Caledon dentist fighting MTO over driveway width
Dr. David Hickman thinks a narrower driveway would be unsafe, costly and disruptive. The Ministry of Transportation disagrees. Hickman’s practice has closed during the impasse.

thestar.com
Aug. 11, 2014
By Eric Andrew-Gee

A dentist and a bureaucrat are fighting over the width of a driveway in Caledon. It’s not the start of a bad joke - it’s a real-life saga that has taken on the professional properties of its protagonists: painful as a root canal and sticky as a roll of red tape.

The disagreement centres on the northern driveway of the Caledon Village dentist’s office owned by Dr. David Hickman. The Ministry of Transportation (MTO) wants Hickman to narrow the strip of asphalt; Hickman doesn’t want to. Both say they’re motivated by driver safety. And neither one is backing down. It has resulted in a bitter, protracted dispute and the closure of Hickman’s dental practice for the past six weeks.

The spat dates to last May, when Hickman bought what had once been the Caledon OPP station on Highway 10, with the intention of moving his office there. That summer, he and the MTO began negotiations over the property’s two driveways. Provincial regulations only allow commercial businesses to have one entrance on highways, so in August the ministry and Hickman agreed to preserve the lot’s southern driveway as an exit and narrow the northern driveway. The ministry eventually requested that it be cut down from eight metres to six, the standard width for driveways on commercial properties.

But over the winter, the dentist noticed that snow banks further narrowed the passage. When he set up pylons six metres apart he found that cars turning into the lot from Highway 10 had a tricky time passing through the space, according to Lily Hickman, the dentist’s wife. Around March, the couple decided to take a stand against altering the driveway.

“I’m not doing something that’s going to compromise my patients’ safety,” Dr. Hickman said Thursday.

The Ministry says a six-metre driveway is perfectly safe. In fact, driveway widths are set at that size specifically to slow cars down, according to MTO spokesperson Astrid Poei. “Unless the roadway actually changes, drivers won’t slow down,” she said.

But Hickman has other concerns. He feels manhandled by distant government employees who don’t understand the specifics of his case. “I’m dealing with an idiot bureaucrat,” he said. “When you’ve got somebody who’s got no brains, who won’t leave his desk, whose only reason for saying you need a smaller driveway is that his boss says so, that doesn’t work.”

“I don’t like the fact that I live in a country where this is being imposed on me when it doesn’t meet the standards — it doesn’t meet the standards of logic, it doesn’t meet the standards of anything,” Hickman added. “This isn’t Russia.”

The dentist also said the MTO’s proposal left his driveway with a smaller turning radius than the Caledon building code requires, which can be a hazard when fire trucks need to manoeuvre in the space.

Hickman said that at a meeting with the MTO on Friday, the Ministry granted his request for a wider turning radius, but held firm on the width of the driveway. “This is a standard that’s put in place for all the commercial businesses in that corridor, so I don’t know what else to say,” said Poei.

Asked if he would comply with the MTO’s requirement, Hickman said, “We don’t really have a choice.”

During the standoff, the dentist’s practice has remained closed, a headache - and a toothache - for his “thousands” of clients.

“I’ve got patients that are breathing down my neck to get stuff done,” he said.

The MTO, for its part, tried to strike a conciliatory tone.

“I don’t want this to be this crazy thing,” said Poei. “We’re willing to work with Dr. Hickman. They’re might have been some miscommunication.”