Safe streets in Kitchissippi

It's time to start working on safer streets in Kitchissippi.

One of the key issues I heard about during the campaign was the prevalence of traffic safety issues in the ward. The ward email box is filled with requests to help with dangerous intersections, very fast/high-volume cut-through traffic on residential streets and near schools, and other issues of pedestrian and cycling safety.

My election promise was that we would deal with those on a community-wide level, seeking as much as possible to understand what our highest priorities are, and how addressing those may have impacts that ripple to other areas. I wrote recently about my support to deal at the provincial level with reduced speed limits, but the issue is much broader and requires a range of approaches.

We've recently retained Anne Duggan to help us, as a first step, to identify the problem areas, and solicit your ideas and solutions for fixing those. She's working now to enlist the help of stakeholders in the community to spread the word. She'll capture the suggestions you've made by email over the past two months, and all the suggestions to come. That inventory will be shared back with the community to make sure we've captured as much as we can. Volunteers will help us prioritize the problem areas, and further refine the potential ways we can solve those. We've already heard from many of you who want to help. I'm looking forward to sharing everything we hear.

We won't be able to immediately solve all the problems, of course. We'll need to find money in the budget and from development benefits to address the more costly solutions, and street re-designs won't happen quickly. But, at least some will be able to be addressed through low-cost approaches and better enforcement. We need to ensure great public transit and encourage more people to use alternatives to driving such as walking and cycling. Knowing what the problems are and how we might be able to address them is the first step to fast-tracking as many solutions as we can.

Everyone is encouraged to write to Anne safestreets@kitchissippiward.ca to help begin this work. Many thanks to everyone who has already engaged with us. If you do want to submit a comment in reply to this post below, please be sure to still send us an email - we want to make sure everything is captured.