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Drivers who are fed up with bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Airport Parkway are just going to have to suck it up because the cash-strapped city has delayed plans for widening the road until at least 2020.

An environmental assessment for widening the two-lane arterial between Brookfield Road and the airport is underway, and the first stretch, between Brookfield and Hunt Club Road, was to be completed by 2018, at an estimated cost of $31 million. But that target has now been pushed back for at least several years — and perhaps even longer.

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According to River ward Coun. Riley Brockington, senior transportation planners told him last month that the work may not be finished for eight to 10 years.

He called the delay “excessive” and says staff “haven’t justified why it’s being postponed for as many years as it is.”

But a lack of cash appears to be the reason.

The 2013 transportation master plan was built on the premise that the city would collect from development charges and senior levels of government somewhere in the neighbourhood of $43 million to $45 million each year for growth-related road projects. But lower-than-forecast development charges, among other things, have forced the city to revise that projection to $26 million annually, wrote Michael Mizzi, the acting general manager of planning and growth, in a November memo.