A city councillor who wanted 2021 declared the Year of the Cyclist, thinks Kamloops large geographic area shouldn’t be a deterrent for people that want to use their bikes.
Arjun Singh says while the city does cover a large swath of land, Kamloops is set up so we can stick to our own neighbourhoods.
“There’s a lot of folks who are looking at multi family, looking at the the amenities like the North Shore core, the Downtown core or even the Sahali area in terms of by the malls or Aberdeen by the malls, what those offer because you can walk to places, you have amenities close by, you have vibrancy in the area.”
“That is kind of a shift we’ve see in our development patterns.”
When asked about worries of Kamloopsians not exploring what the city has to offer, Singh says they’ll continue to promote the main areas of the city.
“I think that we’re always going to want to attract people downtown, we’re always going to attract people to the North Shore core areas, I mean that’s going to be something the city should be promoting and talking about. Those are really the ambassador areas for the community.”
“Kamloops has been, historically built in quite a large geographic area and the city planning that we’ve done talks about neighbourhood centres, like Brock neighbourhood centre, the Westsyde neighbourhood centre or the Dallas neighbourhood centre so there’s some shopping amenities around those areas.”
Singh say neighbourhood infrastructure allows for people to stick to their own areas and pointed to those that are shying away from single family homes.
“I think that again the diversity of housing choice in Kamloops, which is good but organically, a lot of folks are starting to choose multi family duplexes or high rises, well Kamloops style high rise six, seven, eight stories typically building with having the proverbial pub downstairs or the grocery store downstairs, that kind of thing. It just changed organically over the last little while.”
Singh’s motion that was voted down last month would have had the city look into improving infrastructure for cyclists and other alternative forms of transportation.
