A group of students in Port Alberni spent three months this spring coming up with solutions to safety concerns at Cathedral Grove.
In March, five students from a Social Justice class at Alberni District Secondary School began conducting a survey of 300 other students and teachers at the high school as an assignment under the direction of teacher Anne Ostwald. The survey results were released in late May.
Conversations around traffic congestion and safety at the Grove (part of MacMillan Provincial Park), situated at the western end of Cameron Lake on Highway 4, have escalated in the past few years.
“Every year they do projects to better the community, it also has to be something the students are interested in,” Ostwald says.
In this case the Grade 12 students wanted to see what recommendations they could come up with to make the busy stretch of highway through the Grove safer.
”It’s called ’Through the Grove’ and it’s a project on Cathedral Grove and we’re hoping to find a solution for the pedestrian and traffic issues throughout the grove,” says student Ella Freethy.
”Living in Port Alberni most of our lives we’ve gone through the Grove many times and just with all the accidents that happened through there, we wanted to make a difference with that,” Freethy says.
Co-student Kirsta Samuel was one of the five involved in conducting the survey. ”We did a Google form and went around to every single class for every student to scan to do the survey. We even e-mailed them to teachers and posted them around the school,” Samuel says.
Hannah Banford is also in the group and agrees the area has its challenges
“Driving through there at night is really scary, especially if it’s windy. There’s just trees coming down everywhere and driving through there when it’s winter time,” Banford says.
The group’s survey found that 77.6 percent of the respondents believed there were ongoing issues with traffic and pedestrian accessibility and 53.4 percent reported adults in their lives feeling anxiety when driving through the Grove.
“Not only does my family complain about it all the time, they hate driving through there because it’s terrifying. You never know if you’re going to crash, you never know if you’re going to hit someone,” Banford says.
Amaya Parmar says her group looked at various recommendations that included an overhead walkway, the installation of sidewalks and crosswalks or an underground walkway. Parmar acknowledges the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure did undertake some measures a few years ago but believes the results of that work were mixed.
”The speed bumps definitely helped when that was in place, they did help people slow down because I’ve seen a lot of people speed through there. But I think the new (dividers) didn’t do too much,” Parmar says.
The group researched overpasses which would run in the neighbourhood of between $5.7 million to $11.2 million depending on the complexity of the project.
”The pricing of how expensive it could be to get an overhead bridge in, but I think in the long run it could be worth it to save lives,” Banford says.
Jenelle Kozlowski is one of two students in the group of five who has her drivers license and immediately noticed problems when she began driving through the area.
“I think it’s really frustrating because there’s people just running across the road wherever they want to and it’s a very unsafe place,” Kozlowski says. “I think there needs to be a way better solution for people.”
Along with sharing the results of their survey with the school population, a power point summary was also sent to the Ministry of Transportation and Transit, City of Port Alberni, Mosaic Forest Management, MLA Josie Osborne and the Alberni-Clayoquot Regional District.
Ostwald says her students have been the catalyst for several community-based initiatives in the past including the installation of sidewalks near her school and even involvement with the community’s tsunami warning system. It was one of Ostwald's classes that came up with the idea to have the didgeridoo sound for the monthly warning system announcements, after researching which tones would best grab the public's attention.
