Widen Highway 3 to 4 lanes, Essex MPP Natyshak tells province

Essex NDP MPP Taras Natyshak has signed and submitted a petition to the Ontario government, calling on the province to widen Highway 3 to four lanes from Essex to Leamington.

Natyshak filed the petition Tuesday at Queen's Park.

The provincial Ministry of Transportation is planning to resurface Highway 3 betweenCottam and Ruthven beginning this year.

• 10 km of Highway 3 could be closed for construction in spring

The road will be resurfaced and new culverts, lights and signals will be installed as part of the project.

However, the road will not be widened to four lanes, even though eventual widening has been approved and it passed an environmental assessment in 2006 that would allow lanes to be added.

Highway 3 is four lanes wide between Essex and Windsor.

Repairing and not widening road 'a waste'

In the Legislature Tuesday, Natyshak said Highway 3 "has long been identified as dangerous and unable to meet growing traffic problems."

He wants the province to "revisit plans to rebuild Highway 3 from Essex to Leamington and direct those funds to the timely completion of the already-approved widening of this important roadway."

Natyshak said repairing the road and not widening it is a waste.

"Lets not take half measures and kick the can down the road and simply just give us a rehab of an existing road when we definitely need a widening of that highway to ensure safety and mobility of people in our community," he said.

He said he's going to be circulating the petition when he arrives home this weekend.

"We're concerned that they are going to take the wrong approach and the provincial government is not going to allocate the appropriate resources and earmark that funding to Highway3," said Natyshak. "We need that connectivity, we know our greenhouse productivity is growing, we know our mobility between our regions in the county, in the city is enhanced."

Traffic increasing

Ron McDermott,the Mayor for the town of Essex agrees with Natyshak, sayingtraffic in the area continues to grow.

"Definitely will be an increase," said McDermott. "The agriculture industry is going full bore now and we're getting things over the States. There's a major need to expand out this way with the four lane highway."

McDermott said it's a busy stretch of highway bringing in people fromLeamington, Kingsville and Windsor.

The ministry in September sent notices to people who live along that corridor in Kingsville, explaining how the closure would affect a 10-km stretch between County Road 27 in Cottam and the County Road 34 junction on Highway 3, near Ruthven.

The early plan is to detour traffic on to County Road 34, the old two-lane rural highway that runs parallel to Highway 3.