43 Street closure is short-term pain for long-term gain
REROUTING TO 47 STREET EXPECTED TO BE COMPLETED BY AUGUST
City of Lethbridge Community Planning manager Maureen Gaehring says the recent vote by city council to close 43 Street south of Highway 4 has been a decision five years in the making.
“Five years ago our planning department received the go-ahead to do a Southeast Area Structure Plan for a rather large area in south Lethbridge,” said Gaehring. “As some people might know, development in south Lethbridge pretty much stopped for awhile because we exceeded some of our sanitary and stormwater servicing capabilities. What we discovered during the Area Structure Plan was actually how to enable those services in that entire area.
“The second part of that was the transportation network,” she added. “There were existing problems in the Southgate neighbourhood because it was an incomplete neighbourhood, as well as in Fairmont. City staff had been asked on numerous occasions about how to improve traffic flow, how to address residents’ concerns. With the completion of the Southeast Area Structure Plan, which was adopted by city council in May of 2016, we actually did develop a strategy for lessening traffic impacts in that area.”
According to Gaehring, engineering reports generated for the Southeast Area Structure Plan identified the best way to lessen the traffic flow through this area of the city was to eventually close that stretch of 43 Street South. However, she says, with the announcement of a new school in the vicinity the closure process had to be sped up.
“With the announcement of new school funding, there were public meetings done with the developer and the Gateway Mews community to pick where the school should be located,” she said.
“And at that time, the school was pushed farther west to provide more greenspace behind those houses. With school construction needing to proceed, the 43 Street closure was just the last step in the overall planning process which began over five years ago.”
Gaehring admitted residents of local neighbourhoods will likely have to put up with some shortterm routing complications until 47 Street South to the east is fully constructed and a new signal light interchange is added there onto Hwy. 4. This rerouting project is expected to be completed by August.
“It is true people will have to drive slightly out of their way in order to go to the east,” she acknowledged. “There will be a detour route in place for residents, and no one will have their access cut off at any point. This (rerouting to 47 Street South) will help the neighbourhood and lessen that shortcutting through the area.” Gaehring said after a period of adjustment local residents will see a real difference in terms of less traffic running through their neighbourhoods.
“This is the way all city neighbourhoods develop,” she said. “In Lethbridge we are a bit slower in developing our neighbourhood than say in Calgary, where things go at a fast pace. But as this neighbourhood develops we are going back to a grid-oriented street system with numbers, which is certainly easier for wayfinding and overall connectivity — not only for cars, but also for pedestrians and cyclists. Having a new elementary school in the southeast is also important for us in terms of community-building for all the young families in that area, and for public school district as well.
“We understand this is a change in terms of peoples’ driving behaviour and what they may be experiencing,” she acknowledges, “but we have done all the engineering work necessary to ensure all of this new road design will function properly.”