After a fairly lengthy construction process, the City of Prince Rupert’s new roundabout on Highway 16, McBride Street, and 2nd Avenue opened on November 1st of last year.
Prince Rupert Mayor Herb Pond was recently interviewed about how helpful he thought the roundabout was and what the public reaction to it had been like a few months in;
“I’ve enjoyed using it., I made no secret about it even though it was a BC Highways project and we weren’t really involved directly. My vote was that I thought it would be better and in my mind, it is better. It’s opened up the view corridor to the courthouse and the RCMP building. The flow of traffic is incredibly improved. There have been a couple of minor incidents, but there were minor incidents at the old intersection too. Going into it, BC Highways said they always start at about 50/50 in a community when they do a roundabout and it always ends up in the 80 to 90 percent range in favour of it. I’d say we hit the 80 to 90 percent in favour mark. There’s a few people that still don’t like it for various reasons, but for most people, I think the feedback has been extremely positive.”
Pond also mentioned people had been driving around it to just enjoy the roundabout and even then, traffic was said to be less congested than before it.
Another touted benefit of the project was that it was done by BC Highways, meaning the City didn’t have pay for it and that they could get some other important work done for free as well, which was also illustrated by Pond;
“Our staff was very successful in pushing BC Highways to replace all of the City’s infrastructure that lies underneath there. That was millions and millions of dollars of water and sewer pipes that were replaced before the roundabout got put in. So even if you don’t like roundabouts, if you know that we need to improve our water infrastructure and you don’t want to pay additional taxes to do that, that was a big saving for local taxpayers.”
The mostly positive reaction to the results of this project can now allow for the City of Prince Rupert to put more focus on other endeavours that will help their citizens.