Sign installed to drop traffic count on Hawstead

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/11/2020 (1948 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A no-left turn sign has been installed at the corner of Hawstead Road and Bairdmore Boulevard to decrease the amount of through-neighbourhood traffic.

Its installation comes after Hawstead Road residents approached area councillor Janice Lukes (Waverley West) with concerns about high traffic volumes.

For the past year, the City of Winnipeg has been counting traffic, registering around 2,000 cars daily on the residential street, Lukes said.

“Hawstead was built to handle 1,000 vehicles per day. But what’s happened with Waverley West, because we haven’t built a connection with Bison Drive, now there are 2,000 cars a day on Hawstead.”

The cause of the problem is a lack of a collector street from Waverley West to Richmond West that’s able to handle heavier traffic. Bison Drive was supposed to connect from Pembina Highway through to Kenaston Boulevard, Lukes said, adding that connection was never built.

“Traffic is like water. It will find its way,” Lukes said. “For people living in South Pointe and Prairie Pointe, the only way to get to Pembina Highway is to drive along Sandusky, and either go to Bairdmore, or onto Hawstead and then Kirkbridge.”

Jane Romaniuk, who has lived on Hawstead for 27 years, said the traffic volume got so bad, it was hard to get her car out of the driveway at times. “The road doesn’t have sidewalks either, so you have to walk on the road, which doesn’t work in winter when the streets aren’t plowed very well,” she said.

The online forum NextDoor for Richmond West has been filled with compliments and complaints about the new no-left turn sign, Romaniuk said.

“The police have been ticketing people who are still making that turn,” Romaniuk said. “People are out, waving signs at the drivers.”

She remembers when the land to the west wasn’t occupied by houses, but rather canola fields.

“We started work on it two years ago, first putting out ‘slow down’ signs before contacting Janice Lukes. Having the no-left turn sign is an inconvenience for me, but it’s going to decrease the traffic on our street, which is good.”

The city engineers monitored the volume of traffic on Hawstead for a year and found only one per cent of cars were speeding.

“Speed wasn’t the problem, volume was,” Lukes said.

Residents of Groveland Bay and Hazel Park Drive, along with those on Hawstead, now enter their streets by driving further south on Bairdmore, turning north onto Kendale Drive or Meadow Ridge and then onto Hawstead, Lukes said.

“It’s two or three minutes longer to drive, but it’s going to massively improve the quality of life for people on Hawstead,” she said.

School buses are the lone exception to the no-left turn rule, Lukes said.

“We will continue to monitor the traffic at that corner, with cameras and traffic counters,” she said, adding further options could be used to deter drivers from using Hawstead as a through-street, such as concrete block barriers.