Amalgamation could greatly improve Duncan
It would seem to me that the City of Duncan, one of Canada’s smallest cities, was never built specifically with people in mind.
In many ways it feels like a glorified truck stop. In fact, I’ve heard that the City of Duncan was established as a whistle stop on the E&N Railway line. There have been all kinds of efforts over the years to improve upon this reality. For example, the heart of downtown Duncan, which is charming and lovely, is a very good start. This effort needs to be added to. When it comes to the rest of Duncan, the pieces that make a community a great place to live have been overlooked or forgotten, i.e. tree-lined streets for walking, wide pedestrian-safe sidewalks, pedestrian-friendly intersections, narrower roads (think traffic calming), etc. Instead, we have barren, broken-up sidewalks adjacent to empty lots, chain-link fence and vast car lots right in the heart of the downtown.
In addition, there are great swaths of excessively-wide road that split Duncan north/south and east/west (Trunk Road). Perfect for logging trucks travelling at 90k but not great for pedestrians or cyclists. For those driving through town and looking out the window, it’s a bleak landscape; unfriendly and uninspiring. There is no denying it. For anyone forced to walk, it’s a soul-crushing experience of strip malls, too many cars and asphalt. And, the irony is that Duncan really functions as the heart of North Cowichan.
Change could be achievable if both communities combined resources to invest in improvements, rather than it coming solely from the small population of the City of Duncan. If we were to amalgamate, the combined tax revenue could help to make Duncan spectacular for everyone — a place with beauty and walkability, not just a place to drive through on your way someplace else. Amalgamation, combined with vision and willingness on the part of elected officials and the community is the only way to go to achieve much-needed change in Duncan.
V. Bramhill
Duncan