Why Driving to Tappen Feels Like a Survival Game

The road construction between Salmon Arm and Tappen has been going on for 4,367 days now.

Ok, not really, but that’s what it feels like.

It understandably takes a long time to make major changes to the Trans Canada Highway, but it’s not always smooth sailing (or driving) for the general public to navigate those changes while they’re in progress. A little temporary chaos is fine and we should all be able to handle that, but what I take issue with is how it seems like they are taking advantage of the chaos to make things as disorganized as humanly possible.

Again, disruptions are expected, but we shouldn’t need to have the reflexes of an F1 driver to get home safely after a rewarding shift at Dairy Queen.

The work that’s being done is a little more involved than a simple repaving. They are literally changing where the highway exists. You’d think that with something that intrusive, there would be equal emphasis placed on safety and organization of the remaining intact roads for the public to navigate.

What am I talking about specifically? Glad you asked.

Road Lines

The inconsistency here is wild. They add new sections of highway and paint lines so bright that you could see them from space, and then they re-route existing chunks of highway and don’t change the lines at all, or worse yet, they half-heartedly scrape off the old lines so that you aren’t sure if you’re following the old path or the new path. Either way, you end up straddling the rumble strips unsure if you're about to drive off the shoulder or get into a head-on collision.

But don’t worry, they’ll add a confusing amount of traffic cones to easily guide you towards your death. Seriously, if I trusted the placement of the cones on Kault Hill, I’d be writing this blog post from the bottom of the lake.

There is only one way to survive this stretch of highway right now — pray that the driver in front of you has cyborg-level eyesight and brain computing, and then tailgate them like you’ve just rolled in from Calgary.

To the men and women doing this road work, please make it a priority to paint clear lines when you change the road that has been unchanged for decades. Paint them clearly, and stop using whatever paint you’ve switched to that fades as soon as a bicycle wheel touches it.

Expecting people to safely navigate these new roads and stay inside the arbitrary lines is like Trump’s speechwriters expecting him to follow a teleprompter.

Flaggers

Let’s not pretend this is hard work, or even work that requires a human to do. (How this industry hasn’t been entirely replaced by robots is beyond me). But, for now, we’re stuck with them.

I’d be a little more tolerant of these little Lego people (you’ve seen their trucks that literally have Lego people on them, right? There’s a lawsuit waiting to happen) if they seemed to follow any semblance of order.

They stand in the middle of the road, then they stand on the side of the road. They sit in a car on the side of the road doing nothing, then they sit in a truck blocking the lane and waving you ahead with their arm out the window. They hold up stop signs, then they hold up cigarettes.

And let’s not forget that they are the ones that set up the slalom course of traffic cones I mentioned earlier. The fact that we even put human beings in this environment is wild.

It must be some sick person’s idea of population control.

“Let’s take this confusing mess of highway, send 10,000 vehicles on it daily, remove the road lines, and place dozens of humans in the middle of the road like little hi-vis bowling pins.”

There’s one way to get me to chill out on this rant: put each of these flaggers in a car and make them drive the highway. If they can successfully navigate the route they put us on, I’ll obey their commands to slow down.

Until then, the bowling pins better watch their back before someone gets mad and goes for a perfect game.

Honorable Mention

Shoutout to the flagger with one leg by the way. Have you seen this guy? It’s actually super impressive. Gotta respect a man with one leg that chose a career where all he has to do is stand for 10 hours a day.

He’s proven that we don’t need all these bipeds out there doing this job.

Either double his salary or round up his coworkers and start amputating. Gotta keep things fair. Equality!

If you want to keep people happy, and alive, it’s not complicated. Paint accurate lines on the road with something more resilient than a crayon, and replace the flaggers with robots.

Somebody call Elon.

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