Editor:
Re: Freeway on-ramp official, Oct. 16.
Langley Township has spoken of widening 16 Avenue for 30 years without doing it.
During that period, more and more traffic was dumped onto 16th in advance of this now mythic upgrade – of late, speed-humping Zero Avenue to dump its traffic onto 16th and the punching through of 192 Street to allow industrial park traffic to access 16th.
Now we learn that Highway 99 will soon be disgorging its traffic and yet more trucks onto 16th.
Township Mayor Jack Froese’s vague reference to the need to address safety on 16 Avenue looks like lip service, given that there is no plan to make the road safer.
Worsening the nightmare traffic on 16th does not make it safer any more than buying a case of wine for a wino is keeping him safe, but it is one way to get him out of your face for awhile.
And so it is with excess traffic. Dumping it on hapless residents is little different than dumping urban garbage on rural communities simply because you can get away with it. Policy-makers don’t live there, so why not?
Yes, I live on 16 Avenue. It is still a country road, one lane in each direction. We have had no garbage pickup or home mail delivery for 20 years because it is too unsafe.
Approximately 20,000 vehicles roar past my driveway each day. About a quarter of those are large trucks and in particular, tandem dump trucks loaded with gravel.
Residents here have put up with a lot and with a minimum of complaining, which, in retrospect, was probably a mistake – no squeak, no grease – because the nightmare just gets worse.
Is it enhancing safety or enhancing traffic flow that authorities wish to address on 16 Avenue? They claim it is the former, when it is so obviously the latter. At some point, the up-is-down reverse speak becomes an insult to one’s intelligence.
Just do the right thing. This exchange, that will worsen a bad situation, is not it.
Steve McIntyre, Langley