The first sign we were on a brand new road Wednesday was the GPS display on the vehicle driven by Barry Tonello, superintendent with Teranorth Construction.
Teranorth has the contract to build the new 11-kilometre road from Maley Drive at Barrydowne Road, all the way to the Lasalle Extension. With a full media contingent on board to see the latest progress in the $80-million extension project, the GPS showed we were driving into the bush.
In fact, we made it from Barrydowne Road to Collège Boréal within minutes, even with Tonello driving at a less than brisk 15 km/hr. Leaving aside the politics of the project – critics have labelled it as too expensive and unnecessary – the scale of the work that has been done to date is impressive.
Rock drills are scattered along the road, as excavators scoop the blasted rock into massive vehicles, which takes it to the crushing area for use in building up the road. Some sections have to be raised as much as 10 metres to align properly.
When complete in December 2019, close to one million square metres of rock will have been blasted from the ground. That includes 175,000 square metres of from one rock cut that was 300 metres long and 27 metres high at its tallest point.
“We've used that rock to build the roadbed and produce all the granulars on-site,” said project manager David Shelsted, shivering with the media as -15 C temperatures made each stop on the Maley tour an endurance test. “So we're not importing or exporting granular material to the job site.”
Not only does recycling the blasted rock for use in the road save money, it also reduces the impact of the project, since trucks don't have to haul away all the rock, or carry granulars to the job site.
“So obviously, it's cost-effective,” he said. “The big thing is, you're not hauling. So there's no fuel consumption by the trucks. There's no damage to the roadway from the trucks bringing the gravel to and from the site, and it's all being produced here.”
The idea behind the Maley Drive extension is to take traffic off of Lasalle Boulevard and The Kingsway, especially heavy ore trucks that are particularly damaging to roads. The first stage was completed last year, when Notre Dame Avenue was moved to align with the extension, now running under a bridge that connects to the Lasalle Extension.
Shelsted said doing that part first allowed crews to access the area from that end, minimizing traffic disruptions.
“We're moving material from the west side to the east side and back and forth – and it has no effect on live traffic,” he said. “All of this traffic flowing back and forth and nobody's getting stopped or held up.”
The massive vehicles that carry as much as 30 tonnes of rock up and down the new roadway aren't even allowed on regular roads and had to be transported in on floats, with their tracks pushed in so they would fit on the roadway. Tonello said the trucks consume between 800 and 1,000 litres of fuel every day.
In addition to measures to protect turtles, beavers and other wildlife in the area, there's also a culvert running underneath to allow snowmachines to pass. It's five metres wide, three metres high and runs for 50 metres – room enough for snow groomers to make their way through, too.
And, even though the road isn't open and is in the middle of what used to be bush, there's already some pro-marijuana graffiti spray-painted on the side of the culvert.
One feature that was especially tricky to pull off were the roundabouts, which Tonello said had more than 200 GPS points to follow in the design. Shelsted said making roundabouts less tricky for drivers not used to them will be key.
“Traffic will normalize once the road opens,” he said. “It'll take time for people to be comfortable using them. (We'll) be relying on our media partners to help get the word out."
Maley Drive has been the city's top infrastructure project for more than 30 years and for a long time, it seemed funding from the provincial and federal governments would never arrive.
After so much waiting, Shelsted said it's amazing to him how quickly the project is becoming a reality, with work ongoing regardless of the weather.
“We literally did a decade of pre-work to get here, and to see how quickly it's coming together, to see the amount of equipment and manpower that are here, it's incredible,” he said. “It's -15, -16, snow-covered and we're still getting this type of production – and it's going to run through a whole another construction season.”
With the latest update having the extension running around $4 million underbudget, a resurfaced Maley Drive could be four-laned all the way to Lansing Avenue when it's completed next December.
