ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Rob Fleming - Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure - Salt Spring Transportation issues

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Minister Ron Flemings quickly goes over some of the recent transportation announcements dealing with Salt Spring, especially the Ganges Hill

Welcome to the Cheer.fm podcast, Ask Salt Spring Answered. After many Ask Salt Spring events, we sit down in our studio with Gail Baker's guests and review some of the key points discussed. Hi, and welcome to episode 12 of Ask Salt Spring Answered. Damien Inwood sits down with Rob Fleming, the Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure, to go over some of the Salt Spring Island specific transportation issues. Note it's a little bit noisy because there's a lot of people at this particular event. Here with cheer.fm with the Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure, Rob Fleming. Rob, we've just listened to Ask Salt Spring,

and you made a number of announcements or comments on things upcoming. Ganges Hill, tell me a little bit about the timeline and the cost of that. You said tens of millions, but you weren't very specific. We've got to get it out to contract, but it's going to be expensive because in order to get it out to contract but it's it's going to be expensive um because uh in order to make it climate resilient we're going to have to uh you know really really have it protected and have good water management uh principles built behind it uh not you know culverts and ditches so uh we'll have more to say about that the design will be complete by the end of this month we

expect the project to uh begin in the fall and be completed by next year. So it's 1.5 kilometers and it includes a 1.2 meter shoulder? Yes, that's right. Is that for bikes specifically or for everybody? Well, it's for everybody, but it's obviously going to be a safe, decent width shoulder that will be clearly line-plated and marked for cyclists to use and we want to see more cyclists on this island and everywhere really in every community we see as part of our

drive to shift to folks out of you know vehicle kilometers traveled every year to you know be truly multi-modal you use the bike sometimes sometimes you want to use the car but to feel safe and that's why we changed the law to make motorists responsible for what are called vulnerable road users. We passed that bill, Bill 23, a month ago, and we'll have more to say about when those regulations take effect. Now, you were hit with questions about speed limits. Is that feasible to reduce the speed limit to 30 kilometers in the village? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I didn't want to commit anything today because we want to look

at which stretches of roadway are problematic and what it looks like, say, around or within the town sites versus other parts of the highway. But certainly I struggled to travel at a speed greater than 60 or 65 kilometers when it was posted at 80 in using the roads today. So we'll have a look at that and see what we can do. Right. They talked about crosswalks and roundabouts. Crosswalks in the wrong place, no roundabouts. Is that something we might look forward to?

Absolutely. So the regional manager who is here with me today is taking those comments under advisement around the crosswalks. So roundabouts would be probably a different examination that we would do to see if that's the right intervention to both promote road safety and and also reduce if there's pinch pinch areas where there's congestion and that's we just have to have an engineering perspective as to whether that's the right intervention to make so how soon would we get a decision on something like that i think the crosswalks we could look at more immediately

because we're planning to do a bunch of line painting in and around Ganges already. The roundabouts were not part of the recent safety study that we did, so that's a new thing that will come into view. But I know that some people feel that would be valuable to Salt Spring, and we'll have to take a look at that. Yeah, because we have to have a referendum on a traffic light, apparently. Oh, is that right? So roundabouts would be a lot simpler.

Yeah. Well, I am certainly familiar with them, and I've put them in both as a city councillor in Victoria and as a minister. And they are often the most intuitive, safest thing to do, but they're not suitable everywhere, so we just have to make sure we're doing it. Okay. One last brief thing. You talked about the bridge at Blackburn Lake. When is that going to start, or has it started already? Blackburn Lake will start. It will be tendered later this year.

It may start this fall, but it may restart in the year. It depends on tenderness. All right. Any price on that yet? No. Got to get the bids. All right. Okay, thanks, man.

As cheap as possible. That's right. Thank you very much. We hope to have a competitive process, you know? Okay. Okay, you betcha. Thank you.