Dear Editor,
Re: Letter from Scott Thompson [Langley should follow Surrey’s lead in road building, March 2 letter, Langley Advance]
A little bit of knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing.
Thompson’s letters have the effect of misinformation disservice to the community as they are filled with utter nonsense.
He clearly does not have any experience or understanding of how different developments are done and the construction sequence order with related costs.
If you were building a house, would you do your landscaping and pave your driveway before you did your excavation?
He marveled at a Surrey single-family residential subdivision: “They had the roads, sewers, streetlights and sidewalks all completed in an area with no houses or condos built on it yet.”
He then denounces the Township staff and council for not doing it Surrey’s way and “allowing such a boondoggle.”
He is obviously unaware that most single-family/duplex subdivisions everywhere (except Brookswood) have been done with full services this way for many decades.
The reason they can install complete services for single-family/duplex is because the densities are pre-determined for each lot and the types and size/capacity of each service is known. Therefore, it is unlikely that they will ever have to dig the roads up for other than repairing faulty services.
With other developments, commercial, multi-family, institutional, etc., the services are capacity/sized for the demand loads (water sprinklers, sewers, electrical, gas, etc.) of the buildings.
These factors are not known until the developer gets to substantial design stages and Township approval of their projects.
In these cases, if you put the roads in first, you will be constantly digging them up, repaving over and over, rebuilding sidewalks, street lighting, etc. all with public inconvenience, traffic delays and at taxpayers expense.
It takes much longer with greater risk of damage and expense to dig across a road that is full of service pipes/conduits, water, gas lines etc.
You can, however, provide temporary path-walks for pedestrian safety where needed.
Why do the people with the least knowledge feel compelled to advise everyone of their expertise?
Roland Seguin, Fernridge