Traffic growing on Kelowna's Bennett bridge as are efforts to get a second crossing
A petition drive trying to get a second crossing of Okanagan Lake near Kelowna is slowly gaining traction.
The Change.Org effort was launched Sept. 1 and received about 700 signatures in the first three days. Over the course of this week, it has grown to almost 2,000.
“The population growth in the Central Okanagan area coupled with tourism makes working and living in the area difficult due to constant traffic jams and endless idling while traveling 4 km/h just to cross the three-lane bridge,” the petition author, Joseph Wadden wrote on Change.org. “It’s a bottleneck and needs to be solved and should already have been solved.”
READ MORE: Petition calls for second Kelowna bridge crossing, traffic relief
There is some truth to the perception that traffic is getting worse in the Central Okanagan with the bridge as a focal point.
Data posted on a Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure website shows the number of vehicles crossing the bridge in the first seven months of this year increased by a mere 0.2% or 22,900 vehicles compared to 2021.
That overall number is low because of significant declines in travel in January and March.
The pattern changed significantly in the three months from April through June. That shows a 1.5% increase, or 77,500 more vehicles over that three-month period versus 2021.
READ MORE: Transit, not a second crossing, is the solution for Central Okanagan's bridge, highways: planners
The data shows huge differences in travel patterns from day to day but one thing is consistent. The very worst time to try to cross it (other than when it’s clogged because of accidents) is between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.
The Ministry’s website has a portal that shows the busiest 30 hours recorded for traffic on the bridge each year since it opened in 2008.
Surprisingly, the busiest hours recorded are not always in the peak summer months because fewer people commute to work.
The busiest hour in 2021, for example, was actually on April 23 when 5,933 vehicles crossed the bridge between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m.
That’s far short of the 6,290 recorded on Aug. 28, 2019 and the 6,287 peak hour for any year on June 28, 2018.
The busiest full day ever recorded for traffic on the bridge was on June 30, 2016 when 76,454 vehicles crossed the bridge.
Yet, in terms of hourly counts, that ranked 30th on the list for that year with 5,907 vehicles crossing between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m.
Traffic jumps by about 8,000 vehicles a day in the summer which means that more than one-third of the busiest rush hours recorded in 2018, 2019 and 2021 (skipping the slow 2020 COVID year) were in July and August.
The data also shows that the worst day for the evening rush hour is Thursday. Over the three-year period, Wednesdays were as bad as Fridays as the second busiest days.
In the first full year after the Bennett bridge opened, 2009, there were an average of just under 50,000 vehicles crossing it every day.
READ MORE: How Westsiders are keeping Kelowna's Bennett bridge 'useable'
Travel peaked at 59,218 vehicles a day in 2018. It was about 2,000 vehicles a day below that peak last year.
But, if traffic from April through June of this year is an indication of things to come, the 2018 record is at risk of soon being broken.
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