Editor:
Re: Stop those drivers, NOW Letters, Nov. 12
Residents of Capitol Hill have been petitioning the city for traffic calming for decades now.
With recent consultation for a new transportation plan, we held out hope for safer streets.
That’s why we were shocked to see the proposed local collector road network for Capitol Hill in the proposed new plan.
In Burnaby's traffic management plan, a local collector road is defined as:
Local Collector: Function, to provide access to and from a residential area. Traffic Service: Carries traffic between Local Residential streets and MajorRoads. Buses sometimes permitted. Large trucks not permitted.
For Capitol Hill, this should be a local collector road network that carries traffic from residential streets south to Hastings.
In presentations for the proposed transportation plan, the proposed collector roads in Capitol Hill run east-west, making it even easier for ratrunners to race through our community as well as through the Heights community - instead of taking Hastings.
The result is upwards of 2,000 vehicles racing past our houses every weekday, concentrated during commuter rush hours. Most of those vehicles originate from east of Burnaby, racing through our neighbourhood to access the Skeena Underpass in Vancouver Heights during the a.m. rush hours. That pattern is reversed during the p.m. rush hours.
According to city engineering staff, it’s OK to have up to 5,000 vehicles on these designated collector roads, which are essentially our residential streets.
A new contractor parking lot that the city approved quadrupled parking to 500 stalls at the Parkland refinery has only added to this chaos.
How can you do this to us?
The root of the problem is through-traffic (ratrunners). And it’s not just our Burnaby neighbourhood that suffers.
With a new transportation plan, the city can implement city-wide traffic calming measures to finally put Burnaby residents ahead of ratrunners. Goal 6 Connected Community even identifies “Reduce through-traffic impacts.”
Vancouver did it in east Vancouver between Victoria and Nanaimo from Hastings to East 1st. It can be done here.
You just need the will to do it.
Peter Cech, Burnaby
