Many people in Nanoose Bay woke up on Friday January 3, 2025 to news that a well loved community member, a local man who was a well-recognized regular pedestrian and bus commuter, was struck and killed near the intersection of Northwest Bay Road and Highway 19, at the corner with the PetroCanada. 

This tragedy renews conversations about ongoing safety concerns for pedestrians, cyclists, wildlife, and other drivers in Nanoose Bay. In a town with few sidewalks; increasing vehicle pressures on our roads; and with the highway cutting off half of our town, many have expressed fear that someone was going to die due to inadequacies in both road infrastructure and enforcement of traffic regulations at key intersections in Nanoose. And now, once again, that has sadly come true. 

Residents of Nanoose Bay have been documenting and reporting serious issues — including near misses involving speeding/distracted drivers; unsafe conditions for pedestrians and cyclists; dangerous highway access; as well as cars losing control at various key intersections — for several years to various government agencies to little effect. This safety pressure is particularly intense at the turn off at Highway 19 at the Petrocan, where highway drivers frequently fail to slow down to the required 60 km/h and ICBC reports that 63 crashes took place between 2019-2023 (with 29 of these crashes involving injuries). Additionally, traffic safety throughout Nanoose Bay is a concern. Between 2019-2023, 502 crashes took place in Nanoose Bay. 126 of these crashes resulted in injuries, 3 of which were fatal. 

The first week of 2025 added another tragic fatality to our roads. 

Residents of Nanoose deserve meaningful safety measures, better enforcement, improved infrastructure, and changes from relevant agencies in all levels of government to protect our community, full stop. We are not asking for anything extravagant: we want tools to ensure that that speed limits and traffic regulations are enforced throughout our town; that infrastructure is updated to address additional thoroughfare pressures on Highway 19 and Northwest Bay Road; and that being a local driver or a local pedestrian, cyclist, child, or senior citizen in our town is not a death sentence on roads that are currently ill-equipped to meet multi-modal transportation needs of a growing community. 

In light of this community tragedy, we ask for a compassionate, transparent, and concrete response from both the Ministry of Transportation and the RCMP to our concerns so that we may move forward and ensure that all members of our community are safe on our roads, regardless of age, class, mobility, or transportation mode. We invite both agencies to meet with residents to learn more about our concerns and to take seriously the need to improve infrastructure and enforcement to prevent further traffic injuries and deaths in our town. 

In order to formally present this petition to the legislature, we have included the following: 

To the Honourable the Legislative Assembly of the Province of British Columbia, in Legislature Assembled:

The petition of the undersigned, residents of Nanoose and surrounding communities, request that relevant provincial and federal bodies and agencies take road safety concerns in our community seriously. Your petitioners respectfully request that the Honourable House support our calls for relevant representatives of the Legislature and provincial regulatory bodies and ministries meet with us to address our pressing safety concerns. 

Dated January 7, 2025.