Support for a highway bypass around the Town of Athabasca is growing, with Athabasca town council recently going on record as backing the idea in principle.
Now here comes the tricky part: the community will have to demonstrate both the patience and persistence needed to move a highway bypass from an idea, to a plan, to a project.
Alberta Transportation says it has no plans to put a highway bypass around Athabasca. Of course it doesn’t, unless you believe the rumour that a bypass plan was actually concocted some 20 years ago before it was allegedly rejected at the community level, and if you further believe that such a document, if it ever really existed, currently sits in some bureaucrat’s file cabinet, just waiting to have the dust blown off it.
A much more likely scenario is that any campaign to build a bypass around Athabasca will need to start at Square One, with many, many squares left to count before we even dare of thinking it could be a reality.
If the community is truly committed to the idea of a highway bypass, the challenge will be to keep constant pressure on the provincial government to move the concept forward, while at the same time recognizing that these things take time. There are budgets, processes and protocols to be followed, none of which move any faster than a snail’s pace. Maintaining momentum in the face of such obstacles is no easy feat.
The good news is, we’ve been here before. Remember all the effort that went into lobbying the province to complete the paving of Highway 813 to Wabasca. And decades prior to that, remember what it took to get the Athabasca River bridge built. So for what it’s worth, our community at least has a history of pestering provincial officials going for it.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Maybe if we had been more receptive when a bypass was first suggested all those years ago, we wouldn’t be faced with the challenge that confronts us now. But what’s done is done, and if a bypass is what we want, it’s going to take determination and patience to make it happen.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was its highway system.
