How safe is our community?

There are signs across the Rainy River District proclaiming the area as a Safe Community, a title given to the Rainy River District by the World Health Organization. The designation was earned because the communities across the region recognized the importance of eliminating physical barriers and being inclusive to all of our communities. Today, would our community be capable of showing that it still is a “Safe Community”?
Our first question to the community is “Is it safer to walk on a sidewalk or on the road?” Our second question is “Would you prefer your child or handicapped parent to walk on the sidewalk or the road?”
I would like to challenge all seven members of the elected council (Fort Frances) to push themselves in the seat wheel chairs along Third Street and Colonization Road west where today no sidewalk exists. Try being handicapped. Try wheeling yourself along the footpath. Try crossing the highway in a cart or wheel chair and then pulling yourself up a driveway.
Looking back almost a decade, the first action taken by the Fort Frances council to make the community a “Safe Community“ was to make playgrounds safer. Spear headed by then Mayor Glen Witherspoon, loose sand was placed around all the equipment to protect the youngsters playing on the playground equipment.
Fort Frances then began an aggressive program to put curb eases in at all corners. It made pushing strollers, wheel chairs across intersections easier. It made it possible for people needing scooters to cross at corners rather than drive on the street from one driveway to another.
Now in Fort Frances our aging council feels that sidewalks are not necessary. The first threat came to remove sidewalks on the east side of Portage Avenue from First Street through Third Street. Fortunately they came to their senses and the sidewalk was not removed.
Earlier when residents had balked at replacing sidewalks on the south side of Colonization Road west from Central Ave past the West End Cemetery, council chose to remove the sidewalk. Residents who want to walk on the sidewalk must now cross the busy four-lane highway. It is not a safe activity.
Now council feels that removing the sidewalk from the east side of Armit Avenue from Church to the River Front is a good idea because repairing it to safe provincial standards is too expensive.
Throughout the community, the public works has gone along the streets first marking the uneven sidewalks with fluorescent paint and then grinding down or cutting off the raised and broken edges to reduce the stumbling that takes place.
That is making walking on our sidewalks safer. The long-term plan should be to replace those sidewalks and the easiest way to do it is to have the residents where the sidewalks run pay for it. Historically that is how the sidewalks were built in the first place.
Our demographics tell us that across the district more people will require assistive devices to move about our communities. Another statistic that we tend to forget is that more people every year, end up in the emergency rooms of our hospitals from falls.
Healthy active lifestyles include walking and getting about our community. We need to remember that as we age, many of our abilities are reduced and many of our citizens become physically handicapped. If making sidewalks safe for 80 year olds is good, then toddlers and all age groups benefit.
Removing sidewalks will not make Fort Frances a safer community for all of our citizens.
Can we really say to our community, if you need a wheel chair, walker or scooter to get about Fort Frances, you really don’t count because council does not believe a sidewalk in front of your home is important?
–Jim Cumming,
Publisher