My wife and I watched the Westerner Days parade and enjoyed it very much.
For a small city, the parade did Red Deer proud. We were impressed with the new (apparently) fire and rescue equipment with sirens blaring and light flashing that passed our viewing spot.
Sadly, upon leaving the area and driving to our “home away from home,” we were astounded to see that the streets signs were still nearly impossible to view from a moving vehicle.
As we have had to do in previous visits to Red Deer, we were forced to search for street signs. Those that we were able to view from our moving vehicle, were well hidden behind posts and appear to be placed more to accommodate pedestrians than they are to assist motorists.
This is not good enough and tends to create dangerous situations as a motorist, looking for a street sign, searches frantically for a sign, any sign, to assist him or her. Again, this is not good enough.
In the past, we have communicated with your city bureaucrats on this very issue.
We received an unbelievable, bureaucratic, nonsensical reply. In an attempt to assist your bureaucrat, I took pictures of road/street signs placed on traffic light arms that extend over the roadways to illustrate that in one Canadian city (and I know of more) such signage is possible despite what your bureaucrat claimed was not possible.
We did not receive the courtesy of an acknowledgement of our communication; but that is not unexpected based on the tenor of your bureaucrat’s silly comments given in his baffling letter.
It seems that the City of Red Deer has sufficient funds to purchase new fire and rescue equipment but not enough money to produce and position street/road signs, to assist motorists, both visitors and locals, as suggested in a positive comment to counter your bureaucrat’s nonsense.
I believe that properly positioned street signs will assist greatly emergency response crews such as police, fire and ambulance, when responding to a callout.
Common sense suggests this will be so; one wonders why common sense is so foreign to at least one of Red Deer’s bureaucrats.
Bob Orrick
Richmond, B.C.