St. Albert’s newest walkway is now open for business, and the head of the chamber of commerce hopes it will help get people excited about downtown.
City officials and dignitaries officially opened the St. Anne Promenade Wednesday. Under construction since May 2015, this new street is part of the $4.45 million project to realign St. Anne Street and connect it with TachĂ© Street. It’s meant to be a showcase entrance to downtown St. Albert.
“St. Anne Promenade is one more step to continue the process of energizing our downtown,” Mayor Nolan Crouse said in a press release. The roadway would link the downtown region together and offer better access to future development, and makes Lions and Millennium parks better places for community gatherings.
The walkway features LED streetlamps, custom metal fences into which are cut depictions of popular St. Albert sports and landmarks, red-coloured sidewalk panels that have been embossed to look like wooden planks and a 40 km/h speed limit. There are also 30 new on-street parking spots on the shoulder, numerous trees and plants and fluorescent yellow crosswalks.
St. Albert Public Library director Peter Bailey said he’s been longboarding to work along the new road since it opened, and called it “quite spectacular.”
“It’s really beautiful, if you can say that about a roadway,” he said.
“Lois Hole, rest in peace, would have loved the landscaping.”
Bailey said he hoped the promenade would encourage more people to walk downtown, and noted how it opened up Millennium Park to residents.
The most visible change brought about by the promenade to the downtown is the roundabout – the city’s third, said Robin Benoit, the city’s director of engineering (the others are at Giroux Road and Versailles Avenue and in the Jensen Lakes region). Designers chose a roundabout over a standard intersection due to the angle with which St. Anne met the walkway.
“The roundabout is a much safer, more efficient traffic control device,” he said, as it reduces the risk of car and pedestrian collisions and makes the region more walkable.
Residents seem to have quickly adapted to the roundabout and are able to navigate it quickly after a cautious approach, Benoit said.
Bailey said he appreciated how the roundabout narrowed this part of the street to a single lane, as drivers previously had a habit of speeding down St. Anne Street.
“I think this will really slow the traffic down to a reasonable pace.”
The sidewalks along the promenade use a new technology called Silva Cells to promote tree growth and intercept runoff, Benoit said.
A traditional sidewalk cuts a small space out for a tree to grow, meaning it has little loose dirt available for its roots. With Silva Cells, you stack up a bunch of wall-less plastic boxes full of dirt and put the sidewalk on top, effectively putting the concrete up on posts. This leaves a large space of loose earth into which roots can grow and stormwater can seep.
Lynda Moffat, president of the St. Albert Chamber of Commerce, said this walkway should help draw more people and businesses to the downtown region. It was also an important part of the Downtown Area Redevelopment Plan (DARP).
“The (Sturgeon) river is a feature of our city a lot of cities don’t have,” she said, and the walkway will bring more people and traffic closer to this selling point.
Moffat said the walkway will allow more vendors to participate in next year’s farmers’ market, and should help residents visualize the potential of DARP.
“It makes it so much easier to get excited about the benefits that are going to come to the city of St. Albert from having their downtown healthy and strong.”
This will likely be the last big development in the DARP until commercial development catches up, Crouse said in an interview. The next road to get a makeover would likely be St. Thomas Street, where plans are to remove the road’s large concrete median.
