Worried about the safety of pedestrians and cyclists using a stretch of King Street south of St. Jacobs, a village resident is looking to Woolwich officials for solutions.
Sara Spencer will be presenting a petition to township council Tuesday night dealing with the neighbourhood’s traffic concerns.
From her kitchen window that looks out directly across to the Tim Hortons restaurant, Spencer gets a daily reminder of the potential threats. She sees kids out darting across the road during the short break in traffic, mothers with strollers trying to get over to the sidewalk on the west side and, more times than she can count, trucks parked in front of her driveway, and those of her neighbours, as drivers head over to grab a coffee.
“Often I can’t get out of my driveway. Same with my neighbours,” she said, noting that the trucks force pedestrians and cyclists using the road to move even closer to the speeding traffic – there’s no sidewalk, only a ditch, on the east side of King Street.
Cars routinely speed along that stretch of the road, she said, with northbound traffic not slowing down until they reach Highcrest Lane, where the crossing guard helps kids on their way to St. Jacobs Public School.
With more seniors and families on the east side, there are more people than ever trying to cross all along King Street, noted Spencer, adding there’s a real bottleneck of vehicles and pedestrians in the vicinity of her house.
“Sometimes it’s a bit of a jumble at Tim Hortons.”
She would like to see more enforcement of speeding and parking along the section of King Street from Printery Road to Highcrest Lane.
“Parents recognize it’s dangerous. There’s a concern that this is an issue that’s getting worse.”
Tuesday’s committee-of-the-whole meeting will be the first for Woolwich’s new council, with four of the five members new to municipal politics. But the issues are ones the township has dealt with before. Specifically, council has had to address parking and stopping concerns at the Tim Hortons restaurants in Elmira and St. Jacobs.
In Elmira, measures were taken to deal with trucks parking across residents’ driveways on Arthur Street. And even before the St. Jacobs location opened, council debated measures in 2002 to control the kind of on-street parking
Spencer plans to discuss in her presentation next week.
