Flashbacks: The 13th birthday of a very unlucky Red Hill Valley Parkway
It's the 13th anniversary of Hamilton's highway of bad luck.
Although some might use harsher words to describe the Red Hill Valley Parkway, such as jinxed, cursed or botched.
But, call it what you want on this noteworthy birthday: The $245-million express route through east Hamilton - that officially opened on Nov. 17, 2007 - was one of the most contentious and exasperating public policy debates in local, living memory.
It took more than a half century of mind-numbing planning, polarizing debate and bend-over-backwards engineering to accommodate a slate of environmental, Indigenous, technical, economic and political considerations to finally build the north-south expressway.
And even before the first automobile drove on it, the project was the subject of a rancorous $75-million lawsuit between the city and the federal government. The city contended that former Hamilton East MP and Chretien-era cabinet minister Sheila Copps and 67 other federal officials conspired to use the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act to obstruct the project, causing unnecessary costs.
Over the past year, more lawyers were called in over new allegations that slippery pavement and other design problems have been compromising road safety and the stage is set for an inquiry early next year. Meanwhile, a proposed $250-million class action lawsuit is gathering steam in the background.
The legal challenge, which still needs court authorization to move forward, contends the parkway was built negligently without using acceptable construction standards contributing to more than 200 collisions and four deaths since a 2013 city report identified the pavement as being unduly slippery.
How could a short stretch of blacktop become such a big pile of predicaments? We think of the LRT as a historically divisive issue mired in a colossal quagmire. And it is. But the fight over Red Hill is the stuff of legend, a never-ending saga of snafus, a bumpy road that just can't seem to get smoothed out.
My goodness. It was eight kilometres of trouble," says Larry Di Ianni, who headed the Red Hill Expressway Implementation Committee in the early 2000s. He was elected as mayor in 2003, running against expressway opponent David Christopherson.
It is a project that was plagued with controversies from its inception. That's why it took so long to build," he said.
Don McLean, from the Friends of the Red Hill Valley, a group that opposed construction of the expressway, said, It may have been that someone put a curse on it somewhere along the way. I don't know."
The Red Hill Valley Parkway began as an idea that grew out of the post-Second World War boom.
It was the beginning of suburbia in North America. And Hamilton was no different. The city had to plan for growth," Mike Marini, of the city's Red Hill Valley Project Office said back in 2007, as the roadway was about to open.
After the expressway was originally proposed in 1950, it took municipal politicians several years to get their heads around the idea of turning over parkland in the Red Hill Valley to road construction.
But as the city got bigger, support for the project grew.
The roadway was expected to bring more business to the east end of Hamilton, encourage development in upper Stoney Creek, increase the city's tax base, and move trucks from Centennial Parkway. Opponents protested for years about its impact on the environment.
After approvals and funding were in place, the NDP government under Bob Rae, that was elected in 1990, cancelled provincial financing. But the support was restored after the Conservative Mike Harris government was elected in 1995.
But then, the federal government demanded environmental approvals under federal law and that took several more years to sort out before bulldozers could start on the project.
Supporting the road was an easy decision for me because it was a needed project, it was economically beneficial and I always thought that people really wanted to see it built," said Di Ianni.
It's led to tens of millions of dollars coming into the city's coffers to help with services and resources for the citizens of Hamilton."
But McLean doesn't buy the arguments, even today. I'm still strongly opposed to it. The climate crisis in particular makes it clear that it was a bad idea," he says.
That was what the road was about, facilitating sprawl. It was backed by pretty powerful forces and city council rolled over on it.
It was not about transportation as such. It was primarily about creating a situation where you could sell houses in upper Stoney Creek on the basis that you are five minutes from the QEW."
Di Ianni acknowledges the parkway has facilitated sprawl, but he believes the real cause of it is prior urban planning that allowed development in Glanbrook and upper Stoney Creek. Sprawl could have been contained by zoning the area differently.
An interesting aside developed when a deal was struck in 2015 for the city to drop its lawsuit against the federal government. Part of the agreement involved handing over the former Marine Discovery Centre to the city as a kind of a peace offering.
But true to the narrative about everything associated with the Red Hill Parkway being jinxed, the waterfront building sits empty after a protracted legal battle with the restaurant that used to operate there.
Sarcoa closed in 2017 - just like the $10-million discovery centre did in 2010 - and no one is sure what to do next.
Perhaps the centre might have been a good place to celebrate a 13th birthday and make a wish for a roadway that could use some better luck.
Markflashbacks@gm