It’s said that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. But Fred Martin is much more than a squeaky wheel.
Motivated by a near miss with a semi while standing on the corner of 50th Street and 50th Avenue last December, Martin initiated a lobby for a highway bypass — or ‘safety route’, as her prefers to call it — that has apparently born fruit, in the form of a functional planning study by Alberta Transportation.
What that means is Alberta Transportation will conduct a thorough assessment of traffic — particularly heavy truck traffic — through Athabasca, determine if a bypass route is needed, and where it might go.
While only a first step, it’s a pretty monumental first step, one that many in the area have been requesting for years.
So how did Fred Martin do it? How was one person able to make more headway on the bypass issue in six months, than handfuls of local politicians have in years, if not decades?
For starters, he did his homework, and did it efficiently. He didn’t play on emotional arguments or collect a bunch of meaningless signatures on a petition. Instead, he gathered factual information about the specific situation and government policy, and put it in a format that would resonate with provincial officials. He also got key players on his side, like the Town and County of Athabasca, the chamber of commerce and Al-Pac.
Armed with all that information, he didn’t organize a demonstration or some other public spectacle. He arranged, with the help of local MLA Jeff Johnson, a meeting with the Minister of Transportation. There, he laid out his argument and essentially let the facts speak for themselves.
The result is that he made enough of an impression to get a study commissioned, which is all he was really looking for.
This functional planning study comes with no promises. Transportation officials may very well come back and say a bypass isn’t feasible, or even necessary. But if it does continue to move forward, we can thank Fred Martin for understanding the difference between a squeaky wheel, and one that just makes noise.
