Expect Horses on our Roads

Scattered throughout the town of Maple Ridge, you can find these signs:

(image thanks to Susan at the Maple Ridge Daily Photo)

There's a lot that I like about this sign. It is a bold declaration that our streets are different. They are not just used to carry cars to the office or the grocery store. No, in Maple Ridge, our roads are a reflection of our culture and history. There are horses on our roads!

Now, an actual horse-sighting on a residential road in Maple Ridge is a rare event. But these signs started me thinking about the purpose of our roads. To date, most North American cities have been constructed with the assumption that roads are generic mixed-use transportation structures. Cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, scooters, and, yes, horses all share the same road system.

What this means, however, is that there are vast speed and size differences among the vehicles in this shared system. What average citizen seriously feels comfortable cycling on the side of a major road? Or what of those cool Canadian Zenn cars, which can only go 40 km/h? The Zenn car would suffice for 90% of my driving, if I could actually find a road I could drive it on. Driving a Zenn on our busy 60 km/h roads would take more chutzpah than I've got!

This shared-road system really needs to be re-thought.

Not only is it dangerous, it's deadly

I have sad news as a follow-up to my previous post regarding the need to create pedestrian-friendly spaces. On Monday, March 3rd, a 25-year old man from Coquitlam was killed around midnight while walking along the highway just blocks from where the picture in my previous post was taken. Details can be found from the RCMP media centre here.

In response to this news, and as a follow-up to my previous article, I contacted the Golden Ears Bridge Project Office, to see what pedestrian-access improvements were coming as part of my local neighborhood's experience of the Gateway Project. I just got a response from them two hours ago. They write:

Dear Mr. Mantel,

The Golden Crossing Constructors Joint Venture is managing construction for the Golden Ears Bridge project. I have checked this question with the construction team.

There is no provision in the project design concept for improved pedestrian facilities on Lougheed Highway, and there is no pedestrian walkway provided on the Abernethy Connector or the Lougheed Interchange.

I regret that I could not be more helpful in this case.

I'll follow up with the Pitt Meadows city planning. This is exactly the type of car-centric 20th-century urban planning which leads to fractured suburban island communities.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand...

Wahoo! Just dropped the kids off at Brownie’s Camp! What to do with all the freedom? Sounds like time for a dinner-and-a-movie date!

My wife and I were very specific about our neighborhood when we bought our house in Maple Ridge. It had to be within walking distance of both a school and a major transit hub. As it turned out, we were also able to find a place within an easy (1.5 km / 1 mile) walk to a movie theatre and a nice restaurant. There’s just something more satisfying and intimate about walking on a date, instead of taking your car. I don’t know about you, but I find holding hands while driving to be somewhat dangerous; whereas while walking, it can be quite delightful.

Unfortunately, my romantic walk quickly degenerated into a pedestrian-hostile situation.

You see, our neighborhood is cut off from the movie-and-restaurant complex by a highway which slices through most of Maple Ridge. While it's hard to undo that piece of history, an alternative such as a separated bike/pedestrian path would have been nice. Unfortunately, the only pedestrian access possible from the neighborhoods on the north side of the theatre is along the shoulder of the highway.


Adding insult to injury, when you finally make it to the complex, you are greeted with a short uphill section alongside a construction zone before you make it to the safety of the sidewalks:

This brings me to the point of this entry: Always Create Safe Pedestrian Corridors to Transit, Entertainment, and Shopping

You wouldn’t create a movie-and-shopping complex and connect it to your roads with bumpy gravel paths, would you? So why would you create it with pedestrian-hostile access? If you actually want to create livable cities, you must create walkable cities.

I'm out of time right now; but since I want this blog to be about solutions, and not just about problems, I'll try to dig up a way around this mess and write about it in an upcoming entry. In the meantime, if you have any examples of elegant solutions to pedestrian-access problems such as this one, please drop me a line!