Notice has been served to the retail tenants at Britannia Beach to vacate premises in order to prepare for a retail/housing development to begin next spring.
Macdonald Development Corporation is making good on plans long delayed to build the commercial component of their development after completing the housing element in 2006.
Anticipated are a total of 40 new housing units and a comprehensive village retail centre.
Although the smaller of two planned projects for Britannia Beach, this will add more traffic to a highway that already comes to a grinding halt through Britannia Beach on busy weekend days with cars backed up to Shannon Falls and even to Squamish at times.
Most of us have experienced the delays and residents in Britannia Beach don’t necessarily drive to Squamish on weekends without anticipating possible delays.
This will not get better with destinations like Joffre Lake along the Duffy looking like the Stanley Park causeway.
We urgently need a comprehensive traffic strategy that isn’t limping behind the actual demand.
The bottleneck at Britannia Beach was kicked down the road during the Olympics upgrade of Highway 99, with two traffic calming lane merges at both the south and north end of our community as temporary solutions.
Now with this development going ahead and Taicheng planning a 1,000 unit retail/housing development on the southern properties of Britannia Beach, we need a comprehensive traffic management program that takes the load of all the northern development in Squamish and beyond into consideration too.
The growth of this region needs to be firstly reflected in the transportation infrastructure. Everyone is affected by long delays in commuting and travel times.
Ralph Fulber
Britannia Beach
