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| Thursday, February 20, 2014
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Students ‘Jump Rope for Hearts’
School to get ‘traffic calming’ despite public vote results Council decides 29 Avenue ballot was so close something should still be done to deter speeders By DAN FERGUSON and KURT LANGMANN Aldergrove Star
HARRY HUNT PHOTO
Aldergrove’s Shortreed Elementary school students “jumped rope for hearts” on Friday, in the annual fundraiser for the BC Heart and Stroke Foundation. From left are students Ruby Hunt, Troy Uher and Nicholas Truong.
Very few take bus to work here By DAN FERGUSON Aldergrove Star
If you live in Langley Township, there’s a good chance you commute to work and you get there by driving or ride-sharing rather than taking public transit. There’s almost no chance you’re taking the bus. A Township staff analysis of recentlyreleased figures from the Statistics Canada census in 2011 shows 86 per cent of workers in the Township drive their own vehicles rather than take the bus to work. Only 3.5 per cent take public transit, the lowest percentage in Metro Vancouver. The report to council by the community development division calls the figures “disturbing” and suggests it is the result of “our large land mass and a lack of appropriate and timely public transit options.”
Most Township commuters were traveling to Surrey — 9,510 every work day. The City of Langley is the second most popular destination at 4,405, and Abbotsford third at 2,530. At the time of the federal census, there were 104,177 people living in the Township. The federal figures show Township residents were more likely to be working than their counterparts in other Metro Vancouver municipalities, thanks to the third-lowest unemployment rate in the region. Only North Vancouver District and Lions Bay reported lower jobless rates. In 2011, 6.1 per cent of the Township work force was unemployed, compared to the B.C. and Canadian average of 7.8 per cent. The work force was an educated one,
with 84 per cent possessing a high school diploma or better, and 53 per cent having either university degrees, college diplomas or trades certificates. The Township analysis said the largest segment of the Langley labour force works in the retail trade (11.5 per cent), followed in order by construction, health care and manufacturing. The 2011 census was the first year that Canadians could legally refuse to fill out the detailed “long form” census used to create detailed reports about jobs, income, education, citizenship and more. Critics and some researchers have expressed concern that the results from the new voluntary long form survey will be less accurate. About a third of the 4.5 million households who were asked to fill one out in 2011 refused.
A vote on traffic calming measures for the road that runs in front of Aldergrove Community Secondary School was so close to passing that Township council decided to go ahead anyway. A report on the mail-in vote which was carried out in November shows 65.6 per cent of the residents who responded support taking steps to slow drivers down on 29 Avenue fronting the 700-student school. The vote was a near-miss, just short of the 67 per cent minimum required under Township regulations and that would normally mean Township staff automatically move on to the next highest priority location. But council decided the work on 29 Avenue will proceed, after mayor Jack Froese suggested they should make an exception to the rule in the name of student safety, calling it “a larger community good that council needs to address.” Councillor Charlie Fox, who was principal of the school for about six years, needed no convincing. Fox made the proposal to waive the minimum majority requirement, saying at the very least, “one or two speed bumps” should be installed to deter drivers from speeding. “We had a student hit on 29th Avenue,” Fox said. “There have been accidents through Township councillor the course of years [because] people Charlie Fox argues don’t respect the school zone in that some measures area, they just don’t.” should be put in place Councillor Bob Long suggested waitto prevent speeding. ing until after some already-approved crosswalk improvements were made at the school this year. “Lets see what happens,” Long said. Councillor Kim Richter agreed with Long, saying she was concerned that only 19 per cent of the area residents surveyed actually voted, 259 of 1,342 people. “We’re making a decision to spend money on the say-so of a small group of people,” Richter said, adding “we can come back to this next year.”
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