ROAD WORK ON TRACK
While the City says the crowchild trail widening project, above, And the southwest BRT project Are on schedule, some residents Are frustrated By ongoing traffic snarls.
While the city says the nearly $90-million Crowchild Trail widening project and $66-million southwest BRT project are both on time and on budget, a councillor says her constituents are feeling the pain from the ongoing construction.
“A lot of work is being done on the weekends when people are off and wanting to get stuff done,” said southwest Coun. Diane Colley-Urquhart, calling it the largest construction project the city has undertaken.
“There’s pretty well construction going on everywhere ... When you think you can take a detour, there’s more construction.”
Jim Dawson, who lives in Palliser, said the BRT project, along with work on the ring road and flood mitigation projects, makes it difficult to get in and out of his community, which offers few access points.
“It’s disorganized, and traffic was backed up from 14th Street to 24th Avenue at 9 a.m.,” Dawson said of a recent rush hour traffic jam, adding he has seen ambulances unable to pass through traffic due to the large volumes.
“(City council) ramrodded the BRT through, despite opposition,” said Dawson, who noted he wished the BRT construction came after completion of the ring road.
City crews are working to finish the first facets of the BRT construction — a transit-only ramp from the Lakeview community onto eastbound Glenmore Trail and a Woodbine roundabout — before they wrap up other aspects of the project.
Construction will continue up and down 14th Street as they work to install bus-specific lanes.
When it comes to the $87-million
Crowchild Trail widening project, Coun. Evan Woolley said his office has received only 14 complaints from constituents about the construction.
When completed, he said, the project “will greatly reduce traffic, congestion and better help connect people from the south and west into the downtown, to our universities,” he said.
“What’s amazing about this project is our original ideas had contemplated blowing out huge amounts of residential housing units with a big, old, clunky interchange over the river. Our new thinking and thoughts on it is that we are adding a number of lanes onto an existing bridge.
“It was a really innovative engineering idea that costs way less money, way less construction time and has minimal impact to adjacent neighbourhoods.”
Launched last fall, the project is now halfway complete. Going into the winter and the new year, crews will work to complete construction for on and off ramps, and finish repairs to erosion sites that suffered damage from the 2013 flood.
City spokesman Sean Somers said everything is going according to plan when it comes to the massive projects.
“I’d say at a high level, for the most part, things are going as planned and on schedule,” said Somers. “We’re on time, on budget and things are looking good to be wrapped up both in terms of construction and money spent for next fall.”
Somers said both projects will slow down as the cold weather hits this winter, but won’t halt operations.
“The cold weather, I’d say, generally slows things down a little bit, but not to the point where we are facing any type of significant delays,” he said.
“Things like paving and things like concrete work become harder to do. It becomes a bit more labour intensive and a little more expensive having to do all the setup and take down of equipment.”