No one enjoys sitting in traffic - but anyone who travels the Bedford Highway in Halifax probably does it often.

The highway is one of the busiest in the city - and has been the source of complaints for years.

Every day, 50,000 vehicles travel on the Bedford Highway.

“One word, busy,” Motorist Liam Robertson said when asked to describe the road. “Too busy, really, it's the only way I can describe it.”

The Esquire Restaurant has been a mainstay been here since 1953, bearing witness to the ever-increasing traffic.

“If we could maybe slow down, control the speed, it's very busy,” said restaurant supervisor Jason Alward. “I find there's a lot of accidents on this highway because people don't slow down.”

And the owner of this new business on the Bedford Highway says it's not exactly pedestrian friendly either.

“We don't have the sidewalks, and because of that we don't have a crosswalk in between the buses,” said business owner Jules Cullen-Duncan. “It’s the only thing we find to be a big safety issue in our area.”

These are the reasons city staff are  studying this road with the bad rap - a 13-kilometre long corridor that connects the city to the community of Bedford and beyond.

Part of that study involves asking the public what they'd like to see.

Most people who drive this busy route every day know that it doesn't take much to tie up the Bedford Highway. Too much snow, too much rain, or a sudden collision, and all of the sudden, there's nowhere else to go.

“One of the big issues is that we can't really widen very easily, so we're stuck with what we've got,” said HRM transportation planning engineer Mike Connors.

The problem? The Bedford Highway is sandwiched by development on one side and rail lines and the Bedford Basin on the other.

“Part of the study we're working on now is to understand what are the widening requirements to do something different, if there are, and if we don't widen, how do we reconfigure the corridor to better to better serve all users,” Connors said.

Halifax Regional Coun. Tim Outhit wants it fixed once and for all. He's long heard the talk about adding another ferry, and putting in a commuter train, to relieve the congestion.

Both options are still in the works.

“But it is going to take some money, it’s going to take some will, it's going to take some buy in from developers, and it's going to take more than one solution,” Outhit said.

Any kind of fix will take time.

The kind of time that makes commuters run short on patience.

There was a final public consultation at this point in the process Tuesday night. Now, consultants are going to take the information they have so far and try to come up with a plan for dealing with the congestion here once and for all.

The results of this study are due to be presented back to the public in the new year.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Heidi Petracek.