Transforming Boucherie Road to cost $31.5M

Full development of the Wine Trail in West Kelowna will come at an eye-popping price — $31.5 million.

That’s the currently estimated cost for improving and beautifying eight kilometres of Boucherie Road with amenities such as bike lanes, wider sidewalks and decorative street lamps.

Wine Trail upgrades represent three of the four most significant local road improvement projects to be undertaken by the municipality in the next five years, with improvements to other streets such as Shannon Lake Road, Glenrosa Road and Old Okanagan Highway further out on the planning horizon.

Short stretches of the Wine Trail now exist at either end of Boucherie Road, which runs through West Kelowna between Highway 97 and Okanagan Lake.

It provides access to several wineries, affords sweeping views of vineyards and the lake, and is also West Kelowna’s most heavily travelled municipal street.

This year’s addition is a 1.2kilometre stretch between Stuart Road and Ogden Road.

Between 2019 and 2022, the city’s plan is to work on a 2.7-kmlong stretch between Ogden Road and Green Bay Road, at a cost of $12.3 million, and a 400metre stretch between Carrall Road and Gellatly Road, at a cost of $2 million.

The remaining stretches of the Wine Trail, totalling almost four kilometres, either won’t be built for seven to 20 years or have no timetable associated with their construction.

About three-quarters of the Wine Trail’s construction is financed through fees collected from developers of new subdivisions and multi-family housing complexes.

When a section of the Wine Trail along Gellatly Bay opened in 2013, Mayor Doug Findlater predicted the road would eventually become one of the most popular scenic drives in the province.