Andrew Underwood

23rd Avenue and Calgary Trail / Gateway Boulevard Intersection Edmonton

The City of Edmonton has finally decided to upgrade the intersection that is not only the gateway to the city but also the site of the most traffic accidents in the city. I’m not exactly sure of the light timings but I’m willing to bet that greater than 50% of the traffic coming into the city has to stop there. What do they see while waiting to proceed? Industrial style wood poles that suspend cables that swing in the wind giving the traffic lights that lovely rickety feel. There is no landscaping done, tall dead grass is just left there amidst the gravel strewn about that blinds any pedestrians waiting to cross as vehicles fly by at 80 km/hr. Another big problem is the train tracks that run by the east side of the intersection causing major delays anytime the iron horse arrives or departs.

The plan now is to build overpasses that will hopefully solve all these problems. They’ve put up a site called 23avenue.com that doesn’t seem to be indexed by Google to keep us all updated with a webcam and other textual snippets. Incidentally they are using the open source platform Joomla to manage the site. You can access all the plans including their vision on how the landscaping will look. They say it will take THREE years to complete, which seems like a long time but it’s probably going to be longer, especially if any of those guys from the Wayne Gretzky bridge are involved. So this is good, the overpasses will make everything better, but in the meantime the whole intersection will be a construction site. How will they manage this?

Where I work is just on the other side of the intersection from where I live implying that it should be feasible to walk to work during the summer months. Now due to the construction pedestrians are no longer allowed to walk through the intersection because it is deemed a construction zone. What they have done to accommodate this is set up a free bus service from bus stop to bus stop to get you across the intersection.

Two big problems with this:
- The bus (number 74) only comes by every half hour. This is NOT good enough for someone just wanting to cross an intersection.
- The bus stops are very far apart. The distances are AT LEAST 1 km apart. The stops should be right before and right after the intersection. At least put in a temporary bus stop in at 99th st and 23rd Ave so when you’re coming out of South Common you don’t have to backtrack to catch the bus. For example, if you’re coming out of the A&W there you can start walking down the side of the road to get to the bus stop but there is no bus stop because the last one wasn’t even in sight and is now far behind you.

It’s an unacceptable situation right now. Perhaps it’s best just to don a hard hat and reflective vest and hoof it across?