If you're driving down Lonsdale, keep watch that you don't run over someone smoking a cigarette standing in the middle of the road.
If the City of North Vancouver follows through on its intended plan to ban smoking 7.5 metres away from all doors, opening windows and air intakes, as well as in public parks and trails, that's about the only place left where someone will be able to legally light up outside their own home.
The city did make an exception for a handful of pub patios and veteran's hangouts, contrary to the wishes of Vancouver Coastal Health.
Now, we won't jab the city for making life inconvenient for smokers. In an ideal world, smoking would be left to Humphrey Bogart movies.
Second-hand smoke is noxious, and a known health hazard and there's nothing more annoying than trying to enjoy a meal, focus on work or tuck into bed and having someone's tobacco stink wafting up from the street outside.
And the less kids see it happening, the less likely they'll take it up. It isn't an accident that smoking rates have fallen in the decades since smoking largely slunk out of public view.
For some, these new regulations won't go far enough. But whether it's three metres, 7.5 metres or an outright ban in the city, without some meaningful enforcement, this new bylaw won't make a difference. It's been more than six years since the province made it illegal to smoke within three metres of a door or window. A walk down any urban street will give you an idea of how strictly that law is enforced.
Enacting bylaws with no ability to enforce them only aggravates the public that lobbied for them in the first place.
