What will the roads surrounding Yorkton look like in the future? The city is looking to answer that question, with a Yorkton Regional Transportation Study, done in cooperation with the Ministry of Highways, City of Yorkton, RM of Wallace and RM of Orkney.
Monique Kealey, Senior Transportation Engineer with Associated Engineering (Sask) Ltd. says that the study is designed to see what the city needs to take into account in order to handle expected growth in the next twenty years. The study will be looking at how roadways will have to be developed in order to meet the needs of the city.
“For example, if people feel that highway 16 through the city is something they don’t want to continue to have, they might say let’s build a new highway 16. Where should it be then? Should it be a freeway style bypass or should it be more of an industrial road that gives good access to adjacent properties? To create a dialog and get the opinions of local businesses and residents on what transportation systems and roadways are needed for future growth.”
Doing the planning now is critical, because without a clear transportation in place it could be a case where the land needed for future transportation development could wind up getting used.
“What you don’t want is to have development use up all the land, without having a plan and organizing all the space to know where the road is going to go, because we need to protect the land from being developed.”
It’s encouraging that the city and the local RMs are working together on the study, Kealey says, and it’s a necessary step because the RMs will be affected by any plans and need to have their concerns at the table,
“It’s fabulous that everyone wants to work together. It’s really critical to have a common vision because typically roads like this are serving everyone. There’s highway traffic that’s going through the city and not benefitting anyone locally, there’s a lot of Yorkton-destined traffic and the RMs also use the city centre as a service centre so they’re doing a lot of traffic back and forth to Yorkton. Realistically, any new highways, if that’s what is needed, might need to go through the RMs so it’s important for the RMs to participate, and say hey, there is this or that environmental reserve or other land feature that we want you to work around, or we have our own growth plans.”
The study also hosted an open house about the transportation study in order to get more information about what’s in the works for the city.
“We want to find out what is the need, what are the physical things to work around, the constraints, so that we’re planning what type of road and where, we have as much information about the local geography and growth plans as is available.”
