Road closure opponents ‘genuinely angry’

Some East City residents are speaking out against the closure of three streets to detour traffic since the Warsaw Swing Bridge went out of commission last month, a move the city says is necessary to keep high volumes of traffic off those residential streets.

A new online petition organized by the neighbours that calls for the streets to reopen got 687 signatures in just six days.

“Our neighbourhood is genuinely angry,” said East City resident Andrew MacGregor, who helped launch the petition along with Ashley Bonner and some other area residents.

The anger isn’t just confined to East City, MacGregor said. Some signatories live in areas scattered across the city as well as the County of Peterborough.

In a decision made by city staff, Old Norwood Road, Maniece Avenue and MacFarlane Avenue were closed to through traffic at the start of October when the Warsaw Swing Bridge on Parkhill Road East was closed by the Trent-Severn Waterway for a replacement.

The bridge work is expected to take eight months.

City staff have said the swing bridge takes 10,000 vehicles daily and the closed residential roads cannot handle that traffic safely.

But the detours are lengthy, with vehicles being redirected far out of their way to the Lansdowne Street and Nassau Mills Road crossings.

MacGregor — who ran for the Green party locally in the last federal election — said he and his neighbours were never warned or consulted on the road closures.

“We were caught off-guard,” he said. “Suddenly there are police patrolling and everyone’s confused, and frankly angry.”

MacGregor called it “extreme” for police to be handing out $110 tickets, which Peterborough Police and OPP have been doing lately (although it was unclear this week how many tickets have been handed out so far).

MacGregor said he’s also concerned

that the road closures were “arbitrarily” decided by city staff — not by city council.

But staff has delegated authority to close roads.

At a committee meeting on Monday, Coun. Keith Riel asked city staff to supply details to citizens who organized the petition on how the road closure decisions came about.

“Maybe we haven’t done a good job of explaining — not only to these people (who posted the petition), but to the residents of the city and the county — about why these decisions were made,” Riel said.

MacGregor said Wednesday he received a subsequent email from city staff explaining that they are preparing a document for neighbours containing those details, though staff hasn’t taken the neighbours up on an offer to meet to discuss it in person.

The online petition is available at bit.ly/35mTcp5