The District of Sooke’s rapid population growth has far outpaced road capacity not only to and from Victoria’s West Shore, but also within the District, particularly throughout the town centre. The race is now on to complete a series of small-scale improvements planned by Sooke, and to learn of improvements envisioned by the Province for Highway 14/Sooke Road.

 

 

On April 8th the Province’s Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure plans to outline what it considers near-term, medium-term and long-term investment goals for Highway 14 at a Sooke council meeting. The provincially-maintained, mostly two-lane thoroughfare linking Sooke with Langford at its eastern terminus (known as Sooke Road), and extending westward from Sooke to Port Renfrew via Shirley and Jordan River (known as West Coast Road), is severely under-capacity along the Sooke Road portion.

 

Furthermore, the highway’s windy routing between Sooke and Langford is frequently the scene of serious vehicle crashes and collisions with pedestrians, one of which resulted in a fatality in early March.

 

Although the highway has seen improvements in recent years including an $87 million upgrade that four-laned a roughly 1.5-kilometre section at East Sooke's Gillespie Road exit and bolstered shoulders between Otter Point and Shirley, its design is not suited for a municipality nearing 20,000 residents just within its borders, not including satellite communities like Otter Point, Shirley or East Sooke all reliant on the highway, and themselves growing.

 

The poorly lit, twisty and congested road is made all the more challenging in inclement weather, with no turning lanes for traffic to safely by-pass vehicles, no centre dividers protecting motorists from head-on collisions (outside of a small section of dividers added in 2023), and no opportunities for detours along significant spans of an 18-kilometre stretch between West Shore Parkway in Langford and Otter Point Road in Sooke.

 

Playing a large game of catch-up, the District of Sooke is racing to complete off-highway road projects in Sooke’s town centre to better route traffic within the District, and to create the building blocks for at least one secondary east-west bypass to alleviate in-town gridlock.

 

Currently underway is a roundabout project on Church Road at Throup Road, north of Highway 14’s Church Road intersection. The roundabout will help traffic bypass Highway 14 via Throup Road between Church and Charters roads. Charters Road, meanwhile, is itself the focus of a road project after heavy rains caused damage in 2021. Since then, Charters Road has been reduced to one lane along an approximately 100 metre length between Highway 14 and Throup Road.

 

Throup Road is planned to eventually extend between Church Road and Phillips Road, yielding a northern highway bypass once traffic headed into Sooke crosses the Sooke River Bridge. However, no timeline for construction of a road extension between Charters Road and Phillips Road is currently available.

 

Additionally, the key arterial of Otter Point Road is becoming busier with each passing year with no pedestrian safety considerations north of Wadams Way in the town centre, no crosswalks north of Sooke’s Otter Point Road town hall, despite rapidly growing subdivisions feeding cars and pedestrians onto the north-south arterial. A future bypass between Otter Point Road and Phillips Road via Pascoe Road, to avoid sending Highway 14-bound traffic through Sooke's town centre, is noted in the District's Transportation Master Plan, albeit it appears to be a goal many years into the future.

 

Along Highway 14, already planned improvements will eventually deliver a new traffic light at Charters Road to coincide with the development of BC Housing apartments on Drennan Street and future densification along Charters Road. Further to that, Sooke Elementary School, just east of Church Road and west of Charters Road, may see an eastbound turning lane to accommodate student drop-offs.

 

In a release issued by the District on March 6th, the municipality plans to ask provincial transportation planners at its April 8th council meeting to describe the prospect of a second Sooke River crossing, the development of alternative or emergency routes in and out of Sooke, and intersection improvements at Otter Point, Church, Phillips and Charters roads, and Grant Road West. The District also wants to understand considerations being made to alleviate school drop-off and pick-up challenges with two elementary schools and a high school all within a short span of each other, and all accessible via Highway 14.

 

Despite the upcoming conversations and projects that are already in-stream, the District concedes in its release, that there will be no quick-fix remedies.

 

“Solutions may not be realized tomorrow,” the District states. “However, through [the April 8th] conversation, the hope is that all stakeholders including residents, Council and MOTI will be better informed about each other’s perspectives while improvements are made.” C

 

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