All Quotes & Clips

Simply to state I’m supportive of the staff recommendations that was seconded yes by Councilor Bligh, and in the interest of time it's simply to say I think it's really important that we give some further direction to look at advancing active transportation along Kent Avenue. This has come up for a number of years now. I know I've met with staff on this. It's been identified as a key corridor not for just the City of Vancouver for active transportation, but also within Transport 2050 as part of our transportation network alongside a public transit and so I'm hoping that staff can report back on funding opportunities. Would that be through additional grant programs, through collaboration with translink and metro vancouver, because this route's identified by both of them as a priority or through reallocations, potentially within the four-year capital plan, and there's been many calls for this and we know it's going. We're adding density in that area, as well in the South end of the city, both in the West and East sides, as well. So, and it's a key part of our regional active transportation network as well. So with that, that's the proposal.

Okay, thank you. I do want to circle back to the subject of the work that was done around schools, in particular, the slower speeds around schools and arterials, also on collector streets. Thank you for that work.

I'm glad to see some improvement, but I'm curious, we have had a number of emails around Stratford Hall School on Commercial Drive and I committed to the parents who contacted us to ask, you know, is there some possibility, they said they haven't really felt there's been, they said they looked at the data that there wasn't really a reduction in speed even though we posted 40 in front of the school and there's the school, there's a daycare and there's Clark Park.

Are we, is there an opportunity to reduce that speed further? I think it unfortunately is still an arterial and our policy is that we don't go down to 30 on arterials, but what options are there for dealing with that route?

I did want to touch on tangentially related subject of bus service along Powell from the Powell Overpass over to Nanaimo and the intersect with active transportation.

I know staff are actively working to address the gap in that network, but what I see right now is if we're wanting to implement a dedicated lane along that route and we want active transportation, right now, I think the proposal staff are proposing deals with Wall Street, but doesn't actually deal with Powell. How will that work together? Because it's a very narrow corridor, it's heavily used by industry and I don't know that we've found the sweet spot around this and I'm really curious if we're going to maybe re-envision that work around the active transportation in the context of wanting to have dedicated public transit and dedicated lanes along that corridor.