Hamilton, Ontario · Urban expressway · 2007–2023
A friction test report reached senior staff, and then sat for six years.
What happened
The Red Hill Valley Parkway opened in 2007. A friction test report on the road surface reached senior staff in the City of Hamilton's Public Works department, and there it stopped. It did not travel further. Six years passed before it surfaced again.
By 2019 the City had recorded at least 140 fatal or serious-injury collisions on the parkway. Rehabilitation and resurfacing of the road cost approximately $24 million. A judicial inquiry was convened to establish why the report had not moved, and the inquiry itself cost the City approximately $26 million in direct expenditure and external counsel. Justice Herman J. Wilton-Siegel delivered the final report in November 2023.
The information failure
This is a Governance failure before it is anything else. A safety-relevant finding existed, in writing, inside the organization that needed it. There was no route that carried it from the place it was generated to the place a decision would have been made, and no duty assigned to anyone to move it.
The asset data was not linked to any escalation path. Nothing in the system treated a friction result as a trigger. It was filed, and filing was the end of it.
What would have been different
An assigned information duty and a defined escalation trigger would have moved the report in weeks rather than years. That is a governance artefact — a written statement of who receives what, by when, and what they are required to do with it — and it costs almost nothing to produce relative to what followed.
We state this carefully. No document can be shown to have prevented the collisions. What the record does show is that the finding existed and did not travel, and that both the rehabilitation and the inquiry followed from the six-year gap.
Sources
Red Hill Valley Parkway Inquiry, Final Report, Justice Herman J. Wilton-Siegel, November 2023. City of Hamilton Council reports. Class action court records.