We went to Elie on Tuesday.
It was supposed to be a trip to Winnipeg for an appointment that my spouse had made. Normally we would not travel on such a snowy day, but the appointment was important enough that we wanted to try to make it, and the roads were at the point where the trip looked reasonable for an experienced winter driver. The roads in Brandon by the time we left were okay and visibility was a few kilometers, the storm was to move further east ahead of us.
Well, things didn’t go quite as well as we had hoped, and by the time that we were halfway between Portage la Prairie and Elie we were basically in whiteout conditions. You could see about 90 metres in front of the car.
It was a little dicey, but the highway itself was still drivable, you just had to travel at a speed that matched conditions. By my own reckoning, that speed would have been about 60 to 70 kilometres per hour.
And no one was doing that.
So, here we are, our little Nissan Versa, hurtling down the highway at 8o km/h. I would have rather been going 65, but because of the other drivers on the highway, that didn’t seem safe either. I was confident in my ability to stay on the road and in the grip that my winter tires had on it, what was making my knuckles white was my nervous grip on the steering wheel while hoping that one of the idiots driving down the highway at 110 km/h in whiteout conditions was not going to rear-end us.
That is why I kept going 80… I shouldn’t have had to.
I just do not understand what people do not get about the concept of driving to the conditions. Nobody was. Not one other vehicle was travelling slower than us, we got passed by multiple vehicles.
And now we want to raise the speed limit on that highway to 110 km/h. Now, I’m not necessarily opposed to this. In fact, in the summer during optimal driving conditions I’d probably be fine with 115. Since most people I know go above the speed limit anyway, and the common speed on the Trans-Canada is about 110, I’m totally aware that the common speed on the route will become about 120. I’m okay with that, in the summer.
So, my suggestion would be that we do raise the speed limit on the highway to 110 during the summer, when it is safe to do so. However, keep the speed at 100 during the winter. Since we haven’t changed the signs to 110 yet, now is the time to consider this way of establishing the speed limit. Add a sign above the current 100 that says WINTER (NOV to MAR) and then attach the new signs to the side that say SUMMER (APR to OCT). Since we were going to have to create new signs anyway, the extra cost of this should be minimal.
Apparently drivers cannot regulate themselves to drive slower in the winter, so it seems to me the only safe thing to do would be keep the highway at 100 km/h, at least during those months. Sure, people would still overdrive conditions, but giving them even more rope to hang themselves with seems crazy.
Oh well, on the bright side, the Elie Timmies is open.
