A rendering Summit Drive pedestrian overpass. (Image Credit: TRU)

By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: The perfect way to waste money – Summit pedestrian overpass

Apr 13, 2023 | 4:55 AM

IF THE BRAIN TRUST at City Hall sat down to think of the perfect way to waste several million dollars, it couldn’t come up with anything better than the Summit Drive pedestrian and bicycle overpass.

And City council has bought into it. During this week’s committee of the whole meeting, the council was presented with a list of ideas for what to do with roughly $15.7 million dollars, the Kamloops share of the Growing Communities Fund created from the massive provincial surplus.

So City staff generated a handsome list of spending options.
Tucked into the list was the overpass, with a price tag of $5 million. That’s half the cost — Thompson Rivers University is to come up with the other half.

The overpass will span Summit Drive from College Heights to the campus. It began as a proposal to keep students safe on their way to class. Daily, they take their lives in their hands running across the four-lane Summit connector, dodging traffic in their pursuit of higher education.

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But it’s entirely unnecessary. Just a very short walk away is a perfectly good crosswalk at the intersection of Summit and McGill, which provides access to the main entrance of the university.

The entirety of the foot traffic could be diverted there with the installation of a fence in the middle of Summit for the stretch of road that’s problematic. It was estimated at one point to cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars; with inflation, let’s say half a million for a really nice one.

For reasons unknown, that option has never been taken seriously. In order to get around the obvious logic of it, staff came up with the notion of making it part of the city’s expansion of active transportation.

Bikes were added to pedestrians and now it’s defined as a “key linkage in the City’s Active Transportation Plan.”

Balderdash. It’s shameful, and everyone connected to it should be embarrassed.

I’m Mel Rothenburger, the Armchair Mayor.

Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.