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!