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Gazette Readers' Choice: St. Albert Trail at Giroux Road voted longest red light

It hasn't gotten any longer, but it hasn't gotten any shorter either
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The intersection of St. Albert Trail and Giroux Road was voted as the longest red light in the city in the 2022 Gazette Readers' Choice Awards. JACK FARRELL/St. Albert Gazette

Gazette readers have chosen the St. Albert Trail and Giroux Road intersection as the longest red light in the city. 

It's the second year in a row this intersection has been selected as part of the newspaper's Readers' Choice Awards.

But according to Dean Schick, the City of St. Albert's transportation manager, voters must have been driven by emotion, rather than fact. 

The Giroux intersection is no different than any of the intersections along St. Albert Trail, Schick said in an email to The Gazette — the lights have a maximum cycle length of 160 seconds.

"The longest wait time for a vehicle to exit the intersection, assuming all vehicles clear the intersection on the first cycle and no other factors occur, such as a triggered emergency pre-emption, would be 92 seconds," Schick said.

"Typically, during peak hours of the day, intersections will be reaching the maximum times for servicing road users in all directions of the intersections, whereas during non-peak periods the intersection may be transitioning faster due to lower volumes."

According to Schick's statistics, the daily traffic averages — the number of times a vehicle goes through the intersection — for certain days of the week through the month of April ranged from a low of 41,405 on weekends to a high of 48,422 on Thursdays at the St. Albert Trail and Giroux Road intersection. 

If we pretend that 41,405 vehicles pass through the intersection every day of the year, and each vehicle was stopped for the maximum 92 seconds, it means that travellers, combined, spend more than 23 million minutes waiting at the St. Albert Trail and Giroux Road intersection each year.

According to The Gazette's calculations, the exact number is 23,167,960.7 minutes a year.

Those millions of minutes are equal to 16,089 days, or slightly longer than 44 calendar years. 


Jack Farrell

About the Author: Jack Farrell

Jack Farrell joined the St. Albert Gazette in May, 2022.
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