Highway 31 Bypass - $88 Million Road to Nowhere?

I’ve often thought that the people in charge of designing certain things - airports, highways, parking lots, don’t have a great deal of experience in actually using the facilities they are charged with creating. It’s often obvious, winding one’s way through a new airport terminal that the architect has never flown - and so on.

Such is my feeling about the recently opened $88 million Highway 31 bypass, a project designed to alleviate the twice a day traffic messes in the western suburbs.

For some reason, the powers that be figured that building a north-south bypass would ease the traffic problems - but apparently they were failed to be informed that the traffic problems are EAST AND WEST, not north and south.

While movement will be speeded up for those coming from the north and desiring to head west on 62, or continue south on 31, this does nothing (maybe it did on paper, but not in reality) for the mile long jam ups east - west bound on 62.

(Scratching head).

A new east / west solution is on the drawing boards for considerably south of town - if approved and funded it will take years to build.

In the meantime, development to the west is being stifled by lack of access, and while construction projects are down, driver’s ire will continue to rise, twice a day, on the way through Algonquin.