The City of Revelstoke is installing a new sidewalk on Nichol Road from Airport Way to Park Drive that it hopes will make the walk safer for children attending Arrow Heights Elementary School.
“We are ecstatic about the installation of the new sidewalk along Nichol Road, providing a safe access for our children and residents,” said Mardi Syrnyk, the chair of the AHE Parent Advisory Council, in a City of Revelstoke news release.
The PAC has asked the city for a sidewalk along that stretch of road for a number of years as traffic increased following the opening of Revelstoke Mountain Resort in December 2007.
Students had to walk along the narrow shoulder, with traffic zooming by — a big concern for the school’s parents. Speed boards and signs urging drivers to slow down were placed along the route to help control the situation.
The construction follows a plan laid out by Mike Thomas, the city’s director of engineering and development services, at a development services committee meeting in April.
There, he presented a plan that called for a substantial ‘remix’ of the road involving adding bike lanes, narrowing driving lanes. and creating a sidewalk that would be separated from the roadway by a swale that would act as a drainage ditch for storm water management.
Darren Komonoski, the city’s operation manager, said in an interview the new sidewalk would be 1.8 metres wide and the swale about 2 metres wide. The driving lanes would be narrowed and a bike lane would be created on each side of the road. The sidewalk will be on the north side of the road, where most of the residences and Arrow Heights Elementary are located.
Komonoski said the narrower lanes should also help slow traffic down. “Our hope is that it creates better driving habits,” he said.
Work is scheduled to start on Monday, July 21, and be finished for the start of the school year. Work will likely result in some controlled traffic delays on Nichol Road, as well as interruptions in accessing private properties. Property owners have been notified of the interruptions.
The work will affect 570 metres of roadway and is budgeted to cost $126,000. There are no plans in the to extend the sidewalk in the future, said Komonoski.
