Banff politicians are keen to further investigate a plan for a mass bus transit system to deal with the tourist town’s traffic troubles, but have put off further consideration of an aerial gondola, for now.
Council has tentatively approved $60,000 for a long-term transit plan to deal with congestion and getting more people using Roam. A preliminary assessment project on an aerial gondola was shelved until council’s review of municipal services in 2018.
Council is also planning to spend $38,000 to hire a contractor to help with execution of an emergency plan next summer when traffic is, at times, expected to back up all the way along Norquay Road to the Trans-Canada Highway.
Councillor Stavros Karlos wants to implement paid parking in the downtown core to pay for transit-related projects, including the conventional transit study and the emergency plan for Norquay Road.
“I’m tired of parking being completely subsidized by the tax base, and I’m trying to find a mechanism by which to offset that,” he said.
“We’ve got quite a few asks in transit and it’s a lot of money. The decision comes down to the fact we subsidize cars 100 per cent, but we don’t subside transit 100 per cent.”
The number of visitors to Banff continues to soar year over year and is expected to hit four million when the final tally is done at the end of the year. Almost all of those visitors arrive in private vehicles.
Data collected by the Town of Banff shows the town’s roads are beyond capacity at 24,000 vehicles per day. In July and August this year, the average vehicle count per day was more than 25,000.
The Town predicts there will be 89 days in summer 2017 when the vehicle per day count is beyond 24,000, with 15 to 20 days when the count is more than 33,000, at which point the roads are congested and traffic backs up.
The $60,000 would be spent on developing a long-term plan to enhance the Roam transit system to achieve a 10-fold increase in mode share by 2025, particularly in trying to get more people to catch the bus to visit tourist attractions on the south side of the Bow River.
Councillor Corrie DiManno supported the plan to further look at conventional mass transit.
“We already have a system in place, Roam. Roam is working, but our numbers could be way better,” she said. “With aerial transit, we’re not sure yet if external agencies would approve it or not.”
When the roads in downtown Banff are full, vehicles back up along Norquay Road.
In an attempt to keep vehicles moving and delays at less than 15 minutes on the south side of town, an override signal pattern is used to give green lights to vehicles traveling north-south along Banff Avenue and red lights to east-west moving vehicles and pedestrians.
This contributes to Norquay Road congestion as vehicles within town moving east-west along Buffalo Street are often stopped when the green override signals are used – resulting in backups of traffic along Bear, Lynx, and Gopher streets and out along Norquay Road to the Trans-Canada Highway interchange.
To deal with this, the Town and Parks Canada have developed an emergency traffic management plan for Norquay Road. This plan entails a temporary closure of Norquay Road to incoming vehicles, and detouring them all to the Banff Avenue entrance to town when needed.
Council has tentatively set aside $38,000 to hire a contractor next summer to help execute this plan when needed, particularly given next year’s expected rise in visitation with entry to all national parks free to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary.
“If we have cars backed up onto the highway, it’s a safety issue,” DiManno said.
Council has also given preliminary approval to spend $250,000 in 2020 to design a biking greenway for a one-way bike lane on both sides of Banff Avenue, from Marmot Crescent to Wolf Street. A detailed design process would inform of the scope of work and construction costs.
None of these decisions are final until council passes the 2017 operating and capital budgets.
