To the editor,
Re: City coping with higher costs, other construction challenges, July 6.
While inflation, labour shortages and supply chain disruptions may all be named as causes for the above, perhaps the greatest financial problems are being caused by the determination of the city staff and council to provide unwanted and unneeded amenities that eat up the dollars while showing no noticeable return on investment.
Our city is littered with bike lanes of indeterminate but generally short length, shoehorned into impractical spaces, that start and end abruptly, and are rarely, if ever used. Not content with this, we have to stand by and watch while new bike lanes are constructed in equally useless fashion using yards of expensive concrete and hours of equally costly labour – all this at the expense of free-flowing traffic.
I suppose that the idea of a non-polluting bicycling public is praiseworthy, however the residents of Nanaimo have been fairly obvious in their rejection of this idea.
Admittedly there are cycling enthusiasts in our city and a very slowly growing number of people investing in e-bikes, but nowhere near enough of either to justify the expenditure the city is making, supposedly on their behalf.
How much money could have been saved if the Metral Drive improvements had been designed with the residents’ needs in mind rather than the pipe dreams of impractical tree huggers? As for the ludicrous changes to Enterprise Way, words fail me.
Garry Bradford, Nanaimo
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