Keith Gerein: A bridge too far for construction snarls in Edmonton

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Whether it’s clutter, clatter or cheapness, all of us have a running list of pet peeves that tends to grow throughout our lives.

These days, mine includes tailgaiters, government secrecy and bad spelling, especially among those who can’t understand why “looser” isn’t quite the barb they think it is when sending me fan mail.

Whatever serves as the nails on your particular chalkboard, I suspect traffic congestion would also make most people’s top-10 list of common infuriations.

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Unfortunately, for those motorists who must regularly traverse their way in and out of the city’s core, I have some bad news: construction-related snarls are about to get considerably worse for at least the next few years because a bunch of aging bridges are all requiring rehabilitation around the same time.

In my 20-plus years in Edmonton, I’m not sure I’ve seen a traffic headache as potentially painful as this one.

With 50,000 people a year moving here, it’s hardly ideal timing. Nor will it be a help to a Downtown that is still recovering. At the same time, it’s probably not a great idea to mess around with the schedule of bridge repairs.

“What is a bit different here is the context or the area that it’s happening in, in that a lot of these bridges are in or around Downtown,” said Natalie Lazurko, the city’s director of transportation planning and design. “They are all coming up in the same time frame, one after the other, and that does have an impact. We’re doing our best to put in place accommodations, but people will feel this.”

The question many of you will have is how the city found itself in this situation. Was a bridge blitz always going to be necessary in the 2020s, or did certain unfortunate choices create this?

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The answer seems to be a little of both.

Dawson shutdown

In the latter category is the Dawson Bridge, east of Downtown, which is scheduled to be closed for repairs through most of 2025. It’s an old structure, built in 1912, but it also received major rehabilitation work just 14 years ago that included the installation of a “sandwich plate” deck that was supposed to help greatly extend the life of the bridge.

Unfortunately, what was thought to be an innovative solution at the time has proven the opposite, with engineers finding significant deck deformations, surface cracking, and water leakage underneath. Not a great outcome for a city that is trying to improve its project management record.

As the Dawson Bridge repairs are hopefully wrapping up, the city will then turn its attention to the other side of the core when the Wellington Bridge on 102 Avenue is replaced. The Glenora structure is set to be completely closed for a year or so starting in fall 2025.

For west end residents, the timing is troublesome given that there is already a great deal of traffic disruption on nearby Stony Plain Road and 104 Avenue due to LRT construction. The city is hoping the LRT work will be far enough along next year to minimize flow issues — though I expect a lot of motorists may find themselves forced north onto 107 Avenue and 111 Avenue.

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Low Level’s murky future

Also scheduled for closure through much of 2026 will be the northbound Low Level Bridge, an official historic resource that was built in 1900 as Edmonton’s first permanent river crossing.

This is normal rehab work to keep the old bridge operational for another couple of decades, but the fate of its southbound twin appears far more fleeting.

The side-by-side bridges look essentially identical but are actually unique structures. The southbound bridge was built 50 years later with different design that is approaching the end of its lifespan, and the city says it doesn’t make financial sense to keep it going.

“We don’t often part ways with our bridges, but sometimes they do reach a point in their lifespan where the cost is no longer worth the value you are getting from them,” Lazurko said.

Maintenance efforts will buy up to 10 more years, but at that point the plan is to remove the southbound crossing. In the meantime, the city will need to figure out a traffic flow alternative — whether that’s a new bridge in the same place, a new bridge somewhere else, an expansion of an existing bridge, or none of the above. Right now, there is no specific strategy.

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(The city is planning a road network study to assess the options, which will also look at the long-term feasibility of keeping the northbound bridge.)

High Level headache

Whatever the solution, I think it’s fair to say much of the city’s strained infrastructure budget will be spent on bridges in the coming decade.

Despite its age, the bridge remains a hugely important crossing, which means its closure has been a long-dreaded inevitability. The only good news is that we’ll get three years with no semi trucks getting stuck in the entrance.

“It’s a bridge that has many millions of different components so it’s going to take some time to get through all of that,” Lazurko said.

All told, the traffic flow problems are expected to be severe enough for long enough that the city is preparing some rather radical moves to mitigate them, including having vehicles move in both directions on the Walterdale Bridge rather than just northbound.

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This change will require rejigging of the south side intersection at 109 Street and Walterdale Hill, and the north side intersection at Rossdale Road, 97 Avenue and 105 Street.

An interesting wrinkle in all this is the province’s interest in building a high-speed rail line between Calgary and Edmonton.

So far, there is no indication of where a grand central station might be built in Edmonton’s core, or how the trains will cross the river. In an ideal world, the province and the city might work together on a dual rail-asphalt crossing that could serve as a replacement for the Low Level Bridge, though not necessarily in the same location.

Either way, prepare for commuting pet peeves to be on full throttle in the years ahead.

All I can say is load the LRT, build the bike lanes, and fix the funicular — anything to improve alternate modes of transportation. And oh yeah, just saying, but it might have been nice to have a gondola to glide over the river, too.

“We do know there is a lot of happening. It might feel like it’s coming at us really quickly, but we want people to know this is being done really carefully,” Lazurko said.

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“It’s going to be a lot, but we’ll be OK.”

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