Trail circle at Browning Park
The Bowker Creek Greenway is starting to appear in Browning Park in Saanich. As I mentioned last fall, it is funded by provincial money via LocalMotion and federal stimulus dollars. When I was there yesterday, the asphalt had been poured but the construction fencing was still up. This wasn’t stopping people, as the new, very black asphalt was covered in footprints, of the human and canine variety.
Browning Park with approx. trail location
Later that evening I spoke with a Saanich Parks rep (at an event on a new 20 year plan for the Cadboro Bay Gyro Park) about the greenway and he stated the last work left to do was some curb cuts and some concrete. He didn’t give me a timeline but the amount of work is pretty minimal so I don’t expect it to be too long now.
One of the sad parts about this project is that the trail likely won’t see a great deal of us because it is isolated in amongst the very car-centric Shelbourne Corridor area (although the whole corridor is being rethought, as I reported a few months back). The next pieces should be easily to get built, because now they are extensions onto an existing trail, not the creation of a new trail whole cloth.
[...] starters, this little section of the trail is tiny. Much like the Bowker Creek Greenway in Browning Park I talked about, network effects mean that both trails will get few users until such time as more of it is [...]
The changes to Browning Park are a tragedy – not any improvement! A much better option would have been to refuse the fed/prov money that helped asphalt-over much of the western-half of the park, and instead, just refurbished the old tot-lot playground and sport court – and added 8 new social housing units where the older houses were removed along the Shelbourne Road strip. That terrible ten-foot wide asphalt road – mistakenly called a “greenway” is hazardous to children and pets if any cyclist is travelling at speed – like I’ve seen them do frequently. Better to keep the bikes on Shelbourne – not on this black, hot asphalt stupidity. Cheap infrastructure funding makes politicians go nuts. My website lamenting the Browning Park Massacre: https://sites.google.com/site/browningparkkilled/