So what’s hot in Sooke nowadays? Political scandals, lack of services, the weather, crime, and that road … oh, that darn road.
No, really.
Sooke Road is a rotisserie of haphazard engineering: blind corners, tight bends, sudden dips and bad lighting. It’s kind of like that one friend you have. He’s a jerk, but you accept him because he is the only friend you’ve got.
Still, not shooting too high here.
What if you depend on the road to get to work? To get home? To successfully run a business?
Let’s face it, Sooke is growing, which means more people, more cars on the road, higher the chance someone will make a mistake. The province has floated the idea of adding two more lanes, but will that really make a difference? Not really, because you still have one way in, one way out.
In one recent case, a head-on collision happened just before Gillespie Road – the only way out or into Sooke through East Sooke – leaving drivers stranded in their cars for at least an hour. Or another in Saseenos last spring, which shut down the road for nearly eight hours. Go ahead, swim to Victoria.
Maybe this was OK in 1895, when most of us were looking at a horse’s bottom for transportation, but it’s certainly not the layout of a modern community.
Like a pair of siblings desperately begging their parents for that uber-cool Optimus Prime action figure, here we are again, extending our hands out to the province.
Nothing is too expensive.
Not in a time when people are buying themselves entire islands and $400-million yachts.
Nothing is achieved without significant investment of time and money either, and an alternative route from Sooke to the rest of the world is one that seriously needs attention – because it is the only solution that will genuinely work.
Or maybe we should abandon this whole car thing and revert to horses. They’re green, they can travel through the bush and don’t need gas to run (just love and hay).
So back to the 17th century we go. Or just wait another 100 years.
•••
Octavian Lacatusu is a reporter with the Sooke News Mirror.
