By Sarah Stone

City tries to correct past road lane errors

Jun 4, 2014 | 6:23 AM

Driving around Prince Albert, some residents may have noticed an extra lane or two painted in that weren’t there before.

Since May 27, arterial and collector roads in Prince Albert were repainted and altered at times.

Wes Hicks, manager of capital projects, said the City contracted Alberta-based LaFrentz, for less than $50,000, to re-evaluate and paint the lane lines on arterial and collector road. As of Sunday, it was 99 per cent complete.

“We attempted to straighten some of the previous errors in where the lines were painted and so hopefully we’ve achieved that by making a standard 3.5-metre wide lane. And as regarding right-hand turning lanes, many of them were marked and many were not, so we’ve tried our best to mark the right-hand turning lane wherever there is a set of traffic lights,” Hicks said, adding they followed Canadian Traffic Standards and evaluated each street based on its width.

Hicks hopes this will make the appropriate spacing of vehicles on the roads more clear, saying sometimes they straddle two lanes. However, no signs will be in place to indicate where changes are being made.

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The decision to hire LaFrentz did not go through council approval, which Hicks said is normal when it comes to projects that require a high level of expertise. He added very few companies actually have the equipment to handle the 112.5 kilometres of painting required—including the City.

“That kind of equipment is extremely expensive and too expensive to purchase and it’s also about the timing. This contractor is able to paint in off-hours, so when there’s less traffic, which makes it easier to paint and get a good product,” he explained. Currently the City’s machine is too “archaic” and incapable of painting city streets in a timely or straight manner.

However, city crews will be doing a portion of line painting, but only school crosswalks, signalized intersections, half-signalized intersections, pedestrian crosswalks and parks and trails crossing. It totals 108 crossings.

“We’ve always had difficulty with enough manpower to get all the crosswalks painted, so we’re going to concentrate the city crews on painting crosswalks,” Hicks said.

The City is familiar with LaFrentz, according to Hicks, which he said painted the airport lines on the runway in 2012.

sstone@panow.com

On Twitter: @sarahstone84