A recently-completed regional transportation study offers the City of Airdrie and adjacent municipalities within the north Calgary area the opportunity to better plan for various infrastructure priorities throughout the coming decades – and will hopefully help speed up the process of securing provincial funding.
“The study provides a common baseline for assessment of the regional transportation network that will be needed to support planned growth of more than 650,000 new residents in the north Calgary region over the next 20 years,” stated a report presented to Airdrie City council at a meeting May 6, by Chris Delanoy with ISL Engineering and Land Services.
For Airdrie specifically, he said, growth assumptions were primarily based on those reflected in the City’s 12 Thousand Acres Plan.
“What that actually meant, in terms of the City of Airdrie, was that the 10- and 20-year horizons considered the population base for the City of Airdrie of 110,000 and about 155,000 people within your City boundaries, or about two-and-a-half times growth from the 2015 baseline,” Delanoy said. “As well, it reflects some significant job and employment growth within Airdrie that actually well outpaced the population growth.”
To address the demands this growth will place on the area’s transportation networks, the report highlighted specific projects that would make the most significant impact. Key recommendations from the analysis and evaluation of major north-south routes in the Calgary-Airdrie area indicated investment in the existing Highway 2 corridor should be prioritized – “completing long-established plans for eight-laning of the highway from Stoney Trail to Airdrie” – as well as completing a planning study of the East Airdrie Bypass as soon as possible, to ensure the long-term protection of the corridor.
“Essentially, there has never been a concrete plan for this highway, and…there’s a strong potential that there could be development pressures coming into this area here, the risk being that the opportunity to develop this highway in the future could be lost,” Delanoy said.
Additional transit projects were also identified as priorities, according to the report, particularly the development of the Green Line LRT by the 10-year horizon – as well as similar projects connecting to Cochrane and Chestermere – with extensions and new regional corridors within the following decade.
Several councillors stated they were pleased to see Airdrie’s transportation needs listed as high-priority recommendations on a regional scale.
“It’s wonderful to see that Airdrie is being identified as having these urgent needs amongst all of our regional partners, and it’s really great to see the collaboration happening on this instead of all of us just saying, ‘We need this now,’” Coun. Tina Petrow said.
The study was initiated after the City – along with Rocky View County and the City of Calgary – received a letter from Alberta Transportation in 2016 requesting the neighbouring municipalities work together to determine these priorities, including overpasses, interchanges and expansions. To broaden the view of the local transportation network, Delanoy said, the municipalities agreed to include the City of Chestermere and the Town of Cochrane in these discussions.
With funding through both the Alberta Community Partnership grant and Alberta Transportation, he said, ISL was hired to conduct the North Calgary Regional Transportation Study – with the hope that the “relative ranking” of proposed transportations projects will help expedite provincial funding commitments.
“It is understood that this has had some past success in the Edmonton region, where area municipalities have participated in common regional prioritization efforts for more than a decade,” the report stated.
