Municipalities and regional districts govern local road use through bylaws

Question: Recently a trucking company created a parking pad for its large and noisy dump trucks (near Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast).

Its on a property in the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) and the trucks need to drive through my residential neighbourhood to get there. I don't want my street to be a truck route.

The company uses the land only to park its trucks and both the municipality and the Agricultural Land Commission say it is definitely breaking the law by setting up shop there. However, (residents) seem to have no recourse with the trucks driving up and down our road that is full of young children and seniors.

The Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure controls use of our roads, not the local regional district. I want to know if it is legal to drive commercial vehicles repeatedly on a residential road?

Answer: In general, our roads are for the use of all properly licensed vehicles. Restrictions may include height limits due to low clearance or weight limits in spring or because of the inability of structures to support heavy vehicles.

Specific road use restrictions are enacted in the bylaws of municipalities or regional districts. A truck route is often created to control where commercial vehicles operate inside their boundaries. The obvious exemption is when that commercial vehicle is making a delivery to a location that is not on a truck route.

It appears that the Sunshine Coast Regional District does not have a bylaw for this.

Another option for controlling heavy commercial vehicles is to prevent them from parking or being stored on land through the use of zoning bylaws.

Being a home-based business may be a permitted use of the land.

The provincial zoning restriction is the ALR designation, but it permits a home-based businesses.

The regional district's zoning bylaw 722 says:

5.4.1 Where a home-based business is a permitted use, it shall be subject to the following conditions:

Section f) It must not generate traffic that exceeds the level prevailing in the neighbourhood or create a demand for off-street parking that cannot be contained within the parcel containing the home-based business;

k) Employees of a home-based business are restricted to residents of the parcel where the home based business operates plus not more than two other persons.

This does not forbid travel to and from the property. Leaving at the beginning of the day and returning at the end with the odd visit during the day would be similar to traffic from neighbourhood residences.

Police and bylaw enforcement officers are responsible to deal with your complaints about non-conforming commercial vehicle traffic.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.