Easements, Right of Ways, Delta & Vancouver’s Puget Drive

Do you know the difference between an easement and a right-of-way?

Easements are the right to use someone else’s property for a specific purpose, like hydro lines or sanitary sewers. Rights-of-way are easements that give the right to travel across someone else’s property.

Public rights-of-way can provide more direct walking and rolling routes through classic subdivisions.

The City of Delta to the south of Vancouver has the traditional curvy street subdivision patterns so popular in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  It is a bane to walkers that would prefer a straighter, more direct path, and many streets have these narrow walkable rights-of way-provided, most with paving, and all with some kind of  chain link fence.

In fact, the chain link fencing is just being replaced in the example above,  even though many of these walkable pass throughs are already bordered by high, cedar fencing.

That is what makes this handmade sign crafted by a young environmentalist even more poignant: She writes “Save the Environment Don’t Litter” with a image of a person doing exactly that act.

There are examples like this, where vinyl fencing has been installed on one side and the chain link fencing (it is like Homer Simpson, subsiding into the greenery) on the right hand side.

In many suburban cities walking used to be something people did as recreation in the evening. With the pandemic and working from home, walking to shops and services and for “fake commuting” to get the first coffee of the day from elsewhere has become more the norm.

If you are walking in the area of Quesnel/Puget Drive  in Vancouver, there are many walkable rights of way connecting streets, but they are unused, and some of them are hard to find, often looking like privately owned landscaping.

But in the future as the city densifies and as more multi-family units develop even in this bastion of single family housedom, these legal rights-of-way will form the backbone of pedestrian and cycling priority routes. For now, you can spend an interesting afternoon mapping the locations of them along the ridge of the city through the Quesnel/Puget Drive area.