City council emerged Tuesday from a closed door portion of its meeting, asking for provincial help so when the first phase of Terwillegar Drive construction is complete, bus lanes will be part of the completed project on opening day.
Council voted to have Mayor Don Iveson write Premier Rachel Notley and Transportation Minister Brian Mason, explaining that having express bus service in the design is an urgent priority.
“There is an opportunity for Terwillegar Drive to include dedicated bus lanes on it that will be part of the backbone premium or express transit service to the southwest and then ultimately out into the region, where we have huge congestion issues today,” Iveson explained to reporters.
“So we’re not just upgrading the road to deal with traffic, we want to upgrade the road to make transit work better out of the southwest too.”
City council approved turning Terwillegar Drive into an expressway during budget discussions on Dec. 7, voting to take on $112 million in debt for the first phase of the project. The request of the province is to include some work from phase two, so the bus lanes will be ready to go as soon as possible.
“We’re committed to include these transit lanes one way or the other,” Iveson said. “The question is whether they’re eligible for a particular provincial transit grant. We want to urge them to consider it for inclusion of this grant, and that will allow us to do some more work there and to advance into the second phase and serve commuters better in the southwest if we can get some provincial leverage in these grant dollars.
“So we really want to encourage them to take a look at that and hopefully we can maybe get something done here before the election.”
Iveson didn’t have a specific dollar amount in mind, but said it would be in the “tens of millions of dollars.”
“We really want to emphasize that there is a sizable transit component to this and that we believe it should be eligible for the ACT program that we’ve been working with the province on.”
The province’s ACT grant is for transit projects that are not LRT
Iveson said the urgency is there, in part because the province is going ahead with widening the southwest portion of the Anthony Henday to expand that stretch of road from two lanes to three.
“Bus routes that funnel in, using the Henday or any other part of the southwest road network, would benefit from having express bus lanes to be able to get into the university area and that will also provide relief to the south LRT line as it fills up over time.”
During budget deliberations, council approved spending $13 million in 2019, preparing the final engineering work so construction can begin in 2020.
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