The City of Maple Ridge, Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows Chamber of Commerce and TransLink are asking for ideas on how you’d like Lougheed Highway to look in the future.
The city is doing a Lougheed Transit Corridor Study, which will look at how Maple Ridge’s main road between Pitt Meadows and downtown Maple Ridge should develop.
The road will be the route for a new B-Line bus service, to start later this year or early next. It will connect Maple Ridge to the SkyTrain system at Coquitlam Central station.
“As we look around the region, these high-capacity transit corridors are places where people want to live and they tend to attract new businesses and development opportunities,” the city says on its corridor study website.
The study will also include Dewdney Trunk Road.
A series of events is being planned to get public input, from an open house to multiple pop-ups, with the next one planned for Saturday, May 11. That’s when a co-design workshop takes place at Glenwood elementary, near 121st Avenue and 214th Street, starting at 9 a.m.
The workshop involves a presentation by an urban planner, followed by brain-storming sessions for buildings and public spaces along the corridor and, specifically, at future bus stops for the B-Line service. An RSVP to that event is needed by 4 p.m. on May 8.
After all the ideas are in, a graphic artist will provide visual renditions of what’s been discussed, at 3:30 p.m. Everyone’s welcome to the event and no RSVPs are needed for the later one.
TransLink has said the start date for the B-Line bus, which will offer 40-minute service between downtown Maple Ridge and Coquitlam, will be either late this year or early next year.
Initially, the B-Line service was to start this September.
The B-Line will have limited numbers of stops in order to speed travel time. The stops are in Haney Place Mall, at Laity Street, 203rd Street and Harris Road on Lougheed Highway, in Pitt Meadows.
Future stops could be added at Meadowtown mall and 222nd Street.
The B-Line service will use new articulated buses and bus stops, along with electronic signs.
The uncertainty in the schedule is due to estimated construction timelines, combined with a tight construction market, TransLink said earlier.
“After many years of being unable to expand the transit system, we are now in the midst of the region’s biggest expansion in its history. We are doing our best to roll out new services as quickly as possible to meet demand. However, as we move forward with projects, unforeseen circumstances sometimes influence our timelines,” said spokesperson Aliya Mohamed.
pmelnychuk@mapleridgenews.com
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