By Brian Lee
Water access. For a place that boasts such a wealth of marine recreation, we have very little of it. Whether it’s the lake or the ocean you’re travelling to, launching points are limited to a few congested hubs that are the focus of increasing complaints by residents who live near them.
A key concern is parking. The problem of where to store our cars while we go about the rest of our life has plagued just about everywhere else but has never really been an issue here. Until now.
Before roads were built, our commercial hubs evolved to accommodate people who arrived by boat to purchase supplies. For some time now, the congestion fanning out from the public wharves in Madeira Park and Egmont has been growing. The same can be said about the launching ramps of Ruby and Sakinaw Lakes.
Each weekend offers any number of creative parking displays as visitors, desperate to start their holiday, hope for the best by leaving their trucks and boat trailers as nuisance obstacles until they return. And they often get away with it because nobody is really watching. We might swear at the empty vehicle as we drive around it but we accept the offender is unlikely to be removed.
As the number of visitors travelling to nearby lakes, islands and inlets swells each season, so too does the number of cars abandoned. And it’s not just recreational property owners. Adventure seekers like kayakers expect to be able to take advantage of our recreational opportunities without concern for their vehicle, and so they should.
Narrow roadways near access points become clogged with shoulder-parked cars and when that runs out, bad things happen. An ongoing dispute between property owners in the Bear Bay neighbourhood of Sakinaw Lake (see p. 8) has brought to light another example of why the parking situation needs to be looked at more closely.
A subdivision application for water access-only property on the lake required the owners to show they could provide adequate space for the cars left behind. The lot purchased to store future property owners cars sits in a quiet residential neighbourhood three kilometres away, near an already congested road end right-of-way used for lake access. With so much local development taking place on the water, what are the rules for parking access?
The SCRD requires new water access developments to provide on-land parking but not everybody’s comfortable with rezoning residential lots for car and trailer storage. And as recreation properties get handed down and shared by more family members, the problem is expected to be compounded.
It is just one of the issues that will surface later this summer when work on the Area A official community plan gets underway. There’s still plenty of undeveloped land in offshore Area A and if we expect to attract more residents and visitors, we will need to find space for the cars that carry the money our micro-economy requires.
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