People who work on Mitchell Island are happy that Mitchell Road, the main road on the island, was finally paved last month.
“I love it. It’s amazing. [The road] has never been like that and it was always broken,” Alex Yu, manager of Court6 Café, told the Richmond News.
“Every single one of the managers and owners that work here all have had flat tires because it’s an industrial zone and companies transport items so there’s always stuff that can hurt our vehicles.”
Yu, who has worked in the cafe for 12 years, said he has had five or six flat tires and his cousin, who works at another company on the other side of the island, gets one flat tire a year.
Mitchell Island, which is in the North Arm of Fraser River sanwiched between Vancouver and Richmond, is an industrial hub for Richmond, although people can only access it from the Vancouver side of the Knight Street Bridge.
Heavy-duty trucks carry items such as sand, rocks, garbage and auto parts to and from the island along Mitchell Road every day, causing damage to the road.
So for more than a decade, driving on the road caused headaches for people working there, according to a long-time worker on the island who told the News his first name was Randy.
“It’s very nice that they finally paved it, so the road is nice and smooth,” said Randy.
There were so many potholes and the city would come to fill up the potholes, and then rain and everything else the pothole would reopen again.”
He said the potholes also posed safety concerns as accidents happened as vehicles tried to go around them.
Now that the major road and the ramp coming to the island has been repaired, Randy hopes the City of Richmond will also speed up paving the exit ramp from Mitchell Island to Vancouver,
“I usually wash my truck once a week and then genuinely within the day, it is dirty because of all the things. So now it’s a little dirty but it’s not as dirty as it normally would be,” he said.
