While Mayor Jeff Genung did meet with Alberta Transportation officials at the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association convention, he doesn't want to town to sit on its laurels when there's possible interim solutions to relieving some of the traffic congestion through the downtown core.

Genung and the town's top administrative brass met with Darren Daividson, south regional director of Alberta Transportation, last week and while he said it was a good session he believes there are things that the town can do right now to relieve some of the congestion.

"We talked about interim resolutions, where we're at with the intersection and what can we do on 1A. It was a good meeting, it was basically information sharing but, yes, they heard our message. We're going to start looking at things to do in the interim to help with our traffic instead of just waiting for the twinning to happen."

Centre Ave., the downtown core, 5th Ave.... all of it is up for discussion. Establishing one ways and no parking zones at critical locations during peak traffic hour; these are the types of things that could be considered for some quick wins and get traffic moving now, he says.

"I want to take a look at everything and how we're doing it. It's not to say everybody before us has done it wrong, but maybe we could look at things in a different way."

He says council also wants to accelerate the timeline for developing an railway underpass on Centre Ave. Right now it's penciled in for 2023.

To help move up the process they've added more money to the budget to complete the planning this year. While an underpass is still years away, Genung says they want to look at the possibility of establishing four lanes at-grade for now The biggest question mark is the railway track crossing and whether CP would consider the proposal.

"The bottleneck will be at the tracks so that will be the beginning of conversations with CP on whether they will allow us to do a four-lane at-grade crossing in the meantime before we do an underpass."

"If we can get it to four, you will still be stopped when a train comes through town, but at least all the rest of the time there's twice as many lanes."