Canmore residents can expect to get a taste of what complete street design means for the community in 2017 when the municipality moves forward with a pilot project on Spring Creek Drive where it connects with Main Street.
Complete streets are designed to separate transportation modes – with pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles comfortably accommodated on the same road within their own spaces.
Michael Fark, Canmore general manager of municipal infrastructure, said Canmore’s test case for complete street design would be in 2017.
Fark said Spring Creek Drive and its connection to the downtown core has always been envisioned by administration as a core component of the Town’s commuter network and “clearly a core part of addressing council’s priority concern of traffic congestion in town.
“What we are trying to do here with separated protected facilities is make it comfortable so we can achieve the mode shift we are aiming for and reduce the number of vehicles that travel through that corridor and onto Main Street on a daily basis.”
Mode shift means getting people out of private vehicles and into transit, walking or cycling to get around town. Manager of engineering Andy Esarte told council at its finance committee meeting this week that particular intersection sees an average of 2,000 vehicle trips per day.
He said a complete street design could reduce the number of vehicle trips on that road by 136,000 a year, but there is an “incremental cost between a complete street and a standard roadway.”
Just replacing the road without improvements would cost $1.5 million, according to Esarte, but the complete street design proposed for 2017 is $1.8 million. The project includes the replacement and upgrade of deep utilities, as well as road reconstruction.
With the complete street design, the intersection at Main Street would also be included and, according to administration, that work would connect to the next complete street included in the five year capital plan – Railway Avenue, for $10 million over three years beginning in 2018. Design work for Railway is planned in the capital budget for 2017 at a cost of $150,000.
“Railway Avenue is our most critical transportation corridor,” Fark said. “It sees the highest volume of traffic and access to core facilities and is a top priority for addressing traffic and congestion.”
The work to design Spring Creek Drive’s complete street was included in this year’s capital budget.
The work is happening in 2017 as a result of the fact that Spring Creek Mountain Village developer Frank Kernick is also pursuing a major hotel and conference centre development at the entrance to his subdivision closest to the downtown core.
That project requires major underground utility work, which connects to municipally-owned utilities beneath the Town’s roadway, which is the portion of the road from Main Street into the subdivision.
Administration recommended doing work on replacing the roadway’s utilities and reconstructing it at the same time as SCMV is doing development work, to coordinate resources and combine efforts.
As for the actual design of the roadway, Esarte said it is meant to create separation between different users.
“That separation creates a huge leap in the potential for the network to shift modes of transportation,” he said.
Spring Creek’s area structure plan, he added, sets a maximum number of daily vehicle trips on that roadway at 3,000 – and with a major hotel under development near that entrance point, increased vehicle use can be expected over time.
But it is also visitors to Canmore, not just residents, that administration hopes to inspire to get out of their vehicles.
“Part of the rationale here is with our visitors,” Esarte said. “How do we get them to get out of their cars and get them to stop driving to restaurants and to shop downtown? And the best way is to build facilities that encourage that.”
The models used to estimate how many vehicle trips per year will be reduced with the complete design includes visitor populations, he added.
But getting people to bike on Main Street – where cycling on sidewalks is prohibited for everyone – could be a challenge, pointed out Councillor Joanna McCallum.
Esarte said how Main Street connects into the complete street network beginning to take shape will be a conversation to have over the next year because it is not just a destination, it is the route through which traffic flows to other destinations like the Canmore Nordic Centre, for example.
He said the conversation will include using 10th Street or 7th Avenue to route traffic through the downtown and Main Street would become a place where people arrive, instead of move through.
“This will be an incremental thing,” Esarte said. “Over time we anticipate the evolution of Main Street from a place that is less attractive for cycling to one that is appealing.”
McCallum noted that the laneways in Canmore’s downtown – particularly the one that connects to Spring Creek Drive – will be important parts of that network to be included in the design.
“That alleyway is a connector route,” she said, adding the lane is a popular choice of children from Lawrence Grassi Middle School travelling to Elevation Place after school.
