We need 50 km of new sidewalks. I’ll build them.

By Kevin Wilkie

I’m a new dad. This year I learned something about Surrey I hadn’t noticed in 30 years of living here: how many streets have no sidewalk at all. You notice it fast with a stroller. You notice it faster when a truck goes by.

If you walk your kids to school in Cloverdale or South Surrey, you already know. You’ve stepped into the ditch to let a car pass. You’ve driven your kid a few blocks because walking wasn’t safe. More than 80,000 students went back to class in September, and a lot of them walked along roads with nothing but a white line between them and traffic.

Here are the City’s own numbers. Surrey needs 558 more kilometres of sidewalk to meet its own standard. There are 63 kilometres of major roads with no sidewalk at all, and 377 kilometres of local roads with none. City Hall builds about seven to 10 kilometres a year. At that pace, staff say the job takes nearly 50 years. The mayor’s Sidewalk Action Plan, endorsed last year, adds 7.5 kilometres over two years.

Mike Starchuk and the Imagine Surrey team have committed to 50 kilometres of new sidewalk in four years, starting outside schools. That’s net new sidewalk on roads that have none today. Not a strip poured because a road got widened. New.

The mayor’s answer, in the Vancouver Sun last month, was that her council built 85.6 kilometres this term, and she’s not sure why we’d want to do less. Here’s the difference. Her number counts every metre that went in for any reason, including the concrete that comes with widening a road. Ours is for the streets where your kid is walking in the ditch. On those roads, the City’s own figures say it adds about seven to 10 kilometres a year. We’re promising 12 and a half, every year, on those roads first.

I do this for a living. At Black & McDonald, my job is to walk into an organization, find where the money is leaking, and fix the process. A city that has studied its sidewalk gap for decades and builds 7.5 kilometres in two years has a process problem, not a money problem. Fixing it means picking the streets by a rule everyone can see, schools first and then the rest, publishing the list, and building them in priority sequence. 

The same parties have run City Hall for decades. Every one of them has walked a school route at election time. This summer they agreed in principle to a $360 million arena downtown, in closed meetings. There’s always money for the thing with a ribbon on it. There’s never money for the thing with a stroller on it.

I grew up on Surrey’s rinks and fields. I ran federally in Cloverdale-Langley City last year and lost, and I knocked on a lot of doors. Nobody asked me about a stadium. A lot of people asked me about the road outside the school.

If you see a man in South Surrey pushing a stroller through the gravel beside a road, with a dog named Enzo dragging him along, that’s me. Stop me and tell me which street. I’m building the list.

On October 17, vote for Mike Starchuk and the Imagine Surrey team, and let’s build the sidewalks your kids are already walking on.

Kevin Wilkie has lived in Surrey for 30 years and works at Black & McDonald. He is an Imagine Surrey candidate for Surrey City Council.