Traffic light, not bridge woes

Re: No highway forethought

Up to a point, the writer is right. However, I don't think that it is a bridge problem, it's a city problem.

But the city can't do anything because Highway 97 is a provincial highway.

More than once, I have made a suggestion to synchronize the traffic lights on Harvey, all the way to past the airport. By doing so, the speed limit could be variable, slower when there is a lot of traffic and faster when there is less traffic.

A third lane into Kelowna won't do anything under the conditions we have now. There are way too many traffic lights between the bridge and Gordon, and the first three or four are a problem. When traffic is at a standstill on the bridge, it is because the city can't "swallow" all that traffic.

Having a third lane would just increase the "parking space" on the bridge.

When I moved to Kelowna, we still had the old bridge with the lift span and three lanes. Traffic was standing still on the bridge every morning coming into town and every evening leaving town.

But again, that was not a "bridge problem," it was too much traffic that couldn't be handled with traffic lights that aren't synchronized.

Just adding lanes won't solve the problem. Forty years ago, they were talking about a road going north on the west side of the lake, bypassing Kelowna as well as Vernon.

After all the development, this idea can be scratched by now. We have a big city now, but the brains behind are still small town.

Roger von Dach