Chief Peguis Trail inner ring road inches closer to completion

The completion of Winnipeg's inner ring road is continuing to inch closer, as the plan to extend Chief Peguis Trail across the city's northwest quadrant now calls for overpasses at both Main Street and McPhillips Street.

Late last week, the City of Winnipeg launched a search for a consulting firm to design a nine-kilometre road that will extend Chief Peguis Trail from its current terminus at Main Street west to Brookside Boulevard.

Right now, Chief Peguis runs five kilometres east from Main Street to Lagimodiere Boulevard. The western extension is intended to be another link in an inner ring road originally envisioned as a freeway in the 1950s.

"It's a part of strategic road network in the Transportation Master Plan, which eventually will connect all throughout the inner ring road system," said Scott Suderman, a transportation planning engineer with the city.

"The other important part of this roadway is that it will take a lot of traffic off neighbourhood streets and put them on a higher-classified roadway, making existing neighbourhoods and new neighbourhoods more accessible for walking, cycling and transit."

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Right now, short-cutting through residential streets is a problem in new northwest-Winnipeg neighbourhoods such as Mandalay West and Amber Trails.

"These particular streets were never designed for the traffic loads they see today," said Old Kildonan Coun. Devi Sharma, whose ward encompasses most of the proposed extension.

The request for design proposals issued last week calls for Chief Peguis Trail to be connected to north-south arteries such as McGregor Street, Keewatin Street and Pipeline Road through a series of realignments and extensions of connecting roads.

It also stipulates there must be overpasses at both Main Street and McPhillips Street. Conceptual art presented in June at a public meeting called for a grade separation at Main but only a regular set of traffic lights at McPhillips. 

Instead, the city is demanding the construction of some form of diamond interchange at McPhillips "on day one" as well as a smaller structure known as a "single-point diamond" at Main, where the available land is restricted by the presence of the Kildonan Golf Course and the North End Water Pollution Control Centre.

Suderman said the design contract should be awarded this fall. The study will then take about a year to complete, he said.

At that point, council will have a cost estimate to consider before it decides to fund the project. City council public works chairwoman Janice Lukes (South Winnipeg-St. Norbert) said the extension of Chief Peguis Trail warrants serious consideration because it will facilitate the flow of goods to and from CentrePort, the industrial development northwest of the city.

"In my opinion, I think we should prioritize routes that have a notable economic spinoff," said Lukes, adding that the new roadway will facilitate the construction of single-family homes on former agricultural lands in fast-growing northwest Winnipeg. "We also have to be looking at the greenfields we'll be opening up."

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The earliest council could fund the western extension of Chief Peguis Trail is 2018. Suderman said before the completion of the design study, he could not predict when construction could commence or hazard a guess at the project cost.