Guelph-Eramosa is advocating for pedestrian crossovers in Rockwood.
At the June 11 council meeting councillor Mark Bouwmeester submitted a notice of motion asking staff to provide an update on converting school crossings into pedestrian crossovers on Main Street South, south of Bridge Street, and on Alma Street, east of Inkerman.
At the point of the crossovers, both Main Street South and Alma Street (Highway 7) are owned by the Ontario government, so the municipality must work with the Ministry of Transportation (MTO) to convert them to pedestrian crossovers.
“School crossing is yellow; they’ve got yellow school crossing signs,” Mayor Chris White explained at the June 25 meeting. “It’s in effect when there’s a guard. It’s not supposed to be in effect when there’s no guard.
“People don’t know that and they go waltzing out and just about get hit.”
A pedestrian crossover, on the other hand, is in effect 24-hours a day, usually has lights, and does not require a crossing guard.
“So the ones on Highway 7 (that) were set up for the school crossings are being utilized by our seniors and everybody all the time,” White said.
Bouwmeester said he’s hopeful there will be action in the near future.
“All indications, as the optimist that I am, I’m reading stuff like that means the MTO is not stringing us along,” Bouwmeester said. “The fact remains that once the writ dropped everything went dark.
“I mentioned this to keep the pressure on the Ministry of Transportation to allow us to do something like this.”
At the July 16 meeting at Parkwood Gardens Community Church in Guelph, public works director Harry Niemi said the approval process for the pedestrian crossovers began in February and since the provincial election in June, he’s been in regular contact with the MTO.
“The commitment I have there – and I didn’t get a verbal update, but I spoke with MTO staff – they’re … fairly confident they can find some minor capital funding to get these installed in September of this year,” Niemi said.
“As noted on the financial side, in order to move this forward there was some cost from the township’s perspective. We did pay for the survey and did the initial preliminary design, funded through … operational engineering fees, which I think … is an appropriate use of engineering consultant fees to advance a project like this.”
Bouwmeester thanked staff for their time in getting the file moving, but said he is still skeptical the MTO will follow through.
“I’m glad it’s September but until September comes, I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said.
White explained the government often doesn’t know what project they’ll be able to complete in the fall until sometime in August.
“So what happens is they’ll get 800 requests at AMO (Association of Municipalities of Ontario) and they’ll flip through them and say ‘we’ll meet this guy, this guy’ …” White said. “So … if you’re asking if we can influence that pile, the answer’s no.”
