Closing streets in Montreal to traffic has proven popular with residents, tourists and businesses.
By Lex Harvey • Toronto Star
I was there a couple of weeks ago and it was amazing. I felt something I missed ever since I left Eastern Europe for Canada half a lifetime ago. This would never happen under Tory. Olivia is the mayor who might do it. That said, given the sorry state of the city finances and infrastructure, she has a much tougher battles ahead of her to expend political capital on this.
So no. 🥲
The irony being, of course that a true “conservative” that cleaved to the values they claim to care about would absolutely want this kind of car-light/car-free downtown.
Time and time again, complete streets and walkable cities are shown to save huge money on the city budget. They cost so much less to maintain and they boost economic productivity so much. The return on investment is just immense compared to car-intensive infrastructure. There’s a reason a city like Houston has something like double the per capita spend on transportation of a city like NYC in spite of NYC’s massive subway system and there’s a reason NYC has something like double the per capita spend on transportation to Amsterdam with its vast networks of bike paths and trains. Car-intensive infrastructure is crazy expensive to maintain. It’s unfrugal madness.
And for the non-financial side, car-intensive civic design still doesn’t qualify as “conservative”. Having car-intensive design requires a huge, top-down approach to urban planning where the city tries to plan every aspect of its citizens lives. Plan for them and fit them into figurative boxes in order to make the literal boxes practical to use. It’s practically authoritarian. It’s a violation of the traditional values of cities which grew slowly and organically, adapting to the changing needs of their citizens through work done typically by those very citizens’ hands.
Switching urban planning models to a car-first approach led to a lot of the other problems of modern cities, including the fact that small-scale/neighborhood developers have been all but run out of business by huge outsider development firms that refuse to build anything other than huge exurban sub-developments and luxury condos. Conservatives should be there to resist and reject this total upending of normal development of society, but they make money off of it so stay mum.
Buddy, no one here is confused that conservatives represent nothing in particular but whatever is going get them power and profit. I began blacklisting libertarians after years of arguments with a few in RL. Now I’m blacklisting conservatives without arguing.
You’ll never convince a conservative they’re being a hypocrite, but you can arm as many reasonable people as possible with arguments they can use to convince their dumbass aunts, dads, cousins, and friends to show up and vote against evil. At least that’s my hope.
But it is also philosophically of interest to me that Strong Towns should be considered the very model of a modern Conservative political force while they are widely considered in pop culture to be WAY far left. The fact that being “conservative” today means having feelings-based political motivations and rejecting evidence-based approaches as its core precepts makes me tired and sad.
When I think about it, dirty socialist policies often have lower costs than “conservative” ones. For example housing people from the street is cheaper than having them live in encampments. Right to repair is cheaper than planned obsolescence. Cheaper for the majority that is. 🥲
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Try reading what I wrote next time instead of just projecting all this hostility at me.
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Agreed, I was visiting earlier in August and it was such a pleasant experience walking around the city in general but especially the pedestrian only roads. The ones they have implemented in Vancouver aren’t nearly as lively and nice. Especially with our new mayor and council essentially just paying lip service to the concept this summer.
If the sorry state of city finances and infrastructure are a problem and priority, then building and maintaining pedestrian, bike, and rail infrastructure are potential solutions.
Take a look at this study detailing the cost benefit analysis of bike infrastructure in Portland, Oregon. Millions of dollars can be saved. https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/43289/8/Gotschi1.pdf
Another study concluded that “creating or improving active travel facilities generally has positive or non-significant economic impacts on retail and food service businesses abutting or within a short distance of the facilities”. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01441647.2021.1912849
“Building a new roadway for automobiles can cost tens of millions of dollars to construct, and many of the pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure projects and facilities are extremely low-cost in comparison. This infrastructure can also serve to improve safety for all road users, while also promoting healthier lifestyles through more bicycling and walking.” https://www.pedbikeinfo.org/cms/downloads/Countermeasure Costs_Report_Nov20131.pdf
Oh ma gaad! A Canadian city actually did it.
I’ve been talking about this for years. I live in Saskatoon and this city has a couple of amazing places that should be converted to car-free. Though I dont think that will ever happen here.
I thought that’s where they were headed on 21st Street and then on 2nd Avenue. Then they went backwards, at least on 21st. I think it was supposed to be a pedestrian mall, but it ended up being a parking mall, whatever that is.
There’s good reason to be cautious. These don’t always work well, and security can become an issue. Changing the built environment to support safe and active public spaces is challenging.
It would be great to know what factors make a pedestrian mall in a downtown core work well over the long haul and which don’t.
In the 1970s, several Canadian cities emulated European ones and created pedestrian spaces in their cores. Vancouver had a good length of Granville ‘theatre row’ closed for decades and Ottawa had Rideau closed to all but public transit. A great deal of infrastructure investment was made to make them appealing pedestrian spaces. Ottawa still has Sparks street completely vehicle free in the Parliamentary precinct.
Both Granville and Rideau were eventually reopened to traffic after they became crime focal points. Both were places women felt safe to walk on in the evening in the late 70s and early 80s, but by the 90s many pedestrians avoided them during the day and businesses left, replaced by boarded up storefronts.
All to say, not such a simple public good question as some are presenting here.
With Olivia Chow it might happen.
Yep, they started with Ste-Catherine, sometimes St-Denis for just for laughs, Avenue Mont-Royal is car free too. It’s pretty cool.
Old Montréal is a lot car free and it’s beautiful
i hope so. i think making pedestrian friendly streets are something we are scared to try because its new, but i dont think its a bad thing.
its new
Only if you ignore the >100 years during which Toronto existed before cars. Downtown areas do not benefit from car traffic, the more inner roads that can be converted to walking/biking/bus/streetcar only use the better.
Aren’t the Toronto islands already car free?
Yup its the only suburban neighbourhood in north America that is completly car free.
Trouble is zoning laws in Ontario and anywhere else in north America prevent cities from building more neighbourhoods like this.
Examples include things like minimum parking requirements, minimum setback, fire codes and even policing all play a part in shaping this. If you ever look at new suburban developments, think how hard its to get a convenience store or small supermarket build right inside the suburb.
Its a shame because we really should not be building suburbs with the same two or three single family homes repeated over and over, its really inefficient. We should start having townhomes, fourplexes, small 4-5 level mixed use condos, subways and trams with busways incorporated. Existing suburban layouts should also start adding missing middle housing inside whereever possible by changing zoning.
Preaching to the choir here.
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“Pedestrian streets” are not really “new”, it’s just something that we as North Americans have forgotten about.
We see large Walmart parking lots as normal and 6 lane “strodes” as nothing weird in cities and suburbs.
I gotta get better at French
Tu peux.
C’est plus poli d’utiliser vous avec des étrangeres
If Toronto tries, learn from Vancouver’s failed trial.
I wouldn’t call it a ‘trial’.
It was in place for a couple of decades. Agreed that it failed in the end, as did Rideau street in Ottawa.
Article says it was in place for 5 weeks.
I was referring to the one in Vancouver.
The article in question is about a 5 week failed trial in Vancouver.
https://www.nsnews.com/transportation/city-ends-pedestrian-friendly-street-pilot-project-7370064
Yes but I had noted that there’s been a previous 2 decade installation on Granville in Vancouver elsewhere on the thread.
There’s been a lot of success with these in Europe, less in North America.
Refined form of Betteridge’s law of headlines: if any headline asks “can Toronto” anything, the answer is definitely very no.
Can Toronto become worse?
