the stop sign and proceeds with caution as required by law, there is no problem.

“A vehicle driving up and stopping looks to the left [and] can see up the road and around the corner for oncoming traffic. There may be times when some vehicles are parked at federal fisheries but one can see up and around the corner so with a short three-second wait one can see the flow of traffic.”

The response has Picco piqued.

“That’s just so stupid. They are so stupid. That really makes me mad, because that’s not what I was saying at all, at all, at all. This is really upsetting to me.

“I bet [bylaw officers] never even came out here to see.”

And with that, Picco arranged an experiment. He and his executive assistant went out to the site and demonstrated how the layout of the intersection obstructs a driver’s view of traffic turning right off the bypass road when traveling northeast.

The pair then repeated the experiment, illustrating how a driver turning onto the bypass road is unable to see northeast-bound traffic turning right. He described the intersection as an “accident waiting to happen.”

“You can’t see the vehicles that are coming out and it’s very dangerous. It’s a blind corner. You can’t see [the vehicles] until they’re on top of you,” Picco said.

“I don’t know any other intersection where a car will hit you at a 45-degree angle – where they share the same path going in opposite directions.”

The intersection is confusing and difficult to describe, Picco added, so one must really experience it.

And that is precisely what Mayor John Matthews, who lives just up the road from the intersection, asked councillors to do at the city’s regular meeting April 8.

“I think there may be justification for putting a sign or something there but we don’t have consensus yet,” Matthews said, giving the assignment back to Grittner for a second look.