Another collision at Highway 62 and County Road 1, and Prince Edward County residents barely seemed surprised.
“Shocker. How bad this time?” wrote one person beneath a Facebook post about the collision. Others blamed distracted or impatient drivers, called for more enforcement, suggested converting the intersection immediately to a four-way stop, or asked the most obvious question of all: when is the promised roundabout finally coming?
Behind those comments is a remarkable piece of Ontario infrastructure history. The safety problem at this intersection was formally before Prince Edward County’s Traffic Advisory Committee in October 2020. Construction of the solution is now anticipated to begin in spring 2027.[1][2]
The roundabout itself is expected to take approximately 120 days to construct.[2]
Four months to build it. Roughly seven years to get to the point where somebody can build it.
That enormous difference deserves more scrutiny than another announcement that the project has reached its next “milestone.” It raises a much larger question about how government works: when relatively modest infrastructure takes years to move from an acknowledged problem to construction, how much of that time represents necessary engineering, environmental protection and property work – and how much represents the accumulated machinery of modern bureaucracy?
The Problem Was Known in 2020
Go back six years.
On October 22, 2020, Prince Edward County’s Traffic Advisory Committee considered an agenda item specifically concerning the intersection of Highway 62 and County Road 1. County staff discussed conversations with the Ministry of Transportation, an OPP representative provided information concerning collisions, and the committee ultimately recommended that Council write to MTO requesting action. The committee wanted a roundabout identified as the preferred response.[1]
The resolution itself referred to the “dangerous intersection.”[1]
Nothing in that record suggests government didn’t know there was a problem.
Yet by 2023 – nearly three years later – the Ministry of Transportation was conducting a preliminary study into improvements at the intersection. The alternatives included traffic signals with left-turn lanes or a roundabout.[3]
A local newspaper reported at the time that Prince Edward OPP had recorded 25 collisions at the intersection during the preceding five years, including ten resulting in personal injury. The reporting indicated that eastbound drivers on County Road 1 failing to yield featured prominently in the collision history.[3]
The issue had moved from a dangerous intersection to a study of a dangerous intersection.
Government was moving. The roundabout wasn’t.
Then Came the Process
By 2024, preliminary design and a Class Environmental Assessment had been completed. The roundabout emerged as the recommended plan.[4]
That might sound like the point at which construction could begin.
It wasn’t.
In December 2025, the Ontario government announced that Stantec Consulting Ltd. had been awarded the detailed-design contract. That work included reconstructing pavement, modifying entrances, addressing drainage, installing lighting and landscaping, developing construction staging and establishing environmental protection and mitigation measures.[5]
Much of that work is plainly necessary. Nobody wants a provincial highway intersection designed casually. Drainage matters. Utilities matter. Construction staging matters. Environmental effects matter. People whose property may be affected by a project have rights.
But look at what happened to the calendar.
The dangerous intersection was formally before the County committee in 2020. A preliminary study was underway in 2023. Preliminary design and environmental assessment were completed in 2024. A detailed-design contract was announced in 2025. Detailed design and another environmental process continued through 2026. A Design and Construction Report followed, along with another public review period. Construction is anticipated in 2027.[1][2][4][5]
At every stage, something has been happening.
And six years later, motorists are still driving through the same intersection.
That is one of the fundamental problems with bureaucracy: activity and accomplishment are not necessarily the same thing.
Nobody Has to Be Lazy for Bureaucracy to Produce a Slow Result
It is tempting to look at a seven-year timeline and conclude that public servants simply aren’t working hard enough.
The evidence County First has reviewed does not establish that.
The more interesting possibility is that individual employees, engineers and consultants can each diligently complete the work assigned to them while the overall system still produces an extraordinarily slow result.
One group conducts preliminary engineering. Another administers an environmental process. Consultants prepare reports. Officials review them. Procurement occurs. Detailed engineering begins. Another consultation follows. Another report is prepared. Another review period opens. Property issues must be resolved. Eventually the project can be tendered.
Every participant can quite reasonably say: “We completed our part.”
But who owns the seven-year clock?
That is the accountability problem.
A bureaucracy can become inefficient without containing a single lazy employee. It merely needs a system in which everyone is responsible for a piece of the process while nobody is accountable for the elapsed time of the whole thing.
Government organizations naturally measure the things happening inside government – studies completed, consultations conducted, contracts awarded, reports produced and procedural requirements satisfied.
Residents measure something much simpler.
Is the dangerous intersection fixed?
As of October 2026, the answer is no.
Twenty-Five Collisions. Ten Involving Injury.
This isn’t simply an argument about bureaucratic inconvenience. The intersection has a documented collision history.
Local reporting in 2023 cited OPP figures showing 25 collisions over the preceding five years, including ten involving personal injury.[3] More recent local reporting, citing MTO figures, again described ten injury collisions among 25 tracked collisions.[6]
That doesn’t mean bureaucracy caused those collisions. It doesn’t mean a roundabout would have prevented every one of them. Drivers remain responsible for stopping, yielding and paying attention, and the collision history itself suggests driver behaviour is an important part of the problem.
Nor can County First conclude that the latest reported collision would have been prevented by a roundabout.
But once government identifies an intersection as dangerous, studies the alternatives and determines that a roundabout is the preferred safety improvement, elapsed time becomes part of the public-interest question. A year of delay isn’t simply another twelve months on a project-management spreadsheet. It is another twelve months in which motorists continue using the existing intersection.
China Can Assemble Ten Storeys in 29 Hours
The comparison sounds absurd until you consider what it actually demonstrates. In 2021, China’s Broad Group assembled a 10-storey modular residential building in Changsha in 28 hours and 45 minutes.[7]
It did not manufacture an entire building from raw materials in 29 hours. The modules were prefabricated, transported to the site and assembled there. Comparing that achievement directly with designing and constructing an Ontario highway intersection would therefore be misleading.
China also operates under a profoundly different political, regulatory and property-rights system. Ontario should not abandon environmental protection, engineering standards, public consultation, competitive procurement or private-property rights simply to build faster.
But the Chinese building demonstrates something important nonetheless. Physical construction can happen extraordinarily quickly once the decisions have been made, engineering completed, materials prepared and somebody is finally permitted to start building.
That is precisely what makes Highway 62 and County Road 1 so interesting. The physical construction of its roundabout is expected to take approximately 120 days.[2]
The governmental journey preceding those 120 days will have consumed years. The useful comparison isn’t really China versus Ontario. It is construction time versus government time.
The Price Is Now Estimated at $7 Million to $8 Million
The latest local reporting places the estimated construction cost at approximately $7 million to $8 million, excluding certain property-acquisition costs.[2]
That number isn’t evidence of waste. Provincial highway construction is expensive, and this project involves considerably more than placing a circular island in an existing intersection. But after this much time, taxpayers should be able to see the complete financial history.
How much was spent on preliminary design? How much on environmental assessment? How much is being spent on detailed design? What have consultants been paid? What has consultation cost? What has been spent acquiring property? How much provincial and municipal staff time has gone into the project? And how much of the eventual total cost will represent asphalt, concrete, drainage, lighting and physical construction rather than the administrative machinery preceding construction?
Those aren’t rhetorical questions. They are knowable numbers. County First would like to see them published.
The Most Revealing Number May Be Waiting Time
There is an even more useful calculation government could provide. Take the entire project timeline from October 2020 until construction begins and divide it into two categories: Working time and waiting time.
How many days were engineers actually producing the preliminary design? How much time elapsed before the next stage began? How long did environmental review require? How long did procurement take? How much time passed between completion of preliminary design and commencement of detailed design? How long did property acquisition require? How many days were mandated public-review periods?
And how many days did the project simply sit between those events?
Until those records are available, nobody can fairly conclude that this seven-year timeline resulted from lazy public servants. But government shouldn’t be able to answer questions about efficiency merely by saying a project was “going through the process.” If seven years were genuinely necessary, show residents why. If they weren’t, show them where the time went.
When Process Creates More Process
There is a structural problem worth examining here that goes well beyond this intersection.
In a competitive business, delay usually carries an obvious cost. Finishing a project sooner can reduce financing costs, release employees and equipment for other work, and allow the investment to begin producing a return.
Government operates under a different set of incentives.
Every additional process requires administration. More reporting requires people to prepare and review reports. More consultation requires people to organize and document consultation. More regulation requires people to administer regulation. Procurement requires procurement staff and procedures. Consultants require contracts, oversight and review. Reviews can generate additional studies, correspondence and further reviews.
None of that establishes that an individual public servant is deliberately prolonging a project to protect a job or enlarge a department. The problem can be institutional rather than personal. Process creates work. Work creates workload. Workload can justify resources. Those resources then administer the process that created the workload. The system can become self-perpetuating even when everyone inside it believes they are simply doing their job. That is why the right question isn’t whether a particular engineer, planner or public servant is lazy. It is whether the system itself is productive.
Imagine Measuring Government by Finished Things
Perhaps part of the problem is what governments count.
- A study is announced.
- A consultant is retained.
- A public consultation begins.
- A preferred design is selected.
- Another consultant is retained.
- A report is completed.
- Another review period opens.
Each event can be described as progress. Residents might reasonably use a different measurement.
- Road fixed.
- Bridge repaired.
- Water main replaced.
- Intersection made safer.
- Project completed.
- Final cost.
Time from identified need to completed solution.
Measured that way, Highway 62 and County Road 1 tells a very different story.
The County’s Traffic Advisory Committee formally sought action in October 2020.[1]
Construction is anticipated to begin in spring 2027.[2]
The construction itself is expected to take approximately 120 days.[2]
Those three facts belong on the same page.
Publish the Seven-Year Clock
There is a straightforward way for the Ministry of Transportation to answer the criticism. Publish the complete timeline. It doesn’t require another lengthy consultant’s report. One page would do it. Start in October 2020 and list every substantive stage through construction – study, engineering, environmental assessment, consultant contract, approval, public consultation, property process, procurement and the periods between them.
Beside each entry put three things: Days. Cost. Result.
- If environmental assessment took six months and materially improved the project, show it.
- If property acquisition consumed a year, show it.
- If engineers discovered problems requiring redesign, show them.
- If legislation required a particular waiting period, identify it.
- If consultation changed the final design, explain how.
And if the project sat for months awaiting the next administrative step, show that too.
Transparency would allow taxpayers to distinguish the bureaucracy that protects them from bureaucracy that merely consumes time.
One Town. One Lesson.
This isn’t really a story about one roundabout north of Bloomfield. Every municipality has projects residents seem to have been hearing about forever – bridges, intersections, sidewalks, water systems, culverts, affordable housing and road reconstruction. The explanation is often simply that something is “going through the process.”
Perhaps taxpayers have become too accustomed to accepting that phrase without asking what the process actually accomplished. Process has value when it produces something – safer engineering, environmental protection, fair procurement, protection of property rights or a better design. Process has considerably less value when its principal product is more process.
China’s 29-hour modular building isn’t a prescription for Ontario. Nobody should want infrastructure built recklessly merely so a government can say it was built quickly. But it provides an uncomfortable reminder of how rapidly complicated things can be physically built once the machinery is ready.
At Highway 62 and County Road 1, the machinery of construction is expected to need approximately four months. The machinery of government will have taken roughly seven years to get it there. After another reported collision, residents are entitled to something more informative than another project update.
Show us the seven years.
Show us what was necessary. Show us what every stage accomplished. Show us what it cost. And show us how much of the elapsed time was spent actually solving the problem rather than waiting for the next stage of government to begin. Then taxpayers can decide for themselves whether the problem is construction at all. It may be the bureaucracy we’ve constructed around it.
Footnotes
[1] Corporation of the County of Prince Edward – Traffic Advisory Committee Minutes, October 22, 2020. The committee considered the Highway 62/County Road 1 intersection, received information concerning collisions and discussions with MTO, and recommended that Council seek provincial action with a roundabout identified as the preferred response.
https://princeedwardcounty.civicweb.net/document/208458/
[2] CountyLive – September 26, 2026. Local reporting on the latest project status, including an anticipated spring 2027 construction start, approximately 120 days of construction and an estimated $7-million-to-$8-million construction cost, excluding certain property-acquisition costs.
https://www.countylive.ca/roundabout-30-days-away-to-approval-to-begin-construction-in-spring-2027/
[3] Local newspaper reporting – July 6, 2023. Reporting on the Ministry of Transportation’s preliminary study of Highway 62 and County Road 1, including OPP figures showing 25 collisions during the preceding five years, ten involving personal injury, and consideration of traffic signals versus a roundabout.
https://www.pictongazette.ca/post/mto-announces-preliminary-study-for-intersection-improvements-at-highway-62-and-county-road-1
[4] Ministry of Transportation – Highway 62 and Prince Edward County Road 1 Detail Design and Class Environmental Assessment. The project record states that the Preliminary Design and Class EA completed in 2024 identified a roundabout as the recommended plan.
https://www.hwy62pec1.ca/
[5] Government of Ontario – “Ontario Enhancing Road Safety and Creating Jobs in Prince Edward County,” December 17, 2025. Announces the detailed-design contract awarded to Stantec Consulting Ltd. and describes pavement reconstruction, entrance modifications, drainage, lighting, landscaping, construction staging and environmental mitigation work.
https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1006875/ontario-enhancing-road-safety-and-creating-jobs-in-prince-edward-county
[6] Local newspaper reporting – September 10, 2026. Reporting on MTO collision data for Highway 62 and County Road 1, including ten personal-injury collisions among 25 tracked collisions.
https://www.pictongazette.ca/post/collision-control
[7] NDTV – “Watch: This 10-Storey Building Was Constructed In Just Over A Day,” June 18, 2021. Reports that Broad Group assembled a 10-storey modular residential building in Changsha, China, in 28 hours and 45 minutes using prefabricated components.
https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/this-10-storey-building-in-china-was-constructed-in-28-hours-2467011
Disclaimer
This article examines the documented timeline for the Highway 62 and County Road 1 intersection improvement and raises questions about the efficiency, cost and structure of public infrastructure delivery. County First has not established that any individual public servant, consultant, elected official or agency deliberately delayed the project, acted improperly or performed unnecessary work. References to bureaucracy concern the cumulative governmental process and institutional structure rather than the work ethic or motives of individual employees.
The most recent collision discussed on social media has not been independently investigated by County First, and County First does not attribute that or any particular collision to the intersection design, government delay or the absence of a roundabout. The Chinese construction example concerns onsite assembly of a prefabricated modular building and is included as an illustration of construction speed, not as a directly comparable infrastructure project or governance model.