Signs to help make sense of city streets
Northern News Services
Iqaluit (Apr 23/01) - Iqaluit is months away from receiving 50-100 street signs.
The signs, expected to go up in late summer, replace a confusing and potentially dangerous numbering system, said fire chief Neville Wheaton.
"The bigger the city gets, the harder it is to find things," he said. "I don't want a lack of street names or addresses to impact our response time."
Iqaluit buildings are identified in clusters numbering 100 to 4000.
The numbers do not follow a logical pattern, with a series of 100 houses sitting across from the 300 houses.
Talk of formal street names was bounced around 10 years ago.
Wheaton re-launched the project after moving to Iqaluit in 1996.
"I spent my first two weeks getting lost," he said.
Without a standardized grid system, roads wrap around one another, making the exact number of streets needing names difficult to determine, Wheaton said.
As haphazard as the system appears to strangers, pizza deliverers and taxi drivers say the old system works.
"If they change the numbers, people are going to get confused," said one cab dispatcher.
"Drivers know their customers and the colours of houses."
Signs will be in Inuktitut and English. Street names will reflect animals, people, hamlet names and ships. Expect to see drives, courts, lanes and roads.
Design specifics and colour schemes are under review.
Suggested names were collected at a recent trade show and at Town-sponsored events.
"There's probably enough names to get started right now," he said.
Federal and Ring Roads will not be renamed.
Until all street names are chosen, the project's cost is not known because each sign will be charged per letter or per character.
"Given the fact we're starting from scratch, it's going to be a little more than people anticipate," Wheaton said.
Installing street signs on top of stop signs is expected to save money.
"We've got a map on the wall and what we're doing is gradually putting in the suggestions," Wheaton said.
After a public meeting and approval from council in the next couple of months, Wheaton expects 1,000 signs for 50-100 streets to be on the sealift this summer.
Back-up copies will be ordered.
"People wanting a sign will pull it off the pole. How many Road to Nowhere signs do you think we're going to lose," he asked.
