Metro plans traffic future
Published Monday January 17th, 2011
Communities creating regional master plan to deal with changes in traffic volume and flow
By Eric Lewis
Times & Transcript Staff
As Metro Moncton continues to grow both residentially and commercially, the traffic hot spots are well known to local residents.
If you're a Riverview resident working in Moncton, you probably know exactly the time of day West Main Street at the causeway bottlenecks and it's easier to take the Gunningsville Bridge home.
If you're a Dieppe resident trying to get to and from Moncton, it's likely you are able to time your commute so finely that you're convinced it saves you five seconds every morning on Champlain Street, Paul Street or Veterans Highway, Highway 15.
And if you live or work in north-end Moncton ... if you can avoid the Trinity Drive, Plaza Boulevard and Mountain Road area, your day probably runs a lot smoother.
As Metro grows, so do its traffic problems. In recent years, each municipality has made strides in trying to improve traffic flow, including in the trouble spots just mentioned.
In fact, tri-community staff and councils are just starting the process of working together to form a regional transportation master plan.
Michel Ouellet, director of engineering and public works with the Town of Riverview, says the project is literally just beginning, so he couldn't offer anything in the way of details.
Riverview Mayor Clarence Sweetland says the idea is to paint an "overall picture of the tri-community, which is pretty sizable."
For Riverview's part, the smallest of the three municipalities rarely sees a bottleneck of traffic, aside from the occasional, brief backups on Coverdale Road next to the Atlantic Superstore and fast food restaurants.
The biggest road construction project taken on in the town in recent history is the construction of the new Gunningsville Bridge, along with Gunningsville Boulevard, which wraps around the middle of town, connecting the bridge with the town's burgeoning Findlay Park business area.
"Our problem always was the old bridge," Sweetland says, explaining that it would create traffic delays and make it difficult getting in and out of town.
The new four-lane bridge opened in 2005, and was followed in 2008 by Gunningsville Boulevard, which a study that year said diverted 2,800 cars daily off of Coverdale Road. Coverdale is the town's main artery that sees 22,000 vehicles per day in the heart of downtown.
The purpose of the new road wasn't so much to divert traffic as it was to open up land for possible development.
"It's kind of built more for the future than it was to fix a problem now," explains Ouellet.
Riverview may not have serious traffic troubles, but Moncton and Dieppe both have their difficult areas.
In Moncton, a massive project on Mapleton Road near Trinity Drive has improved traffic in that area, and the city also completed a project at the intersection of Horsman and Berry Mills roads. Another possible change in the future would see the addition of another turn lane off Berry Mills onto Edinburgh to ease congestion.
Stephane Thibodeau, transportation co-ordinator, says the city usually waits about a year after any major traffic changes to calculate exactly how traffic flow was impacted. So while numbers aren't available yet, Thibodeau says the changes Moncton made in recent history have made a difference.
"It usually takes about six months for motorists or drivers to get accustomed to changing their travel habits," he says.
"We've noticed for the first couple months, nothing really changed much for Mountain Road when Horsman and Berry Mills were opened. But as it came toward the sixth month, you noticed a big difference in the morning, especially trying to go down Mountain Road; it's less congested."
Mountain Road at Trinity Drive, its busiest spot, sees an average of 32,000 vehicles a day. Only a few kilometres up Mountain, at Gorge Road, an average of 21,000 vehicles travel there a day.
As far as Mapleton goes, Thibodeau says opening up extra lanes in the power centre changed traffic flow "over night."
"It works much, much better," he says. "We're hoping that will really stimulate more development growth in the area."
He says there are no plans to widen the rest of Mapleton Road past Carson Drive, heading toward Mountain Road, as it isn't meant to be a major traffic artery and it's in a more residential area.
Another big project the city just completed was the somewhat hidden but oft-used Millennium Boulevard, which connects Vaughn Harvey Boulevard to Killam Drive next to the Moncton Coliseum.
"Millennium is a long-term project," Thibodeau explains. It now has sidewalks and curb and gutter, but eventually the city wants to improve access to Millennium at Pacific Avenue and Vaughn Harvey Boulevard.
In addition, there are long-term plans to align Millennium with Worthington Avenue on the other side of Killam into one large intersection.
Next year, a roundabout is planned, connecting Russ Howard Drive to Killam, Purdy and Collishaw.
Thibodeau says there are always areas that can use improvement, but those are the big projects planned. As for the Trinity, Mountain, Plaza bottleneck, he says there's not much that can be done. He says traffic lights have been adjusted to help ease congestion, and also noted that changes to nearby Mapleton and the Berry Mills/Horsman area have helped.
The transportation co-ordinator says the transportation master plan with Riverview and Dieppe will involve councils, staff, the province, the public and consultants. It will deal not only with private vehicles, but also pedestrian traffic and public transportation.
It is expected take a year to two years to complete.
In Dieppe, the obvious recent traffic change was work completed to Paul Street, a major artery that connects downtown Dieppe to Champlain Place and Crystal Palace, Highway 15 and Wheeler Boulevard.
Jacques LeBlanc, the city's director of engineering and public works, says Paul Street receives an average of 30,000 vehicles a day.
No new information on traffic flow is available yet, since the road only completely reopened a few months ago, but LeBlanc believes traffic is flowing much better on Paul than it used to.
"You don't see any lineups, there's no queue lineups coming out of the traffic circle," he says. "People that come out of the traffic circle that want to access Paul Street ... before at Christmastime, you'd have people backing into the traffic circle. That's a thing of the past."
The city has been fine tuning traffic lights to make the best use of the revamped thoroughfare, and work on that continues.
LeBlanc says Dieppe is eyeing a few more major projects, but they are not necessarily in the city's immediate future.
There are plans to one day widen Champlain Street, which sees an average of 31,000 vehicles per day, into six lanes. That project would involve the city and province.
In addition, Dieppe has hopes of easing congestion on Dieppe Boulevard, which today sees an average of 24,300 vehicles per day, a 20 per cent increase over 2008 numbers.
"The numbers reflect what people experience," LeBlanc says, "the delays and all that, in that area. And that's probably our most congested area right now."
The city also wants to see better access to Highway 15, Veterans Highway, from the Dieppe and Harrisville boulevards area.
"We're working with DOT and the City of Moncton and the airport to try to come up with a design that's going to move traffic a lot easier on a 20-year horizon," he says.
Once planning is complete, the city will seek funding and develop a timeline for the project, but nothing concrete is planned at this time.
Meanwhile, a roundabout will be constructed this year, connecting Acadia, Regis, Evangeline and Thibodeau streets.
"Roundabouts ... are fairly new to the area, so that should be a challenge for us as far as construction-wise, but (also) just to get people to get the right habits to drive into and out of the roundabouts," the director of engineering and public works says.
In a city growing as quickly as Dieppe, LeBlanc says it can be difficult to keep up with the changes. However, he was happy to note that while Paul Street was a maze under construction this past summer, residents were accommodating, likely because they knew the end result would be positive.
"For us, it's a matter of coping with the changes," he says. "It's always changing because of the growth we're experiencing. It's hard to stay on top of it.
"We find ourselves reacting to things we hadn't planned for or didn't see coming. Most times we try and stay ahead of it and do the corrections as we can."
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