Traffic conflicts outside Gibsons Elementary School are "a recipe for disaster," the coordinator for Sunshine Coast Speed Watch said Monday, Nov. 4.
"All the ingredients for a disaster are there," Jon Hird told the Sunshine Coast Regional District's transportation advisory committee.
Reporting to the committee as a concerned citizen, Hird said the five years he's spent on Speed Watch duty outside the school have given him a harrowing inside view of the problem.
"There are so many drivers and so many pedestrians engaged in an extraordinary level of risk taking, day in and day out. It's something that actually needs to be seen to be believed," Hird told the committee.
While some of the conflicts will be mitigated by the construction of the new school, Hird said, "I am equally certain that many will not, and some will even be exacerbated."
Many of the conflicts involve vehicles entering and exiting the school driveway via School Road, estimated by Hird at almost 100 vehicle movements in the morning and 100 in the afternoon.
"Horror stories" include:
Excessive speed on School Road in both directions, which Hird described as "near-universal behaviour."
Vehicles failing to stop for students at unmarked crosswalks, and vehicles overtaking and passing those vehicles that have stopped for pedestrians.
Vehicles failing to stop before driving across the sidewalk at school driveways.
Pedestrians walking behind vehicles or in the roadway when the sidewalk is obstructed by vehicles.
Vehicles backing up without due care in the parking lot and in the driveway.
Vehicles failing to stop on a red light when turning right from Gibsons Way, while the driver is looking left.
School District No. 46 vice-chair Betty Baxter, who attended the meeting, said trustees were aware of the problems and had written to the Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure repeatedly asking for a solution.
"We're aware it's a huge hazard," Baxter said. "It's probably the traffic issue that we hear about from parents most regularly, and I think Jon has done a great service bringing this forward."
Once completed, the new school's entranceway will help to some degree, Baxter said. "But we would love to have a safe place where students can walk to school, where they can bike to school, and it cannot happen at that intersection, so we need a response from the Minister of Transportation."
The whole community needs to be concerned about the issue, Baxter added.
"The completion of the school will not solve all the problems because we have a larger parking area and a better space to get buses off the road. It will not stop the high-traffic volumes that are turning onto School Road, off School Road into that parking area," she said.
"We've got another year of construction to at least artificially slow folks down, I hope, and then maybe we can figure out something as a community in terms of pubic awareness."
Gibsons Coun. Gerry Tretick said the problem extends beyond the school area and pointed to the intersection of Shaw Road and Gibsons Way as another major traffic hazard, for both vehicles and pedestrians, which includes many seniors.
"Sometimes it's a parking lot, a moving parking lot," Tretick said. "I think it's a place where an accident is waiting to happen."
With local traffic being impeded by highway traffic, "it's just not working," he said. "I really think we do have to take this head-on and say, 'What are we going to do? What is the plan?'"
Don Legault, area manager for the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (MOTI), said a multi-jurisdictional meeting had been held and MOTI had come up with an option to try to realign the intersection of Gibsons Way and School Road.
The Town of Gibsons is also looking to shorten the crossing on School Road with "a bit of a boulevard," he said. "So there are things that are going on, but they will not address traffic coming from Lower Gibsons."
Regarding Shaw Road, Legault said MOTI is looking to get a countdown timer for the intersection, so pedestrians would know how much time they have to cross.
Traffic lights on that section of Gibsons Way had been malfunctioning because detector loops were cut during the recent roadwork contracted by the Town, but that problem would soon be fixed, he said.
Tretick called all those measures Band-Aid solutions.
"The real solution," he said, "is getting the highway traffic on a highway and getting it out of the middle of the Town's main retail area, where it's local traffic mainly."
SCRD board chair Garry Nohr suggested a meeting with the MOTI minister or deputy minister, and predicted little action if "you don't pound on the door and express the safety concerns of the citizens."
Baxter said she would take the idea forward to the school board, and Tretick raised the issue during his report to council the following night.
During the committee's round table, Const. Todd Bozack of the RCMP's Sunshine Coast Traffic Services picked up the theme again, describing the stretch of Gibsons Way immediately west of Sunnycrest Mall as another "recipe for disaster," as vehicles try to enter and exit retail businesses.
"You've got cars going every which way," Bozack told the committee.
