Saskatoon Freeway Project

The Saskatoon Freeway Project (formerly the Perimeter Highway) discussion has taken on a range of associated topics with it, including the direction of this bridge on the highway and how it cuts through the Northeast and Small Swale areas.

I personally believe that the Chief Mistawasis Bridge was a needless waste of money. The proposed traffic flows and where this traffic was going to divert from always seemed unreasonable to me. And usage of this bridge has not lived up to the promise that City engineers stated. That all of this planning and engineering went into this bridge and not once did they consider that they are putting this through an active chemical buffer within the city is also unbelievable to me.

The proposed new Saskatoon Freeway will have its own bridge which does plan to circumvent the chemical and Waneskewin offset buffers but there are still some lingering questions about how it intercepts the riverbank and the edge of the two swale areas.

At an information session on this, it is clear to me that there is a very small window where this new bridge can reside. While minor adjustments may be possible, it seems pretty clear that provincial highways design staff are very constrained on their ability to move this anywhere else partially due to limitations caused by the close proximity to the existing North Commuter Parkway running to the Chief Mistawasis Bridge.

There are issues around how this corridor is being created and how it unfairly ties up land development for people who may be deemed in the way of it. From what I understand, it feels that this process has locked down the ability of legitimate landowners from making any changes to their own properties even if they are not clearly identified as being within the final highway corridor itself. If you put restrictions on landowners from completing legitimate expansions to their properties or to their businesses while you do lengthy design consultation, the least I believe you should do is financially offset this since you are technically renting a capability of this property until you’ve make a determination of the final pathway. Some of the strongest viewpoints I heard at the information session I attended revolved around this issue.

Travel north around Edmonton on the Anthony Henday or around Calgary on the Stoney Trail NW and you will see the benefit of such a freeway corridor. This will greatly help to remove needless heavy truck traffic passing through our city core on a daily basis. We should also be simultaneously assuming that, in the decades to come, we will need a new perimeter rail corridor that circumvents the city so that the best options are held now for this future plan.