Fresh off last week’s column about Sixth Street being called a “racetrack” comes another Burnaby resident raising concerns about drivers on their neighbourhood’s street.
The lower section of Gilmore Avenue in North Burnaby is seeing a tremendous surge in traffic as the neighbourhood grows.
There have been several ginormous towers built in the past couple of years that have added a lot of new drivers to the area. More towers are planned on the south side of Lougheed Highway next to the SkyTrain in the Gilmore/Brentwood area. Yes, many of those people won’t own vehicles because of the close access to SkyTrain, but the buildings do have normal amount of required parking spaces and some of the tenants will be using those.
Mike A lives in the area and he’s raising alarms about Gilmore between Lougheed Highway and First Avenue on the north side of the highway.
With all of those new developments, the City of Burnaby revamped the road and Mike calls it a “poor street design.”
“They have lanes merging on a down hill southbound and no room to turn onto Halifax without blocking oncoming traffic,” he said. “They have uncompleted lane markings and a traffic light that doesn't align with the road. It's been like this for six months and this is a heavily used street that has horns honking day and night because of the confusion caused.”
Mike says he’s witnessed multiple accidents.
I checked out the road changes and I’m not sure the road changes are all that bad.
It’s really the drivers who are making things worse, especially at that new traffic light for Halifax.
The problem, from what I witnessed, is that drivers are not waiting for the light to change. Instead, they are veering into traffic to turn left onto Gilmore to head south. I saw several drivers taking big chances because they were impatient.
The one issue I did see with this light’s location is that when it goes red, traffic backs up to the highway and to First Avenue, creating some, uh, interesting situations. Traffic also backs up from Lougheed when that light is red, meaning people trying to turn left onto Gilmore from Halifax have nowhere to go.
Frankly, it's not a great location for all of those towers and the traffic that comes with them.
The good news is that when the city made the changes they added a separated bike lane. It’s not a long one, but at least those cyclists are safe for this stretch.
If you do drive in this area, please listen to Mike’s plea: “Please be safe if you do travel south down Gilmore as it's an accident waiting to happen.”
Follow Chris Campbell on Twitter @shinebox44.
