My biggest gripe with the riverfront trails is how the railway cuts off pedestrian access from where people live!! Investing in maintenance feels less useful when everyone has to drive to access them, so there’s little motivation to go there vs driving to trails on the outskirts of town.
Oh 100%. Accessing these trails as a cyclist or pedestrian is a whole newsletter in and of itself. Even if you live "close", it's a nightmare to try and access either trailhead.
Whenever I read/think about the boundary issues that make PG an expensive city to maintain (and hence robbed of cool things that would make the city better), I always wonder if it is at all feasible to redraw the city's boundaries. Doubtful, but I don't think PG will ever reach a population where density/infilling will need to happen.
It's an interesting idea and one I don't think the Regional District would be super stoked on as it would shift a lot of these problems to their stretched resources as well. It feels like that solution is comparable to the recent upping the max mortgage length to 30 years where the root problem (housing is too expensive/city is too sprawled) is not addressed in the slightest.
My armchair opinion is the biggest problem this city is faced with is a lack of a progressive candidate pool and a strong progressive voting block. The people who care about these things don't run in elections and the dominate voting block isn't concerned with these things at all. Our city is small enough that it could shift rapidly if the right pool of candidates entered the fray but that's the part I'm skeptical about.
Excellent article. I have wondered many of the same things you mention. I used to ask the city to satisfy my curiosity. Sadly, I was often met with snarky poems or infographics written by their comms team, further reinforcing that PG just isn't the place my partner and I want to be long term.
If you’re interested in doing a deeper dive into the subject, the library has a few recreation studies from various decades that looked into plans for expansion of the city’s river front trail system. They’re an interesting read and further show how much unused potential PG’s river front has.
My biggest gripe with the riverfront trails is how the railway cuts off pedestrian access from where people live!! Investing in maintenance feels less useful when everyone has to drive to access them, so there’s little motivation to go there vs driving to trails on the outskirts of town.
Oh 100%. Accessing these trails as a cyclist or pedestrian is a whole newsletter in and of itself. Even if you live "close", it's a nightmare to try and access either trailhead.
Whenever I read/think about the boundary issues that make PG an expensive city to maintain (and hence robbed of cool things that would make the city better), I always wonder if it is at all feasible to redraw the city's boundaries. Doubtful, but I don't think PG will ever reach a population where density/infilling will need to happen.
It's an interesting idea and one I don't think the Regional District would be super stoked on as it would shift a lot of these problems to their stretched resources as well. It feels like that solution is comparable to the recent upping the max mortgage length to 30 years where the root problem (housing is too expensive/city is too sprawled) is not addressed in the slightest.
My armchair opinion is the biggest problem this city is faced with is a lack of a progressive candidate pool and a strong progressive voting block. The people who care about these things don't run in elections and the dominate voting block isn't concerned with these things at all. Our city is small enough that it could shift rapidly if the right pool of candidates entered the fray but that's the part I'm skeptical about.
Excellent article. I have wondered many of the same things you mention. I used to ask the city to satisfy my curiosity. Sadly, I was often met with snarky poems or infographics written by their comms team, further reinforcing that PG just isn't the place my partner and I want to be long term.
If you’re interested in doing a deeper dive into the subject, the library has a few recreation studies from various decades that looked into plans for expansion of the city’s river front trail system. They’re an interesting read and further show how much unused potential PG’s river front has.