The City of Burnaby has some issues with New Westminster’s draft transportation plan and is calling on the neighbouring municipality to review the proposed traffic strategy.
At its Sept. 15 meeting, council voted in favour of authorizing city staff to “engage in a detailed review of the various cycling, truck route and road classification issues arising from New Westminster’s draft master transportation plan,” highlighting concerns with cross-border cycling connections and the removal of regional truck traffic.
Coun. Nick Volkow, a former truck driver, took issue with the idea of creating a three-kilometre tunnel near Third Avenue to divert truck traffic under most of New Westminster.
“I think most people in Metro Vancouver are aware of New Westminster’s desire to have no truck traffic on their streets, which is an admirable goal,” he said. “I dare say that truck traffic is probably not compatible with most cities’ aspirations in the Lower Mainland, but the reality is in a major metropolitan area, truck traffic is part of the scenery.
“As much as I would like to accommodate New Westminster in shutting down all truck traffic going through there, I don’t think that can happen.”
Coun. Paul McDonell expressed similar concerns, namely with the proposed closure of several streets in New West’s truck network, including Front Street.
“Traffic is an issue in every municipality,” he said. “I think in Burnaby, we’ve handled this as well as we could. We have five different routes through our city for traffic flow.
“If you go down Marine Way, Kingsway, Canada Way, Lougheed or Hastings, a lot of those are traffic commutes in the morning and afternoon. There are people just commuting through our city.”
He likened closing off one of those routes to plugging a leak, only to have another spring up elsewhere.
“The trucks are going to traffic, and every time you shut down one route, it just means they’re going to blow up another one.”
Mayor Derek Corrigan said for New West to close parts of its truck traffic network, the big rigs would detour through Burnaby, putting added stress to the city’s roads.
“Even within the report, it’s indicated traffic trucks particularly may have to go through Burnaby from New Westminster to access other places in New Westminster, which takes it to the point of absurd,” he said.
“While I often side with New Westminster on issues like the Pattullo Bridge…there’s a point where you’ve got to have a good neighbour policy to ensure we’re all able to deal with the implications of decisions you’re making in your own municipality.”
In response, New West Coun. Jonathan Cote, who co-chairs the city’s master transportation plan committee, noted the next phase of consultation regarding the plan is to start a dialogue with neighbouring communities. He also said Burnaby council’s stance may be “a bit of an overreaction” and assured changes to truck traffic routes in New West would have a minimal impact on neighbouring city streets.
“Our plan still recognizes that New Westminster plays a role for a goods movement strategy, but we do have some routes that are going through neighbourhoods that are just not appropriate for major truck routes – and some that don’t even have a major demand,” he said, calling the tunnel a creative solution to the city’s truck traffic problem.
“I think there are opportunities to try and make the routes we do have more efficient to move traffic, but there has to be a recognition that there’s not a lot of room in a 150-year old built out city to dramatically expand the road capacity without having a pretty negative impact on our neighbourhoods.”
- With files from Theresa McManus
