The opening of the Bear Mountain Parkway extension in Langford will improve public safety and pave the way for further development north of the Trans-Canada Highway, says Mayor Stew Young.
The 3.5-kilometre roadway opened Tuesday. It links the growing neighbourhoods atop Skirt Mountain with developing areas on its southern slope, and provides another route across the Trans-Canada Highway to the city core.
Previously, the only way to reach Bear Mountain Resort and the nearby housing developments was to follow the Bear Mountain Parkway from Millstream Road to the roundabout at Country Club Way. The new extension continues the parkway from the roundabout down the mountain to the junction of Leigh and McCallum roads near the Leigh Road interchange.
“You’ve got two access points now and it allows for future development,” Young said. “It’s fairly restrictive if you only have one access [route] to the top of the mountain; that’s not good planning. So this really opens it up.”
The new route will also give emergency vehicles another way to get to the area.
“Our police department and our fire department and our ambulance have been waiting for this opening for quite some time now,” Young said. “It will make it a lot safer.”
Michelle Mahovlich, Langford’s director of engineering, said the parkway gives the city a second major connector linking communities to the north and south of the Trans-Canada.
“Right now, we have the Millstream overpass that’s a full north-south connector, but that really is the only full north-south connector from north Langford across to the areas south of the Trans-Canada Highway,” she said.
Mahovlich said the opening of the parkway is expected to ease congestion at the Millstream overpass, where work is underway to add a second left-turn lane for traffic heading south toward Victoria. “There’s a lot of people up there that have been waiting for it to open, so we’re anticipating that the uptake on it will be fairly quick.”
Chris Foord, vice-chairman of the Capital Regional District’s traffic safety commission, said he’s hoping the parkway extension will improve traffic flow. He noted there’s already congestion at the Leigh Road interchange, but he expects that will ease once work on the Millstream overpass concludes. “I think we’ve had more vehicles [at Leigh Road] than we would have in normal situations,” he said.
Crews began working on the parkway extension in October 2016, but the project was delayed slightly in order to add more underground utilities, Mahovlich said.
“In the end, it’s a better product because we feel we won’t have to dig the road up again to get other major utilities in there. We’ve done it all proactively now.”
The final piece of the puzzle, slated for completion this summer, will link Leigh Road to Langford Parkway, allowing people to travel from City Centre Park to the top of the mountain.
Young said the new route has been dubbed the “Olympic Corridor” because it will link the rugby players training at Westhills Stadium to the golf, tennis and mountain biking athletes at Bear Mountain.
“We want Olympic athletes here,” he said. “We want athletes training in Langford. We want all that stuff.
“And it’s good for our sports. We’ve got a lot of families in Langford and we’ve got a lot of sports going on, and to be able to have direct access by improving our infrastructure will just create more opportunities.”
