The Township of Esquimalt is set to begin designing an improved Esquimalt Road with more functional bike lanes, traffic congestion mitigation and pedestrian infrastructure improvements.
As they prepare to design the updates, the Township conducted a public engagement campaign to see what residents would want in an improved Esquimalt Road.
Esquimalt published the results of this campaign and the feedback was overwhelmingly in support of installing protected bike lanes, as the corridor is used heavily by cyclists.
Most notable, the results of the feedback campaign found that 79% of respondents drive personal vehicles on Esquimalt Road, 55% said they either cycled or used the bike lanes with another “rolling device”, 50% said they walked the corridor and 7% said they used public transit.
The most prominent reasons for people using Esquimalt Road is to get to Esquimalt businesses (76%), to get to other areas of Greater Victoria (68%), they live on Esquimalt Road (65%) or they use the corridor to commute to work/school (63%).
In terms of what design features of an improved Esquimalt Road would have, Respondents indicated that inter-Esquimalt connectivity was most important, and that was tied with active transportation connectivity (both 58%).
Some of the concerns with this project are bike lane preferences, traffic flow and congestion as well as parking and accessibility.
“While some supported bike lanes, they prefer simple ones (e.g. white lines, without green paint),” wrote the Township in their report.
“Some had concerns about excessive road measures such as speed bumps. Some participants called for physically separating bicyclists from pedestrians and better-designed crossings.”
Respondents also indicated that most people believe protected bike lanes are ideal for the corridor with 69% saying they would make it safer to cycle.
Now that the Township has heard from its residents, next steps in this project are to put together designs for the changes that will be made for Esquimalt Road from Dominion Road to Joffre Street.
A second engagement campaign will be conducted for phase two of the project, from Joffre Street to Canteen Road will be launched in the coming months.
