Murray Wood: Infrastructure projects are expensive, but important
Any time we try to build something, people start complaining about costs. Murray Wood says people are angry about the ov...
The days of the pedestrian overpass at the University of Saskatchewan are numbered.
During a meeting on Thursday, Saskatoon City Council voted seven to three to approve the removal of the overpass on College Drive in between Stadium Crescent and Cumberland Avenue South. A street-level accessible crosswalk will take its place.
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The change is part the city’s plan to reconstruct and redesign the College Drive area. The cost, according to the city, will be around $500,000, as opposed to $3.2 million that would need to be spent in order to demolish, rebuild and replace the pedestrian walkway.
Rob Dudiak, Saskatoon’s special projects manager, also oversees the city’s Link Bus Rapid Transit Project. He said the overpass was built in the 1960s and the new designs – which include dedicated bus lanes in the centre of College Drive – wouldn’t work with the structure for several reasons.
There is no timeline yet for when the overpass will be demolished, but construction on the Link system is scheduled to begin in the summer of 2026 along College Drive. (Lara Fominoff/650 CKOM)
“Not the least of which because there is a column right now in the very centre of the road. So if we were to keep it, we (would) end up needing to divert all the lanes to go around it, crash barriers and the like,” he explained.
The overpass also doesn’t meet the city’s current accessibility standards.
650 CKOM spoke to several people who cross the bridge at least a couple of times each week, and said they’re not entirely on board with the notion of another street-level crossing.
“It’s a busy street to cross at street level,” said John. “I don’t know if I’d feel good about that. It’s definitely an easy access to the university.”
“We could use the intersection at Cumberland and College Drive, but boy, when it’s a busy time of the day, that light can take a long time to change,” added Dudiak, another regular user of the overpass.
“When there’s snow and ice, it’s rough and slippery. They tend to keep this pedestrian bridge cleared nicely.”
The two also pointed out that many students living in nearby residences use the overpass, and removing it would be a big inconvenience for them.
Other users of the overpass, who were staying at the nearby Holiday Inn hotel, said the structure offers very convenient access to the university and nearby trails while they’re in town.
Dudiak pointed out that the pedestrian overpass is the third most used crossing in the city, behind the Cumberland Avenue and Wiggins Avenue crossings.
“From just a capacity point of view, it’s definitely not an issue to have the number of people who are crossing on the pedestrian overpass today crossing at street level,” he said.
Overpass users suggested that removing the bridge and adding another street-level crossing could hinder vehicle traffic, but Dudiak said they’ve kept that in mind with the new design.
“During peak periods it won’t be like a pedestrian on-demand signal. So the signal will be co-ordinated along College Drive with the other traffic signals, so you end up with kind of what they refer to as a ‘green wave,’ where one intersection goes green and then the following one and the following one,” he said.
Dudiak said city staff have been working closely with U of S administration, and said the university is also in support of removing the overpass over College Drive.
“We did take and have a series of five different information sessions in March, some right on campus, one right at the hospitals and two more directed kind of at the community at large,” he said.
He said the information sessions saw roughly an equal split between people who wanted to keep it and those who felt it should be taken down.
There is no timeline yet for when the overpass will be demolished, but construction on the Link system is scheduled to begin in the summer of 2026 along College Drive.
That section of the work is anticipated to take up to two years to complete.
