An open letter to Mayor Nancy Cooper:
The Observer just this week has further public complaints regarding accidents on our main street and Number 1 highway. Two big semis involved and the sad death of a baby.
There were a number of suggestions to increase traffic lights or to restrict left turns, etc., and council, for lack of a better response, agreed to revisit an ICBC study done in 1913.
I myself have lived some 10 years in Salmon Arm and over that time the main street congestion has at least doubled.
In summertime, we have to suffer all the holiday traffic from Alberta together with the 1,000 trailer-trucks a day on our main street.
For safety alone council will just have to plan with longtime vision to alleviate this problem which only grows worse every year. With a bypass across the bay, as I have said often, we’ll gain some valuable waterfront while the CPR and truckers will save endless time and money and traffic will avoid all the perils of stop lights and congestion.
Use everyday safety as good reason to involve both the feds and the province. And please, for heaven’s sake, forget about wasting a further half million dollars on that ridiculous engineered plan for the underpass.
C. H. (Dave) Dyke