It would be very, very easy to undervalue last week’s announcement that the last 16 km of Highway 827 between Athabasca and Thorhild are finally going to be paved.
At face value, we’re talking about 16 km of road in the middle of nowhere (no disrespect meant to the fine folks of New Pine Creek, Newbrook and Abee), linking one sparsely populated rural area with another; there’s no significant municipality at either end of the 16 km stretch, nor any in the middle either.
But looked at from a wider perspective, those 16 km represent the last link in an asphalt chain that will become a significant transportation corridor in the years to come.
The immediate and most obvious beneficiaries from the paving project will be those who live along it; primarily agricultural producers who rely on the route to get their goods to market. They are, no doubt, delighted by the prospect of no longer having to rattle across gravel to get where they’re going.
Other folks who might take a more immediate interest in the project are the traveling public, particularly parents of kids involved in sports. Athabasca athletes and teams regularly play in communities like Thorhild, Redwater and Fort Saskatchewan, and the complete paving of Highway 827 provides a more direct route to many of those towns.
But in the bigger picture, the predominant user of a paved Highway 827 may very well be industry, and that’s why last week’s announcement is such great news for the entire region.
At the south end of Highway 827 lies Alberta’s Industrial Heartland, as it’s been dubbed. The long-term plan for the region sees it as the place where value is added to the resources drawn from northern Alberta.
At the north of Highway 827 (as well as Highways 831 and 63) is the Alberta Energy Corridor, which aims to become the service centre for the northern Alberta resource industry; far enough away from the resource base to be affordable, yet close enough to be effective.
The paving of Highway 827 effectively links the resource-laden northern regions to the service centres of the Energy Corridor, to the value-adding infrastructure of the Heartland, all along logical, efficient transportation corridors. Once fully utilized, the potential benefit to Athabasca, Thorhild and other communities along the route becomes increasingly significant.
It may 16 km in the middle of nowhere right now, but the paving of Highway 827 may quickly turn it into the heart of somewhere special.
