Langley Township is considering adding more than 1,500 condo and townhouse units right now. Add to those all the homes under construction already, all those in various stages of planning, and those being built in Langley City, Cloverdale, and Clayton Heights, and it looks like we’re getting a huge influx of new residents in the next two years.
How are we going to deal with all those newcomers on the roads?
Ever since the creation of TransLink, Langley has been perpetually underserved. For years, we’ve been told that service comes to high-density areas.
Well, Willoughby and Langley City are rapidly becoming high density areas. Brookswood and Murrayville are adding residents at a pretty good clip as well. We may not have skyscrapers yet, but there are already parts of Langley that have a higher density than parts of south or east Vancouver.
With civic elections in the offing, our local politicians need to work on their alliances with Surrey, White, Rock, and Delta, to keep lobbying TransLink and the provincial government that holds the purse strings.
We need to make sure that light rail to Langley remains on track.
And we need to do something about the local road situation.
Building roads as development comes isn’t cutting it anymore.
Traffic jams won’t just be local, but will turn major routes into choke points every rush hour – worse than at present. We need density, to avoid sprawl. But density without transit, without a proper road network, is just going to turn into years of headaches.
– M.C.
