York Boulevard has reopened after the City of Hamilton deemed the slope stable following last Thursday's mudslide on highway 403.

The news will come as a relief to commuters who have awaited the work completion on the hillside between York Blvd and the highway. It had been closed due to fear the road would not be safe for traffic because of unstable ground caused by a burst water main below ground which caused the mudslide. The city said that one eastbound lane on Highway 403 will remain closed from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday and Friday as crews continue to clean up the lingering mudslide mess. The city said they do not expect the closures to extend into the weekend.

City spokesperson Kelly Anderson said traffic was "discouraged" from York Blvd. while the city assessed the stability of the slope, fearing York would become a relief valve and see an increase of traffic if it was opened while the mud and debris was cleared from the eastbound 403 lanes.

With Thursday's announcement, the city says the slope is now stabilized, opening the door for traffic relief. The road to get there was long, with crews only working 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. this week, once the city and the Ministry of Transportation agreed on a plan on Monday morning.

Ministry spokesperson Astrid Poei said the reason crews only worked one shift a day to clean up the mess was for safety, citing "daylight hours" as safe working conditions for the highway lanes and slope, which are partially hidden around the bend in the eastbound 403 where the mudslide occurred.

Both the mudslide and this summer's Burlington Skyway crash severally snarled Hamilton traffic, exposing the susceptibility of the city a key traffic bottlenecks.

Earlier in the year, the city implemented a series of Emergency Detour Routes (EDR) as immediate and automatic actions in the event of major accidents, said Ward 12 councillor Lloyd Ferguson.

Dave Ferguson, the city's superintendent of Traffic Engineering, said the Hamilton was able to manually reprogram some of the timing of lights to alleviate some traffic, but the volume of commuters put the city's main road arteries at their limit.

"Nothing you can really do to elevate the congestion that occurs," Dave Ferguson said.

Aside from EDRs, the city does not have automatic plans to deal with traffic emergencies and must meet several times to decide on any action.

"Obviously those are unscheduled events. they always seem to happen on a Thursday or Friday at the end of the day," Dave Ferguson said.

He added city crews were pouring concrete to stabilize the slope as early as last Friday, and that when the Pan Am Games start, the city should have a system in place to time roughly 100 intersections along the Pan Am route from a centralized location with new traffic control software. Currently, crews need to go to a light and manually reprogram the lights to alleviate traffic, something they did to help with the increased volume on Main Street East because of the mudslide.

Ferguson said the system will be in place for 2015.