Furor over Division Ave. doesn’t make $ense

A school bus navigates the 12-foot lane on Division Ave.

The City of Medicine Hat does not need to follow the North American 12-foot-wide lane standard for highways and expressways when it comes to urban streets.

But we must pay to build, maintain, clear snow, put down and pick up gravel as well as repave the roads.

A city report highlighting the cost of maintaining a kilometre of road in Medicine Hat.

Our community pays more per capita to build and maintain roads than a town in a national park like Banff and nearly 20 per cent more than Lethbridge, according to an albeit dated city report.

To put an even finer point on those statistics, the cost to maintain a kilometre of road in Banff is more than twice that of Medicine Hat, yet Hatters pay more per capita, according to the report. While Lethbridge is 40 percent bigger by population, they only have 27 per cent more kilometres of roads to care for.

While those figures are a decade old, it’s not likely to have gotten any better as we have continued to build 40-foot-wide residential streets in low traffic volume residential neighbourhoods.

Preston Avenue is a good example of why the Hat will likely continue to see its per capita road costs rise.

While far from unique in the city Preston is such a 40-foot-wide residential street sitting across from the grasslands bluff overlooking the South Saskatchewan River.

Preston Ave.

Despite it being built to the standards of Hwy. 41, it likely doesn’t average more than a dozen cars an hour measured over a day with half the speed limit.

It certainly doesn’t need the capacity for hundreds of on-street parking spots for the handful which stow their vehicle on the road where the homes all have driveways.

If our city is true to form, instead of shaving off 10 feet of asphalt along with the associated costs and adding the space to the adjacent grassland, we’ll pay for to have the whole street repaved.

Ross Glen Dr.

It’s not like Hatters can’t drive on smaller residential streets.

Ross Glen Drive and Aberdeen Street are less than 32-feet wide in many places despite having a full complement of people filling up the busy residential throughfares with parking.

Which brings us to the curious case of the new look Division Avenue.

Nearly all the parking has been removed from the street and replaced with wide sidewalks and a pathway, leaving just two standard 12-foot-wide lanes – the same width of traveling roadway which can be found on Hwy. 3.

Alberta Transportation Highway standards.

But it’s not the removal of on-street parking which has caused an uproar but the fact the roadway was built to the same width standard as Alberta Transportation has for highways.

You can, and in many cases should, blame the city government for many things right now.

When it comes to the Division Avenue project, it’s an open question whether it’s on budget as it’s two months behind schedule.

But wanting city streets 20 per cent larger than the continental average, that’s on us along with the cost to accommodate the luxury.