Banff looking at ways to cope with long weekend traffic

The long weekend is just around the corner and that means a lot of traffic for the mountain resort town of Banff.

More than 28,000 vehicles are expected to drive in and out of the town west of Calgaryover the long weekend, which israising concerns about the significant amount of congestion expected in the area.

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Banff Mayor KarenSorenson says they have been looking at ways to deal with the traffic.

"We're worked on optimizing our lights in downtown Banff because it does impact all the way down the road," she said. "We have added scramble crosswalk systems this summer, which are proving quite successful."

The town site went over capacity during the August long weekendwith 30,000 cars entering and leaving the park.

All the visitors caused a major traffic jam on Sulphur Mountain, which lasted for hours.

While tourists say the amount of traffic is discouraging, locals say it shouldn't be.

They say it takes only 20 minutes to walk from one side of the town to the other.