Rapid transit line on 8th Street won't necessarily mean fewer car lanes: city

Launching a bus rapid transit (BRT) line on busy 8th Street doesn't necessarily mean reducing the number of regular traffic lanes on that road, says a City of Saskatoon official.

"In certain select locations, perhaps widening would be an option," said Randy Grauer, the city's general manager of community services, adding that a reduction of regular lanes to make room for reserved bus lanes is "not a given."  

"I'm not sure that exclusive lane option is necessary, particularly in earlier years of operation," he added. "I think [with] the nature of our traffic patterns that a shared lane could function very well probably for many years."  

City sets sights on designer

Grauer's remarks come as the city looks for councillors on Wednesday to approve the selection of Omaha-Nebraska-based HDR Corporation as the company to design and plan (at an estimated cost of $3 million) a potentially sprawling bus rapid transit system for the growing city.

But if HDR (along with some expected consultant partners) ends up going through with the plan, the city will look to the company to iron out the design details, Grauer stressed.

"[We're] looking to hear what they have to say rather than us being prescriptive," he said when asked about the city's preferences on everything from the location of a potential BRT bus village to whether bus lanes on 8th Street should be in the middle of the road or by the curb.

"There's room for the experts to manoeuvre in terms of what they bring forward to us," said Grauer.

The concept of a bus rapid transit system in Saskatoon stretches back many years and involves the proposed (though gradual) launch of a red-line BRT corridor covering portions of 8th Street, 22nd Street and Preston Avenue.

"Over time, both the length of the system, and probably the level of service, would go up," said Grauer, with development of the full line estimated to cost somewhere "in the hundreds of millions of dollars."

It's part of a larger plan to accomodate a growing city population expected to reach 500,000 in the next 30 to 40 years. The BRT system is the "lynchpin" of that plan, said Grauer.

Eliminating railway 'chokepoints'

A contingency fund has been built into the $3 million planning budget for studying the possibility of removing rail "chokepoints" that, if they remained in place, would take the "rapid" out of "bus rapid transit system."

"If we're going to have effective service to go from Kensington to downtown to the university, you don't want to be stopped by a train for 15 minutes," said Grauer.

The city hopes to see the planning and design study completed in April 2018.

Roughly half of the study's price tag is expected to come from a federal infrastructure fund.