Dear Editor:
I have lived in North Vancouver all my life — 45 years. I live on the east side of Seymour River.
I don’t know when North Vancouver politicians decided it was a good idea to increase urban density. I am stuck most days trying to get home because of all the cars leaving North Vancouver.
I work in West Vancouver and I carpool every day. I am the end of the line for my group, east of the Seymour River. Coming down The Cut, it is busy. And when I do get close to home, I deal with a huge project injecting hundreds of people into my neighbourhood. This is going to be a nightmare when it is done.
If I want to visit my friend in the Lower Lonsdale area any time during the day, worse around 4 p.m. on any given weekday, I am faced with no less than 10 stop lights.
The strip of road I travel is the Main Street corridor, which I have renamed “The Gauntlet” of traffic lights that seem to be smart like a rock.
I thought we had a “no idling” bylaw in effect, except for the exemption for traffic out of our control. This seems a bit off.
The city made a bylaw then made urban density happen so fast and then made an exemption for traffic. This seems counter productive. People shoving and pushing their cars through the gauntlet is more frustrating than trying to get a coffee at any Tim Hortons on a Monday morning.
I don’t get how there are so many more people, and single occupancy cars at that. And where are the increased tax dollars from this type of density going? I can say for sure it is not going into road improvements or infrastructure improvements. It seems that North Vancouver has become a tax grab haven at the expense of the average citizen.
Now, I suppose that urban density is getting worse. How many units are sitting empty because of foreign investment? I hear numbers all the time, could be as high as 25 per cent in the Vancouver core.
Why does TransLink want to take an extra 0.5 per cent out of our pockets? Here is an idea: foreign investment non-occupancy tax. Would this generate enough income from the people who are driving up the cost of living here? I wonder.
Or at least the government could force investors to rent these units out at a reasonable rate and try to help with homelessness. These are not new ideas, but somebody has to say and put it out there.
Brian Wagner
North Vancouver
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