Inside Langford

The most contentious things Tuesday night was the request from a local trucking company to use Goldstream Ave along Langford Lake to approach a concrete plant, as opposed to traveling down the highway to Spencer Road. In the end the request was turned down. However, members of the public pressed the committee on rumours they indicated were making the rounds in their neighbourhood that traffic was going to be diverted off, the highway, onto Goldstream Ave., and then onto the Spencer Road Interchange. Les Bjola indicated that a traffic study had concluded that there would be a limited increase in traffic due to this move, an assertion that met with a sceptical reaction from audience members.

The crux of the issue is how much traffic will be traveling east along the highway (from Goldstream Meadows, Sooke Lake Road, Goldstream Provincial Park, and the Malahat and everything north of it), and then wanting to travel up to Bear Mountain. This is the traffic that the new plan proposes to divert onto Goldstream Ave. down the length of Langford Lake, and across the highway via the still under-construction interchange.

An audience member named Cynthia indicated that she’s lived for many years in the neighbourhood. “Traffic’s been an issue as long as I’ve been there.” She indicated that several years earlier that she had led a petition to Council seeking traffic calming, which didn’t happen, and that Goldstream Ave has “shoulders totally inadequate for cyclists and pedestrians.” She became emotional when discussing how her sister had been involved in a traffic accident on her bicycle in Vancouver and had been “thrown under a dump-truck,” in Vancouver. She saw an increase in traffic and, once Spencer Road was closed off with phase one of the interchange complete, an increase in truck traffic as leading to these kinds of risks. She noted that there were already “all kinds of dump trucks, and semis, and other kinds of trucks,” and that they were not obeying the truck policy.

A Langford Bylaw Enforcement officer was in attendance and was asked to comment, and he indicated that the request for permission to use this section of Goldstream Ave showed that the education campaign to inform truckers that they shouldn’t be using this stretch was working. Audience members appeared to disagree that there had been any significant reduction in truck traffic, however.

Another citizen in attendance, Chris, agreed with the previous resident’s comments that the “lake is very active as everyone knows, lots of kids and cyclists,” but further noted that there are “lots of cars, hidden driveways” and that now “people avoiding the Spencer Road Overpass construction are creating a problem.”

He noted that there were many people from his neighbourhood present, most of which he had never met before, and that they all had the understanding that all access to the highway on both sides of the road would be cut off once construction of the interchange was complete. “We all understood it would be closed down as there’d be no need for it anymore.” Various members of the committee indicated to him that no such promise had ever been made. Les Bjola suggested they had confused the closing of the “right-out” off Goldstream onto the highway with the closing of the entire road, a suggestion that grumbling audience members disputed. If and when the second phase of the Spencer Road Interchange gets built, at that point it could be looked at, City Hall staff and committee members agreed.

Chicanes, as a traffic calming measure, are being considered, and an engineering study on the route is due in approximately six months. A Langford engineering staff member noted that the difficulty of predicting the timing of it is due to having to do it in conjunction with the provincial highways ministry.

With only two speakers from the audience having had an opportunity to speak, meeting chair John Goudy heard a motion from the floor to turn down the requested variance, which triggered a vote, ending the discussion and further community input that night.

– Steven Hurdle -