I thought I would use this week's outing to describe an episode of local government working rather well.
Now that regular readers have picked their jaws up. . . . I recently spent an hour or so strolling up and down East 29th Street, a few blocks north of the highway and a major connector between the Lonsdale and Lynn Valley centres. Wow! People really lay down the rubber there. It's an invitingly straight stretch of road that leads drivers coming down or going up the hill to really floor it.
The folks that live on that street are upset. A lady named Gwen Elliott came to city council last September to describe their high-speed traffic woes. As a fan of political theatre, I was impressed by her shrewdly bringing along a few of the neighbourhood kids to illustrate what's at stake. These kids, I must say, were extraordinarily patient and well behaved. I think I fidgeted more than they did through a particularly long-winded council meeting.
Eventually, Elliott got her chance to describe her worries and tell council that one of these charming little tykes was going to wind up as a hood ornament if the city didn't do something. She didn't pound the lectern or produce any great rhetorical flourishes. But she did explain what is clearly a real daily problem.
Guess what? The city did something. Council sent its transportation engineers to have a look at what might be done, who then came to council with options. Council suggested they go run the options past Elliott & Company first.
What an idea!
The neighbours came back to council and said that while it wasn't everything they wanted, it was certainly a good start. It looks like that length of street will get some combination of bulges and marked crosswalks.
It's worth noting that in the interim, just before Christmas, a car had in fact struck a pedestrian there. The RCMP concluded that the collision was due to human error, and it may well have been. But as Elliott pointed out, a child running out into the street is also human error. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be enforcing the speed limit on a residential street.
What could have become a really emotional game of political football, what with the children in peril and all, actually turned into a pretty rational council debate, a discussion even, about what to build and how to pay for it. Throughout the discussion, councillors and residents praised the work of the transportation engineers for their work with the neighbourhood and their menu of options for the city.
Of course we haven't governed happily ever just yet. As I write this, council had not yet decided the best way to pay for all this work, which will come in at somewhere around $130,000. That's a new quarterto half-percentage-point on the 2012 tax hike, which is so far expected to be between two and 3.5 per cent. Or some other capital project could be bumped off the list of 2012 work. Such are the travails of local government, where the - forgive me - rubber meets the road.
There's one other wrinkle in this ode to pavement politics. The north side of East 29th Street is actually part of the District of North Vancouver. The border runs right down the centreline. So you would think this work is a no-brainer for cost-sharing, right? Nope. City staff were politely turned away by their district counterparts, who also don't have a ton of cash waiting for new projects to spend it on.
However, Elliott and her peers did say they were willing to plead their case in front of district council and try to get a bit of funding. The city has gallantly agreed to pay for the work anyway, but it sure looks bad for everyone when they're building stuff in the district.
When those residents and their kids show up, it will take a hard-hearted councillor to argue that they are responsible only for the safety of district children. We'll see how that turns out.
. . .
I'm going to put two little public service announcements at the end of this column.
Wednesday, Feb. 15, will be your second chance (the other was yesterday) to get a look at what Port Metro Vancouver has been doing with the million dollars the city gave it to help get its act together with its Low Level Road design. The online forum the port has run hasn't done much to satisfy the neighbourhood, and I for one think its time to see some scale drawings. John Braithwaite community centre, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
The second announcement is the following day, Thursday, Feb. 16, is the kickoff event for Phase Two of the CityShaping process, which will eventually produce a new official community plan. So if you've ever had reason to kvetch about the OCP, come down to the Pinnacle at 7 p.m.
