Getting Around Pitt Meadows Without Losing an Hour

The commute out of here is what it is, and I am not going to pretend I can fix a bridge for you. But a surprising amount of local time loss is self inflicted, and it comes from treating a city of nineteen thousand people on a flat grid as though it were a big one. Almost everyone lives in the same compact strip in the south. Almost nothing is more than a few minutes from almost anything else.

So here is how I rank the ways of getting around town, best first, with the reasons attached. Two of them will annoy people who love their cars.

1. The bicycle, and it is not close

Flat ground, dikes with trails along the top, farm roads with no hills and very little traffic once you are off the Lougheed. On a bike the distance from Town Centre to Osprey Village stops being a decision and becomes a non event. Half the car trips I watch people make here are trips where parking, reversing and waiting for a left turn eat the entire time advantage of the engine.

Pitt Meadows Cycle is the place to keep the thing running, and that matters, because a bike sitting in the garage with a flat tire is not transportation. It is furniture. The caveat is honest: rain, dark, and groceries for four. Three seasons and one errand type.

2. Walking, but only in Town Centre

Harris Road between the Lougheed Highway and 119th Avenue is the only genuinely walkable commercial area in the city, and the City's own planning work says as much. City Hall, the Family Recreation Centre and Spirit Square are all in that stretch. Park once at one end and walk, if the errand list is three items that all sit inside it.

A car between stops inside Town Centre is the single most common way people here lose fifteen minutes without ever noticing they lost it.

3. The West Coast Express

It stops in the Town Centre, and for anyone commuting west it is the difference between arriving annoyed and arriving fine. The catch is that it is a commuter service with a commuter schedule, so it is superb if your day matches the timetable and useless if it does not. Check the current schedule rather than anyone's memory of it, mine included.

4. The car, with rules

Ranked last, not because it is bad, but because it is where the hour actually goes. Three rules that pay for themselves:

• Avoid left turns onto the Lougheed at peak. Turn right, then loop. It feels wrong and it is faster.
• Cluster by district. Meadowtown, beside Golden Ears Way, holds most of the retail floor space in the city and most of the chains, so do the big shop there in one go. Town Centre is for the errands you can walk between. Do not alternate between the two in a single afternoon.
• Know which way you are leaving before you start the car. The east side of the city for the bridge, Airport Way for the west side and the Golden Ears Business Park. Deciding at the last set of lights is how you end up on the Lougheed at exactly the wrong time.

The unglamorous half of this

Most transport problems are really maintenance problems. A car that is fine is a car you never think about, and DBM Automotive is the local answer when yours stops being fine. DBM Auto Sales is the answer when the honest fix is a different car.

Diplomat Window Tinting is a more sensible purchase here than it sounds. A flat floodplain with no hills and almost no tall buildings means you take the low sun straight in the face for a long stretch at both ends of the day, and squinting through it at farm road speed on a winter afternoon is not a plan.

The one item trip

This is the rule I break most often and regret every time. Express News & Convenience Store or Meadows Pharmacy will have anyone back in the car in three minutes, if the need is one thing and one thing only. A run out to Meadowtown for the same single item will not, because Meadowtown is built for the big shop and it will find you four more things to carry. Whatever I do save, I spend on coffee. The Coffee Pitt gets most of mine.

The short version

Bike when you can, walk when you are in Town Centre, take the train if the timetable fits the shape of your life, and treat the car as a tool for the trips that genuinely need one. The city is small enough that this actually works. It is only when people drive it like a large city that a fifteen minute errand turns into an hour.