Ryan Street, Horsman Road will get upgrades to keep up with increased traffic in booming area

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By Brent Mazerolle
Times & Transcript Staff

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When Moncton City Council this week voted to prevent Muirfield Drive from ever connecting to Mountain Road, it dealt with a worry of many residents that their residential street would one day become a busy thoroughfare.

It was a valid concern, as motorists in the increasingly congested northwest Moncton stretches of Mountain Road look more often for shortcuts to get them where they're going.

Anyone just has to look at Moncton streets like Frampton, Ayer, Kendra or Hennesey for precedents. But those roadways, like Muirfield for that matter, were at least planned for higher traffic volumes. For truly startling examples of how even narrow residential side streets can some day become heavily used "drive-thrus," Monctonians need only look at Kirkwood Drive or Lewis Street for examples of stressed streetscapes.

But residents of the northwest end need not look that far. In their collective backyard they have two quiet country lanes which have gone big city in recent years.

Parts of Ryan Street and all of Horsman Road, once well outside Moncton city limits, don't come close to being up to standards for city streets, and nowhere is the contrast between their originally intended uses and their current reality more obvious than where they meet.

When you think busy suburban collector street, you probably don't picture a cattle barn, but there it is, right where Ryan and Horsman handle early 21st century traffic at an intersection more appropriate to the early 20th century.

With Mountain Road growing more crowded, residents within Moncton's fastest growing neighbourhood -- and many from outside the area -- are using Ryan and Horsman as the back door to get to and from the rest of the city.

And it's not just at rush hours anymore. Come from any well attended event at the Moncton Coliseum and you'll see more and more taillights disappearing from Berry Mills Road into the darkness of Horsman Road.

The head of the city's Engineering and Environmental Services department says the City of Moncton is well aware of the problems in the area, and Jack MacDonald says the work already under way the past two years on Ryan Road will continue in the next several years as well.

It will need to. Roads that do connect to Ryan Street already or will in the not-too-distant future include Hildegard, Evergreen, Twin Oaks, Maplehurst and Augusta.

"Capital works is development driven," MacDonald said, noting that with so many places to allocate limited funds, spending money on infrastructure is a matter of careful timing.

This year, Ryan Street is getting upgrades between Penrose and Horsman. MacDonald said the current city five-year capital works budget has money set aside for more work each summer through 2012.

Next year, Horsman Road will get its needed upgrade, as well as have its intersection with Ryan re-aligned. In the three years following that, the money will be spent on Ryan heading westerly from Horsman.

One big issue for motorists that is yet to be resolved is a traffic light for the intersection of Horsman and Berry Mills.

Because of the high speeds of traffic headed east on Berry Mills and the fact most drivers departing Horsman make left turns onto Berry Mills on their way into the city centre, many citizens argue there should be traffic lights at the intersection already.

MacDonald said the city has been lobbying the province for a signallized intersection there for quite some time.

"We meet with the province every year on this and we will meet with them again," he said, adding members of his department and their opposites at the provincial Department of Transportation usually get together about three times per year.

However, the province says a warrant analysis, a mathematical calculation of traffic numbers and other factors, does not yet support the installation of traffic signals.

The work and materials needed for a signallized intersection usually costs a bit more than $100,000.

It's not just a matter of convincing the province to spend the money. Even if the City of Moncton decided to go it alone and foot the bill, it's still a matter of getting permission to install traffic signals on what is a provincial roadway. So far that permission has not been granted.

MacDonald said it would likely take several weeks to two months to install lights and the necessary underground components they need.

As for longterm thinking, MacDonald said there was not yet any talk of one day having an overpass or other form of road junction at Berry Mills, though he agreed there could come a day when Horsman extends across Berry Mills and connects to roads somewhere in the area of the Moncton Industrial Park.

Similarly, he doubted the east end of Ryan Street, severed by the building of Wheeler Boulevard more than two decades ago, might one day be connected via an overpass across Wheeler.

"Never say never," he said, citing how larger cities like Toronto find themselves creating overlapping "spaghetti strands" of overpasses, but he expressed doubt the need would be great enough to justify the costs in the foreseeable future.