Work at Charlottetown's North River Road to take six weeks, aims to improve congestion at busy intersection

Drivers on the way in and out of Charlottetown will face a bit of disruption over the next six weeks. But the short-term pain should lead to long-term gain at the intersection of North River Road and Capital Drive.

Between 20,000-30,000 vehicles pass through the intersection on a daily basis — a number that has grown in recent years, says Charlottetown’s public works manager, Ylber Gashi.

The road work will increase the length of the right turning lane from North River onto Capital, hopefully relieving some of the daily congestion. While the project is also going to slow things down a bit in the interim, there isn’t any major underground work, Gashi said in an Oct. 19 Guardian interview.

“We’re not upgrading water or sewer lines there. There’s going to be a few storm water catch basins installed, but the majority of it is surface level — adding curb, extending that right lane back and then paving it.”

With extra vehicles trying to get through at peak times in the morning and late afternoon, public works is trying to limit the impact by focusing work outside of these hours. That includes doing the paving during the night, which should take a day or two, Gashi said.

Work began last week, with the winning tender going to New Brunswick’s Birch Hill Construction Ltd. The 2026-27 capital budget set aside $2.2 million for the project.

But it should come in under budget because Birch Hill’s proposal planned to complete it at a cost of $1.1 million plus tax. The city’s money comes from the federal Canada Community-Building Fund.

Gashi was clear that the work underway is just Phase 1 of the city’s North River Road master plan. Eventually, the goal is to build a roundabout at the intersection. But that is still years away, and much will depend on the will of council and other infrastructure projects, Gashi said.

Charlottetown has been working through the goals of the University Avenue master plan as well, and the plan is to avoid doing this work at the same time because of the disruption to traffic, Gashi said.

“We definitely don’t want to do two major projects on both of these streets at the same time in the same year.”

All told, there will be about 600 metres of road work, Gashi said. The tender document for the project includes a detailed description of the work and engineer drawings.

“The work involves the widening of both North River Road and Lower Malpeque Road, as well as milling and resurfacing to the limits displayed on the tendered design drawings. In addition, the work will include the installation of a new curb line on Lower Malpeque Road complete with new storm system, as well as new type one sidewalk on North River Road and Lower Malpeque Road.”

Under the work schedule section, the tender says an engineer will do interim reviews of the work’s progress based on the schedule. Any updates to the schedule require approval of the engineer, it says.

“All costs incurred by the owner as a result of delays and schedule overruns caused by the contractor and not previously approved will be at the contractor’s expense.”

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Logan MacLean is a municipal reporter for The Guardian in Prince Edward Island. He can be reached at lmaclean@postmedia.com and followed on X @loganmaclean94.