What started as a peaceful walk downtown turned out to be a very frustrating experience. I came home spitting nails.
To begin with, a pedestrian is forced to continually dodge impatient drivers at 4-ways and even at designated crosswalks. If not ignoring you, they are driving right up and impatiently waving a hand to make you scurry across, which I will not do. At one point I had to hold my hand out and yell ‘Stop!’ to some idiot with an ego issue on wheels.
Then there is the abysmal state of the gardens in the downtown area. I was forced to contact the head of operations last year, which did no good, then write a letter to the editor before anything was done. I have never, in all my years in Parksville, seen such a sad mess. Boulevards, the garden fronting city hall, the old elementary school overgrown and laden with all manner of weeds. (Down at the beach the tourists see/enjoy pristine work, but not those who live here all year round and frequent the downtown.)
My suggestion is this: take all the scads of money the traffic patrollers will make ticketing impatient drivers and use the funds to hire some motivated high school students to weed the gardens. Problem solved!
As for people not being able to find their way to the ‘wayfinding meeting’: 1) use the money for something that makes a lick of sense, and; 2) perhaps the people couldn’t fight their way through the weeds to get there.
Liz Roy
Parksville
