Sask. author covers Regina Bypass, controversies and all, in latest book

It's been six years since the Regina bypass was completed. A Regina author has completed a review of the $2B project - and walked the entire thing.

It’s been six years since the Regina Bypass was completed, but controversy continues over whether the $2 billion highway was necessary. Now, a Regina author has completed a review of the project which included walking the entire bypass.

Walking on the shoulder of a freeway usually isn’t the best idea, but author Ken Wilson did it as research for his new book, “Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road.”

“And I remember standing on an overpass looking down at the highway and I said to myself, ‘You know what, you’re going to have to walk on this thing if you really, really want to do this project.’ And my heart sank because I didn’t want to walk on this highway,” Wilson recounted.

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The University of Regina English professor had heard a lot about the 44-kilometre highway and it’s controversial $2 billion cost.

“I was just curious about the bypass because I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know why it was there. I didn’t know what its purpose was,” Wilson said.

The Regina Public Library recently hosted a book launch event for “Walking the Bypass.”

“It’s partly natural history. It’s partly broad political history. I don’t shy away from some of the accusations that were made around land purchases but that’s not the focus of the book,” Wilson explained.

Some who have read the book say it’s not just about the bypass but about things passed by in the province’s history.

“And fitting that into our history as settler people who came to this land in a colonial way and we still live in kind of a colonial culture here,” Saskatchewan naturalist Trevor Herriot told CTV News.

It took Wilson two and a half days to walk the bypass.

“When I walked it in 2020, it’s a little different now,” he explained. “It was empty of traffic and that told me, and people who like it, people who drive it all the time, that’s what they tell me. They say ‘But I like the bypass. There’s never any traffic on it.’ I say ‘Yeah, exactly.’”

The author says the bypass is a place that’s very difficult to connect to as a pedestrian, because it’s a place where pedestrians really don’t belong.