I had barely hit click on publishing this story about ratrunners on Dundas Street just east of Boundary Road in Burnaby when I got an email about the street next door.
Burnaby resident Hamish Robertson contacted me after reading about Dundas residents trying and failing twice to get enough names on a petition to have speeds humps built to stop ratrunners who race down their street to avoid Hastings Street traffic.
Robertson said his street, the 3900 block of Triumph, also needs speed humps to stop the ratrunners. Dundas and Triumph are bordered by Pandora and Oxford, which both have speed humps, meaning all those ratrunners funnel onto their streets.
“We just had a similar vote on the 3900 block of triumph,” Roberston wrote. “It too got turned down, primarily because people do not believe that paying for road safety should fall to the taxpayers of that block. Recall that we have an elementary school and two churches at one end of the block and another elementary school at the end of the 4000 block, so there’s a high flow of traffic through, often at high speed. We pay elected politicians to make good policy for its citizens. Municipal road safety being left up to those willing to pay is poor policy and needs to be rethought.”
I’ve thought about this often during the past few weeks after a petition on University Crescent also failed to pass – leaving residents with a traffic problem.
Asking people to pay more money to fix a traffic problem doesn’t seem like a good idea. It’s hard to get enough people to fork over to do the right thing. It’s also tough if there are several absentee landlords included in the equation. As we’ve seen from overgrown lawns and falling-down fences, these landlords are cheap so these petitions appear doomed to fail.
Follow Chris Campbell on Twitter @shinebox44.
