Cowrie Street will become unsafe for transit buses if the District of Sechelt goes ahead with plans to make the downtown artery a one-way street with angle parking, the head of the regional transit system said last week.
"Essentially our concerns are with the safety of operating in an area where people are backing up from parking spaces into an active travel lane," Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) transportation and facilities manager Brian Sagman told the SCRD's planning and development committee April 18. "It's not a good mix where transit can operate efficiently or safely. For a variety of reasons, BC Transit and ourselves are very concerned about this."
In his report to the committee, Sagman also identifies safety concerns with moving bus stop and layover locations to the north side of Cowrie at Trail Avenue, "because a bus at that location would block the sight line of a vehicle exiting the adjacent driveway. This issue applies throughout the Cowrie Street corridor on the north side where there are numerous driveway entrances," he wrote.
Sagman's report lists 11 separate concerns regarding safety, sustainability, schedule impacts and infrastructure, including the absence of a traffic impact study.
If the plan does go ahead, he said, staff would have to evaluate Teredo Street (Highway 101) as an alternate route.
Attending the meeting as the alternate director for District of Sechelt, Coun. Doug Hockley, who initiated the push for a one-way Cowrie, disputed Sagman's analysis of the angle parking impact.
The lane width for westbound traffic, Hockley said, "allows for vehicles to back up safely, in the opinion of the District of Sechelt, without hitting the side of a bus -and especially in the upper part of Cowrie Street adjacent to the Trail Bay Mall."
Hockley went further, saying: "If you cannot back out of a parking place on Cowrie in that section and [not] hit a bus, then you shouldn't be driving. There's more than enough room to back out and blend in with traffic that's heading westbound."
Hockley was the sole dissenter when the committee passed a motion urging the District to delay the change until September. The motion followed identical requests by the Sunshine Coast Transit System and BC Transit.
In her request for deferral, BC Transit senior planner Rebecca Newlove said the extra time is needed "to complete transit route redesign, amend schedules and notify the public," as the conversion to one-way westbound traffic "would result in a traffic direction that is opposite to the current, well established transit service."
Newlove also said Cowrie Street could be unsuitable as the main Sechelt transit route and transfer exchange "without other infrastructure investments" at several key intersections. The result, she said, could be "a less suitable location for transit provision and transfers" in Sechelt.
