Bumpy McBump Bump Way: Perpetual pot holes spark petition to rename Lake Country road
When all else fails, try humour.
That’s the approach Lake Country’s Jordan Standnicki took after his latest trip on Glenmore Road that runs from Kelowna through to Lake Country where he risked doing serious damage to the tires and wheels of his sizeable station wagon due to the potholes along the way.
“I used to drive up and down that road and there were no problems,” Standnicki told iNFOnews.ca today, March 2. “In the last few years, every year we get the pothole complaints and I thought they happen every year with all the growth in the community I just sort of wrote if off as, it happens, they fix it. But Glenmore goes year-round. People just complain and complain.
“I’m sure that hundreds of people go down to the District (of Lake Country office) and complain and, obviously, nothing’s happening. I just thought, you know, everybody’s taken a shot at it. Why not take a different approach? I thought if I could make enough of a nuisance of it, maybe they would go: ‘Oh crap, we’ve got to do something.’”
Yesterday, March 1, he posted a photo and started a petition on Change.org calling on the district to officially change the name of the Lake Country section of Glenmore Road to Bumpy McBump Bump Way.
“We’ve seen these kinds of silly petitions in other places,” Standnicki said. “It seemed like the right way. Glenmore (Road) is the bumpy way to get to Kelowna so call it Bumpy Way.”
By 10 a.m. today it had only received 17 signatures but there were dozens of supportive comments on the Lake Country One Community Facebook page.
It’s not like this is some back road in a small Okanagan community.
Glenmore Road, essentially, runs parallel to Highway 97 and those are the only two routes between Kelowna and Lake Country so it's used by hundreds, if not thousands, of motorists every day.
With growing populations in both communities, rush hour traffic is backed up for many blocks, especially for those trying to turn left on Highway 97 in Lake Country.
In the petition, Standnicki notes that the Kelowna section of the road is fine but its condition deteriorates dramatically along the relatively short Lake Country section.
“For years, the condition of the Lake Country section of Glenmore Road has been embarrassingly decrepit,” the petition reads. “The potholes are dangerous and beyond plentiful. The name of the road should reflect the nature of the road. Change the name of the Lake Country section of Glenmore Road to Bumpy McBump Bump Way.”
As he understands it, there’s a study underway to determine what to do to improve the road but that will take two years.
A recent agreement between the two communities, Okanagan Indian Band and the Ministry of Transportation will, eventually, see the intersection with the highway improved but until then there’s a couple of kilometres of what is, to many travellers, an unacceptably bumpy roadway.
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