Essex County moves forward with transportation study

A study on active transportation may not end up sitting on a shelf collecting dust at the Essex County civic centre after all.

Discussions had stopped because towns in the countycould not agree on a funding formula for building new trails and bike paths.

Now, the county's chief administrative officer, Brian Gregg, says everyone is willing to talk again to break the logjam.

"We recognize that there's probably no one silver bullet with an answer out there so we're looking for something that everybody can live with," Gregg said. "If we can get everybody moving forward, we can get it back to county council and have it approved at that level and get moving on the installation."

Gregg expects a report to be in county council's hands in early summer.

"We're getting the county active transportation steering committee together with our local CAOs to have some debate about to how exactly we're going to define what some of the local roads are; whether they're considered to be an urban road or a local road," Gregg said. "From that, we'll look to develop a funding strategy."