A Capital Regional District committee has pushed back meetings to accommodate its chair, who says a notorious stretch of highway traffic is preventing him from making it on time.

Mike Hicks, an elected official for the Juan de Fuca Electoral Area, lives on the West Shore and says the infamous Colwood Crawl has forced him to ask a CRD Parks committee to delay its meetings from 9:30 to 10 a.m.

He said he can’t make it for the 9:30 a.m. meetings because he has family commitments in Sooke until 8:30 a.m. every morning.

“I rescheduled it because I’ve been on the verge of being late every meeting already, and with more construction on the McKenzie overpass I thought why not move it to 10 a.m. so we can make sure we get to work?” said Hicks.

His colleagues were happy to oblige, recognizing the logjam on the notorious stretch of Highway One as a serious problem that will only get worse once construction of the long-awaited overpass gets into full swing.

“The Colwood Crawl is a very real problem and one that needs to be fixed, so maybe starting that meeting a little later allows us to alleviate the crawl a bit with one less vehicle,” said View Royal Mayor David Screen.

But Hicks said his request didn’t sit well with some commuters.

“I’ve taken some heat, yeah, a few people calling me elitist,” Hicks said.

The constant traffic jams have prompted increasingly louder calls for a solutions.

Langford recently launched a lavish commuter bus service dubbed the Langtoria Greenline, meant to make the rush hour more bearable for passengers.

Area mayors have also pitched the idea of using the currently out-of-service E&N rail line to create a commuter train from Langford to Victoria, bypassing traffic.

“Finally the government is starting to see what’s happening in business,” said Langford Mayor Stew Young. “Businesses need to survive, and when you are sitting in traffic and people are trying to get to work, when you spend an hour to two hours in traffic trying to get to work…you’re actually taking people’s quality of life out.”

Construction on the interchange began in late September.