HALIFAX—Bedford-area Coun. Tim Outhit is urging people to attend a public engagement session this week to discuss and provide input on the future of the bustling Bedford Highway.

The busy commuter route—which experiences heavy volumes and congestion during peak periods—accommodates more than 20,000 vehicles each day and is served by 10 Halifax Transit routes. The transportation corridor runs about 11.5 kilometres between Windsor St. in Halifax and Highway 102.

A Halifax Planning post advertising Monday and Tuesday’s public sessions notes that although several past studies have considered opportunities to improve transportation capacity between Halifax and Bedford, there hasn’t yet been a detailed investigation of the Bedford Highway itself “in terms of its ultimate potential to move people.”

“I think it’s important for people to come out because I think staff and the consultants always need to hear people’s questions, concerns and ideas, but also I think it’s an important study that’s going on,” Outhit said of the public engagement sessions scheduled for Monday in Bedford and Tuesday in Rockingham.

“In addition to the study on rail and study on bus rapid transit, it is going to determine what we can do to accommodate growth, how much more growth we can accommodate, and that will help us not only deal with transportation and traffic issues, public transportation issues in Bedford but also help us plan for development.”

The municipality’s Integrated Mobility Plan (IMP) identifies the Bedford Highway as a proposed transit priority corridor where increased transit priority measures are desired. It also endorses further consideration of the potential for commuter rail service via CN’s Bedford-Halifax corridor, which runs directly adjacent to the Bedford Highway.

Although the IMP does recommend strategic “bottleneck” improvements to the Bedford Highway, it also discourages further investment in additional roadway infrastructure and instead encourages options that are “non-automobile.”

“Traffic on the Bedford Highway is bad because of the fact that there’s only several ways onto the peninsula and of course in Bedford and Rockingham and Hammonds Plains we’ve seen tremendous growth. But we’ve also seen tremendous growth of Burnside, so you actually have traffic going both ways most times on the Bedford Highway now, meaning that you couldn’t necessarily do reversing lanes and or take away lanes and this sort of thing,” Outhit explained.

“You’ve got many people trying to get downtown to work or to the hospitals and universities, but you also have this tremendous number of people trying to get to Burnside, so we have basically outgrown the Bedford Highway as it is so it’s time to see if there are some solutions for the highway.”

Upon its completion, the Bedford Highway Functional Plan will guide future transportation planning for the highway and land-use planning along the corridor and adjacent roadways.

“My own opinion is that the Bedford Highway is at its peak, pretty much has exceeded its maximum capacity. There might be some areas closer to Halifax on the Bedford Highway that could receive some widening or some reversing lanes etc.,” Outhit said.

“But the parts of the Bedford Highway that I represent, largely the solution is going to be trying to get people off the Bedford Highway and into rail or ferries or perhaps bus rapid transit. It’s certainly going to have an impact on where we allow development, how much development and the density.”

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Yvette d’Entremont is a Halifax-based reporter focusing on health. Follow her on Twitter: @ydentremont

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