Sidewalks on a budget

Photo: Contributed

You may want to keep your focus straight ahead when you're walking along a new sidewalk on Rutland Road.

The recently constructed sidewalk on the west side of Rutland Road is lined with utility poles.

While a similar situation on the Boucherie Wine Trail in West Kelowna last year caught the city off guard, that's not the case here.

Infrastructure delivery manager Brian Beach tells Castanet News this sidewalk, and others on the list are designed "as cost effectively as possible" to stretch their limited budget in order to complete as many as possible each year.

Beach says unlike large road reconstruction projects, small sidewalk projects "do not have the budget for pole relocations."

"We try to keep the sidewalk as close to the property line as reasonably possible, as that increases safety from vehicles, provides for on-street parking where practical, provides for future road widening, bike facilities or landscaped boulevards, provides for drainage soak away areas and snow storage, and effectively uses the available road allowance," he said.

"The drawbacks of staying closer to the property line are the costs and conflicts with utility poles and other obstacles, elevation differences with adjacent properties and driveways, drainage issues, conflicts with established hedges and other landscaping that encroach on the right-of-way."

He said when a sidewalk can't be squeezed behind a utility pole, the alignment is adjusted or the concrete is widened to allow for safe passage for strollers and scooters.

"The addition of sidewalks to existing streets is quite often a very challenging design and construction assignment.

"We could make them all perfect but we wouldn’t be able to get much done. Some compromises must be made to ensure we spend tax dollars as effectively as possible."