Busy Corner Brook intersections to get upgrade

Construction won’t start until 2022

CORNER BROOK — On any given day, about 10,000 vehicles pass through the intersections of the Lewin Parkway with Griffin Drive and Mill Road in Corner Brook.

While traffic flows smoothly for the most part, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any issues at the two intersections.

Darren Charters, the city’s director of community engineering, development and planning, said there’s a long list of what’s wrong at the intersections.

The poles are in bad shape, the controllers for the lights and signals are past their full life and there’s a lot of standards that aren’t met, all of which were identified in a 2018 traffic study, he said.

“The biggest one for us it that it’s not accessible. It doesn’t have any of the accessibility features that we would typically do at an intersection,” said Charters.

That will change next year as the city undertakes bringing the intersections up to modern standards.

On Monday, Oct. 18, council started the process by awarding a contract to Harbourside Transportation Consultants for engineering services on the project at a cost of $82,980 (excluding HST).

During the council meeting, Mayor Jim Parsons said the city knew from the traffic study that both intersections were high priority items that needed to be dealt with.

Charters said the work will also include redoing the islands, installing pedestrian facilities and putting in a detection system that will help improve traffic flow.

That system will mean drivers won’t have to sit at a red light for a long time.

“At night when there’s nobody around you pull up to an intersection, you sit there and you sit there, and there’s no cars and you’ve got to wait till that intersection goes through that entire cycle before it gives you a green light. Detection will change that. It’ll be up really quickly, and in a matter of seconds you’ll be on your way.”

To improve accessibility, pedestrian facilities and trail crossings will be incorporated into the geometry of the intersections.

The trail crossings are like pedestrian crossings, are but marked a little differently.

“So, people see it and understand there’s something different there,” said Charters.

Proper phasing for signal indication will also be part of the improvement at the Griffin Drive intersection.

Charters said the design for the intersections will be completed this winter and the tender call for construction will take place early in the spring, with the work to be completed during the 2022 construction season under the city’s multiyear capital works program.