Clearwater has suffered for years from lack of planning. One of the most obvious examples of this is highway access.
Clearwater council recently resolved to seek a meeting with Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure during the upcoming Union of BC Municpalities convention to ask for a comprehensive highway access plan for the community.
Part of developing such a comprehensive plan should be an extensive public input process.
Here are a few ideas from your editor, just to get the ball rolling.
Some of these ideas involve the purchase or expropriation of private residences, which might not make the owners too happy. On the other hand, maybe they'd be glad to receive a government buy-out.
Suggestion number one would be to construct a bypass connecting Highway 5 from just south of the bridge over the Clearwater River to Old North Thompson Highway near Brookfield Creek Bridge.
This would replace existing the single-lane logging bridge and provide more direct and easier access to the Brookfield Mall business center.
Most local residents already use the logging bridge as a shortcut to reach the highway but it isn't very obvious or easy to find, and the bridge isn't designed for large volumes of traffic.
Usually when we use it we are heading south from town along the highway. That means we cross the Clearwater on the logging bridge and then immediately cross it again on the highway bridge - not very logical.
Recently the highways ministry had a crew drilling holes into the subsurface under the pavement at the intersection of Highway 5 and the road to Wells Gray Park. The testing was part of a process to determine if the site would be suitable for a roundabout.
Do we, as a community, want a roundabout at that intersection? Might we be better off if Clearwater's main highway exit/entry point continues to be at the intersection with Old North Thompson Highway at the Wells Gray Inn? Would a roundabout there make more sense? There's more room, for one thing. A feeder road parallel to the highway could connect Harby Road and Eden Road by Clearwater Lodge. As things develop on the east side of the highway, possibly there also could be a feeder road parallel to the highway from near the hotel to the courthouse.
A roundabout at Wells Gray Inn possibly would help maintain the viability of the existing business core centered around Brookfield Mall.
Another idea has to do with the junction of Jenkins Road and Highway 5. We've had several collisions there over the years. Although some of the crashes seemed to have involved people pulling onto the highway without looking both ways, installing left-turn lanes and merge lanes would make the junction safer, if only by encouraging the through traffic to slow down a little.