Also, I do agree that, unless the states decide to upgrade U.S. 97 up to the border, BC 97 south of Penticton should be left as is.

^^ Yeah they've been talking about that Vernon bypass since I was a kid. I don't think it'll ever happen. The last big improvement was the extension of 32nd avenue and the overpass north of town, which alleviated the zig zag you had to do right in the middle of town.

The overpass and twinning north of Swan lake was a good project as well.

The Wood lake bypass is great, That was such a bottleneck when the road ran along the lake, and makes travel from Vernon to the airport a snap. I don't see a Kelowna bypass happening anytime soon either. I do agree about extending the twinned section past the connector turnoff to Peachland. South of that I don't know how they'd expand the highway. The best thing they could do along there is probably add service roads in the places where businesses abut the highway to reduce congestion.

And I heard there was a time when Interior BC wasn’t treated as some sort of hinterland. :rolleyes:

And there was yet another deadly head on collision south of Prince George because the "divided" part is a very short section. Most of the highway is going to be undivided. The only time they are going to divide a section is when the land is not flat, so they don't have room to put all 4 lanes together.

The highway should be a proper free-way from Prince George to Kamloops with lanes separated by a grass median.

I don't see the interior being treated as such. I grew up in the interior, own property there and have family and friends all throughout. There's certainly not the same discord between major cities and smaller centres that you see in Alberta.

From the preliminary graphics and discussions I have seen so far regarding Peachland the preferred choice is an entirely new stretch of Highway to be built along the mountain side above the community. The current stretch of highway along the lakeshore would be repurposed by the community.

For me this is the best option for everyone. The highway loses a major bottleneck and Peachland gets to reconnect with its greatest asset, the lake.

Essentially it would be similar to the Wood Lake bypass.

That's not a bad idea at all. It would make the trip faster/ safer and allow for better development around the old highway, which I would assume would become more of a local road.

Preferred by most, but a few rich people living way up the hill might be able to convince the government to just add two more lanes a a few more traffic lights to the existing highway and call it a "major 21st century upgrade."

Is there much highway construction by Golden right now? hoping to get to the Horse to ride some pow soon!

Sometimes I really don't understand why money still has such influence in politics. I thought that everyone's equal* in democracy? :hell:

I'm not at all surprised if that sort of crap happens.

* I mean, in principle, not in practice.

Ps: In Ontario, Highway 402 was supposed to go north of London towards Woodstock to join up with 403, but this one rich family had its route altered to the inconvenience of everyone else.

I think construction starts next year and will last into Winter 2023 (Read: Winter 2027)?

I wonder if they couldn't abandon the entire stretch of 97 south of Westbank as a highway and do a junction off the connector, say 10k west of the existing junction. Keep the highway up high and run it all the way to Summerland like that. Keep the highway as a local road but funnel all the through traffic to the Coquihalla

They've been planning to use 97C as part of the bypass for a while. Here's the latest version I could find showing some of the newer takes on the original concept.

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/dr...ls-nov2016.pdf

Sweet, glad it won't affect my snowboard commute this year. Looking forward to them sorting that area out though, been stuck in brutal traffic there more times than I can count.

Has it been so bad that going down 93 then backtracking via 95 would have been faster?

Any bypass would connect onto new but existing 4 lane highway north of Summerland and just south of Peachland.

Interesting - thanks for posting that. :tup:

Will sure be nice to have that last phase of KHC done.

That's gonna be one hell of a project, I can't wait to see it completed in its entirety. Currently that stretch of highway is a goat path. The highway will be 4 lanes from Golden to the Yoho Park boundary. Definitely will be over a billion dollars for Phase 4. Hopefully the feds will contribute a good chunk.

IIRC the total cost for phase 4 is $469M with each level of government contributing “nearly” half and half.

Additionally I wanna see the lights in Golden replaced with interchanges, same with the T-intersection with 95, and most importantly twinning from Leanchoil to first few km’s into the park because that < 90-degree turn looks absolutely awful.

Ps: Are there not enough federal votes to buy from Golden?

New 4-5 lane bridge for Sicamous.

In case anyone wants the source, here it is: https://www.kelownacapnews.com/news/...e-in-sicamous/.

I only have one word: cheap. :hell:

In my opinion, I totally understand that money is limited and spending money in one place means not spending somewhere else, so we shouldn't overspend where it isn't necessary, and the projects with the most benefit should be built first, even if that means prestigious projects like the TCH have to wait.

However, I wish things were built with a better end goal in mind, so that things we build today won't need to be torn down and rebuilt in 20 years time. Rather than the pathetically weak objective of '4 laning highway 1', have the objective be a full freeway. I'd rather they wait longer to build things right than waste money on the bare minimum required in 2018.

And also, it is unfair to make BC shoulder this burden alone. The TCH is clearly a national entity, so the cost of every km should be split evenly between the provinces, rather than the province with the toughest terrain bearing the heaviest load.

At the very least the feds knew to share the cost of KHC Phase 4. I will give them that.

It's been a couple years, but even if US 97 isn't upgraded, but some BC 97 upgrades are needed - removed some of the direct driveway accesses, add some service roads where necessary, and upgrade to a 100 km/h standard. Between Oliver and Osoyoos it functions as both a major regional highway and a farm-to-market road. It probably doesn't need to be upgraded to 4 lanes.

Osoyoos to the 3A junction is fine as is. Making it 4 lanes would actually take away from the character of the area.

3A to the north end of Penricton 4 lane limited access (like the Lougheed Highway)

North of Penticton to UBC Okanagan, full controlled access freeway. 4 lanes except 6 lane bridge over Okanagan Lake. From Peachland to UBC completely new route.

North of UBC to Vernon, as is save for maybe one or two new interchanges.

I just noticed (once again) Dawn Creek has a dedicated route around the town for dangerous goods. It’s literally called “Dangerous Goods Route”. I suppose it also serves as a bypass for Highway 2, Highway 49 and Highway 97?

Proposing Solutions for TCH through Three-Valley Gap
 

A Revelstoke-based article expressed the concern that upgrading that stretch of TCH might be so expensive that BC will just leave it as is, even if it’s twinned from Craigellachie westward and from Revelstoke eastward.

Question: Is is viable to dig a straight 4-lane tunnel under the mountain north of the current alignment up to 23 and toll it to recover the cost? If people have already answered this question, can someone point me to the thread and the comments?

TCH should then also receive appropriate upgrades in Revelstoke.

TCH’s closed between Revelstoke and Forde Station right now, by the way.

I say toll the entire thing through the mountains and use the money to do what is necessary where required. Tolling individual pieces would be needlessly complex and be unfair if that happened to be your commute.

I've always wondered why tunnels just aren't a thing in Canada. Drive through Europe and there are lots, and I can't imagine it being any more affordable to do so there.

I have always wondered this as well. It is not just Canada, the US for its population and massive freeway network also has a major relative lack of tunnels.

Where I live in Japan is not a very populated place, but it has two main expressways that I use often, one goes along the coast and the other across the island.

The first expressway, I often drive an 80km stretch of it through an area about as populated as Victoria to Courtney / Comox. Along it (I have counted) there are 20 tunnels.

The second expressway is even more amazing. I drive about a 60km stretch of it through the mountains from my region to another that has half the population of Vancouver Island. Around a solid 40km of that stretch is tunnels. Some are over 5km long and there is about a 20 km stretch where one is not in a tunnel for only about 2 or 3km (and most of those few kms are elevated on bridges over river valleys).

And it is not just the main freeways, the secondary and sometime even tertiary routes have tunnels. For example near my house there is a local road that goes straight through a hill. Not a highway, just a two lane local road.

Even with population / density factored in there are relatively waaaaay more tunnels (and elevated roads) in Japan than there are anywhere in Canada (especially since my area is essentially the Newfoundland of Japan and it is still loaded with tunnels and viaducts). Even Toronto would have far more elevated / tunnelled roads if it were in Japan for its size.

Also, looking on Google Earth, it looks as if the federal government has cheeped out a bit on the first 7km of 4 lane work done through Yoho Park in BC.

Unlike in Alberta there are at grade access points. They aren't even the somewhat acceptable protected T intersections which the province builds on lower volume rural intersections.

Ugh, it is still a massive improvement of course, but now I am worried that they won't add interchanges at busier access points.

We will have to wait and see when they actually show some of their plans for the next 40km.

So Parks Canada's finally done with the first 6 (or 7) km into Yoho Park? :) That's the impression I got from your comment. ;)

Yeah it's done, you can take look on street view.

A new street view?! That hasn't been updated for 3.5 years. Okay I definitely have to see it for myself.

Calgary has a very expensive tunnel to nowhere... :shrug:

When I drove around Kyushu last year, it cost me around $80 CAD in tolls for about 300 km of travel (reduced to $45 CAD with an ETC for foreigners). There was lots of tunnels, and some of them were pretty long. Tunnels are expensive to build, expensive to maintain and have more safety hazards than almost any above ground solution. There's a reason they're avoided at all costs.

I’m aware of that, but for the segment through T-V-G, if BC’s averse to using the Public-Private-Partnership (P3) model, a tunnel might be the only option.

The slopes on the south side of the highway are hard to stabilize, from what I read.

So are you willing to pay a $10 toll every time you go from Revelstoke to Sicamous? I'm sure a tunneling solution isn't very feasible without something like that. The toll would probably be needed if a tunnel was done, P3 or not.

That’s exactly what I said earlier, tolls. ;) But $10 one-way? You’d need to ask people that commute regularly through T-V-G then. :runaway: I was thinking more like $4 or $5 (the cost of TCH Cobequid Pass in Nova Scotia), max at $7.50 each way.

Personally for me, as a traveller, as long as it’s no more than $25, I’ll bite the bullet and use it.

What is it with BC bridges and having an odd number of lanes?

I agree with the idea of implementing a toll for TCH upgrades but not west of Revelstoke. The toll should be at Glacier, between Revelstoke and Golden, so that smaller communities don't get cut off from larger centres. The toll can fund upgrades along the route from Kamloops to the AB border.

The assumption is that the current segment through T-V-G will not be abandoned, but retained as an EDR (emergency detour route).

I thought that was implied but now I had to state it explicitly. :frog:

It remains to be seen whether or not Parks Canada’s down to tunneling through national parks. But darn it that’ll have meant BC upgraded TCH around Donald (and possibly Golden too) for nothing. :(

^ what’s the point of just adressing the issues at TVG though? There are numerous places along the route that need significant upgrades. I’d prefer the whole stretch from Kamloops to AB be adressed wholistically and funded (in part) by a toll

By all means TVG has issues but it’s not the only spot

That’s a good point. Thanks for bringing that up.

I can still see it being broken into a few mega parts though, especially now that twinning has been done east of Kamloops, around Balmoral, around Malakwa and around Golden, so this is how I see it:
Kamloops: remove all at-grade intersections, all of it;
Balmoral: a tolled freeway from there to Malakwa;
T-V-G to Revelstoke: a tolled tunnel;
Revelstoke to Golden: another tolled tunnel.

Everyone here has for sure discussed this before. It isn’t anything new. The main thing that’s lacking is the stupid political will.
Also should I be afraid that the 2 tolls together will render TCH less competitive than I-90??

Most of the Trans-Canada can be twinned in BC without major bypasses. I don't think there would be any appetite for major tunnel bypasses. I was referring more just to Three Valley Gap being tunneled around than the whole stretch. My reference to the Japanese tolls was to show how expensive it'll get if you do those major tunneling bypasses. I don't think there's any jurisdiction in North America who would be willing to set those kind of tolls you see in Japan.

They've found a way to avoid tunnels near Golden, so I'm sure they can do the same for many other parts of the highway.

Good point. It’s pretty crazy that both levels of government are willing to chip in $450M for ~4 km in KHC 4. Even if BC’s only putting in $235M, that’s still a lot of money.

So, just like what milomilo said elsewhere, joint funding’s the way to go? :D

A toll would effectively be joint funding.. all those Albertans vacationing in BC would be paying for a significant amount of the upgrades :)

In an alternative reality, I'd have liked the entire TCH network to be tolled from the start, with the proceeds of the toll funding improvements network wide. Since it's a national highway, in my view it's fairest that the cost of the whole thing is split between all users. I personally don't think it is fair that the greatest cost is instead portioned out to those with the harshest geography. The proceeds of the toll could then have much more quickly built a comprehensive high quality network.

This would be fairly hard to implement now though, as someone in Canmore will balk at being forced to pay a toll when they already have a fully built freeway. But now if we put in tolls just on a few expensive sections, that forces a disproportionate cost on the locals there when everyone else got their roads for 'free'.

One snag with tolls though is that it would require ANPR, but that will be basically useless when it snows. You could put in booths, but yuck, that would be pretty backwards.

In an alternate reality, tolls on Coquihalla Pass should have stayed, since most people would have bitten the bullet and used it anyway. ;)

It's actually the same standard as in Banff except the use of barriers rather than grass median for obvious reason. All the major intersections are interchanges, while the smaller access roads are still left with at-grade crossings.

For example, this:
https://goo.gl/maps/9FfrdzAeMPD2