CALGARY – In a Saturday morning open house at Queen Elizabeth School in the northwest, the city asked Calgarians to provide their opinions about how to best accommodate the growing number of drivers on Crowchild Trail.
The city is studying an area of the major artery, between 24 Avenue N.W. and 17 Avenue S.W. and wants to improve the bottlenecks on Crowchild Trail.
READ MORE: How would you change Crowchild Trail? City of Calgary wants to know
The city’s study, which started in February 2015, is looking at short, medium and long-term plans. The city said in November that the project team was in the “concept identification” stage, hoping to work with residents for their input on possible changes in a series of public workshops.
It’s looking at what upgrades are needed to accommodate higher traffic volumes, as more people make Calgary their home and more people commute from the outskirts of the city to the downtown core.
Saturday’s session got underway at 10 a.m.
Widening Crowchild over the Bow River and creating overpasses are some of the most popular ideas and that could very well become part of the rehabilitation work that’s already been planned for the spring.
“We need three lanes going through, going over the bridge going from the south is just crazy,” Calgarian Brent Wylie said. “To me, Crowchild has to be three lanes all the way through north and south, with no stoplights.”
Anyone driving north on Crowchild during the afternoon rush hour knows it gets backed up near Bow River.
“As part of the study we’ve taken that as an opportunity to say ‘is there something we can do with the bridge?’. So there is a lot of technical work ongoing, but we are reasonably confident now that we could widen the bridge across the river. That provides a lot of opportunities for things that we could do, possibly in the short-term to help Crowchild Trail,” Feisal Lakha, a project manager from the City of Calgary said.
“From day one, we’ve heard fix the bridge. I think that’s the easiest and the consensus idea that we’ve heard,” Lakha said.
Another possibility is interchanges that would remove the lights at Kensington, 5 Avenue or 24 Avenue near McMahon Stadium.
“This corridor they are talking about certainly needs some improvements because there is a tremendous amount of stop and go traffic and lots of lineups of traffic, especially for the river crossing,” Michael Hayduk who attended the session said.
As a short term fix, the city is also considering not allowing left turns onto Crowchild during rush hour from 5 Avenue and Kensington Road. It’s a popular idea with drivers zipping along Crowchild, but not so much for people living in the area.
“What I’m hearing is that residents in the communities adjacent to Crowchild Trail also want access to Crowchild. So cutting off access could be a very negative situation for them,” Councillor Druh Farrell of Ward 7 said. “I think we have come to the realization, and Calgarians helped us get there, that widening Crowchild Trail the whole distance and destroying communities along the way is not an acceptable way of doing things in this day and age. But there things we can do that are better quick wins, less expensive, like removing some of the pinch points to make it easier to travel through.”
There’s no word yet on when a two lane widening of the bridge over the Bow might happen.
A report including all the public input will go to council by early next year.
WATCH: Big changes on Crowchild Trail will cause temporary congestion
The input gathered in the workshops will be used to develop concepts ahead of the evaluation phase in spring 2016. Study recommendations are scheduled to be brought to city council in early 2017.
For more information or to voice your opinion, visit the City of Calgary’s website.
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