Victoria bridge pain, Highway 7 gain

You can’t have a shining smile if you won’t have a cavity drilled.

You can’t have a nice home if you’re unwilling to scrub the floors and take out the trash. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. And you can’t have a new, faster four-lane Highway 7 running between Kitchener and Guelph if you’re not prepared to put up with the next 11 months of traffic mayhem that follow the closure, demolition and reconstruction of the Victoria Street bridge.

So take a deep breath everyone. It’s not going to be pretty but it will be worth it. Besides — you have no choice. The slower morning and afternoon commutes have already begun since the bridge closed Tuesday.

Depending on the time of day, traffic now moves at a crawl not just on Victoria Street but Frederick, Bruce and Edna streets, which have been designated as detour routes.

Commuters are already cursing the back-ups, snarls and delays.

Homeowners who live along the detour routes as well as those in surrounding residential neighbourhoods are braced for months of heavy traffic.

Meanwhile, storeowners on Victoria close to the bridge face nearly a year of lost business. But this is far from just a localized headache. Victoria Street is a major east-west artery in and out of Waterloo Region.

With the bridge out, through traffic will have to drive on Wellington Street, Shirley Avenue and Bingemans Centre Drive, lengthening countless commutes.

Even the Conestoga Parkway — known to most locals as simply the expressway — seems more backedup than usual these days as motorists travelling southbound wait longer to exit onto Victoria Street.

And there’s more. When the bridge itself is brought down, it will disrupt the expressway even if the job’s done in a hurry over a weekend.

All of this, however, as ugly as it seems is merely short-term fall-out. Long-term, it’s all good. It would be helpful for drivers fuming in a traffic jam to cultivate the virtue of patience and remember that people in Waterloo Region and Guelph have for decades demanded either an improved or new Highway 7.

The existing two-lane highway between Breslau and Guelph feels like a parking lot some days.

It has been prone to accidents. Businesses complain about the expensive delays it causes.

This is one time when the public has got what it asked for.

The province is building the new highway a kilometre north of the existing route.

The final cost has not been made public but already $121 million has been spent or committed. Major costs are still to come.

The new Victoria Street bridge, by the way, is not part of that new highway. It does need to be lengthened, however, to accommodate new access roads for new interchanges.

So, if you’re driving in this part of the region — probably for the rest of this year — pick your times and plan your alternative routes with care.

And remember the lesson known by everyone who belongs to a gym. No pain, no gain.