Live Here, Shop Here is a Maple Ridge Pitt Meadows News campaign that spans the holiday season to spotlight the value of shopping local.
People want amenities in their neighbourhoods. Hence the old real estate slogan – location, location, location.
They want to be able to walk to the grocery store. They want to be able to walk to a cafe, or to the park. To improve convenience and the ability of people to shop local and more, Maple Ridge is focusing on transportation infrastructure.
And, Maple Ridge Mayor Dan Ruimy is aiming to make the city not only walkable, but bikeable, and driveable as well.
Ruimy said having a walkable community is important, because it gives residents more options to get around their neighbourhoods, without taking the other options away.
Having a strong transit corridor, he said, is critically important, too.
That is why the city has pushed for bus rapid transit, (BRT), along the Lougheed corridor, he said.
Other cities across the globe where there is already BRT in place have seen transit ridership skyrocket in those communities anywhere from 30 to 80 per cent, Ruimy noted.
More importantly, he said, businesses began popping up along the transit routes, most notably.
“It made it easier for people to hop on and hop off,” he said, which made it convenient for residents to access the new businesses along the bus line.
This is what the mayor hopes to see in Maple Ridge.
The new BRT system will add two lanes along Lougheed Highway that will be reserved strictly for the bus.
As it is right now, Lougheed Highway is not a walkable street, and it is not the most bikeable street, said Ruimy. And, he added, if you are driving, unless you pull into a strip mall with a parking lot, there is no street parking along Lougheed to speak of.
Once the BRT lines are finalized, Ruimy will also be looking for uni-directional bike lanes on either side of the highway.
“So it becomes more easy to get around,” said Ruimy.
With the BRT coming, Ruimy is expecting to see more densification of the downtown core. Along the route, he noted, people will likely start to see four-storey, and even six-storey buildings springing up.
And that density will bring the shoppers, who will support small- and medium-size busineses.
“That’s why we want to focus on our density. The more people you have living downtown, the more the population is able to support the businesses that are here. And that in of itself, is what will attract new businesses,” the mayor predicted.
He noted the city is also pushing forward with the Abernethy project.
In November, the city announced that is was about to start buying land to push Abernethy Way, between 232 and 240 Streets.
Ruimy said the $50-million project would provide another critical east-west route through the community.
The goal, he said is to ultimately push Abernethy through to 256 Street, where there is 600 acres of industrial land.
“Our hope is, as we go through this process, we have businesses that are going there that will have jobs attached to them and those jobs are so critically important to us because that will keep people here in Maple Ridge,” said Ruimy.