François Cardinal and pedestrianized streets
Last week, François Cardinal posted about pedestrianized streets. Monday he says on Facebook:
Or les chiffres montrent bien que ce n’est pas par la voiture que passe l’avenir de cette artère.
Un sondage mené par la société de développement commercial a montré que 54 % des clients venaient à pied sur Mont-Royal. On parle donc d’une majorité d’entre eux!
Il y en a pas moins de 20 % qui viennent en transport en commun, bus ou métro.
Et tenez-vous bien: il y a plus de consommateurs qui viennent à vélo (12 %)… qu’en auto (11%)!
Bref, tout près de 90 % de la clientèle du boulevard s’y rend autrement qu’en voiture!
Et on se déchire la chemise parce qu’on la piétonnise pendant quelques mois cet été?
Comme m’a écrit mon ami Michel C. Auger, la place de parking, à la fin du confinement, est le rouleau de papier de toilette du début du confinement…
My bolding. I don’t usually quote whole chunks off Facebook but he has an important point to make.
(Who said last week that it’s no longer suburban visitors who drive in to keep streets like Mont-Royal alive?)
MarcG 11:11 on 2020-06-22 Permalink
Can someone explain the toilet paper joke to a maudite anglophone?
Blork 11:43 on 2020-06-22 Permalink
Basically he’s saying that the irrational toilet paper hoarding we saw at the start of the confinement has shifted to parking space hoarding at the end of confinement.
mare 11:53 on 2020-06-22 Permalink
If parking is so important for shops there are avenues (Haha) that haven’t been taken at the moment.
Shops often have access at the back of their buildings in the alleyways, and sometimes one or two parking spaces. Now those are used for the owner(s) or staff to park for free during the day, but if they’re serious they could reserve those spots for their clients (30 minutes max), and people can load their heavy bags with clothing and shoes without having to haul them. Make it into a unique selling proposition.
Or go even further: when all (or most) of the shops in the street pool those spots together, they could hire a roving parking attendant (on an electric scooter!) to collect parking fees, or set up a valet parking service at the intersections that aren’t blocked. Fee waved if you spend $20 on the street.
With some creative thinking they could find solutions—this might be one of them—that are maybe even better than the current situation. But change is hard and people don’t want the status-quo to ever be disrupted.
Bill Binns 12:06 on 2020-06-22 Permalink
This never ending argument could be solved with a few strategically placed multi story parking garages. It’s odd how few of them are in town actually.
Kate 12:14 on 2020-06-22 Permalink
Bill Binns: not really. All the older parts of town were built up before cars were assumed. Then people built strip malls at the edges of the existing residential areas (Angrignon mall, Rockland, malls in Lasalle, Anjou, St-Laurent) so people with cars gravitated toward those – a tendency that’s been going on since at least the 1950s. But by then, the denser, older parts of residential Montreal were already built up, and mostly easily accessible by metro, so there was no point in tearing down whole blocks of housing to put up parking garages. I think there’s one on an older side street in Verdun but it’s the only one I can think of like that.
MarcG 12:58 on 2020-06-22 Permalink
Yeah there’s one in “downtown” Verdun that was previously so underused that they were starting to host cultural events in it. Since Wellington has been made a pedestrian street for the summer I imagine it’s a bit busier than usual but I get the feeling that most people shopping are from the neighbourhood and just walk over.
qatzelok 13:39 on 2020-06-22 Permalink
I fear it might take another three or four COVIDs to get rid of most of our cars and airplanes (and thus increase our odds of surviving as a species).
But mankind’s gotta do what mankind’s gotta do… even when blinded by corporate propaganda.
CE 14:19 on 2020-06-22 Permalink
@Bill, Parking garages wouldn’t solve much. The first problem is the cost. Who is going to pay to expropriate expensive Plateau real estate near Mont-Royal and then build the thing just to keep a few suburbanites/JdM columnists happy? Are you willing to have your taxes pay for it?
The second is that people won’t use them. There’s that one in Verdun discussed above and another just off Plaza St-Hubert which also tends to be pretty empty. The problem isn’t the amount of parking but its distribution. Drivers generally want to park directly in front, or within a block of their destination. Often, if they have a couple stops on the same street or in the same neighbourhood, they’ll drive from place to place. There’s something psychological about driving and then having to walk that throws people off. I had a professor in planning school who told us about a study in Quebec City where they asked how far people were willing to walk from their cars to businesses on commercial streets, then compared it to how far people would walk from their cars to a store in a mall. They found that people walked much farther at the mall than they were willing to on a street. (sorry, this was a while ago and I don’t have a citation)
The third problem is aesthetics. Parking garages are rarely pretty and I doubt you’re going to get much support to rip down historic plexes along Coloniale or Brébeuf for multi-level parking garages.
What will work is accepting that continuing to dedicate a massive amount of the street for the convenience of vehicles that make up a tiny portion of the street’s clientele is pointless. Especially since removing cars/parking will definitely make the street nicer and the increased foot traffic will likely make up for the lost revenue from the loss of drivers.
Ephraim 14:54 on 2020-06-22 Permalink
My biggest problem with the pedestrianization of streets is that no one seem to consider the handicapped when reconfiguring the streets. For example, there is a spot on Mont-Royal at Marquette. If you close Mont-Royal, then put that spot elsewhere, so that those who need the spot, have a place to park. There used to be a spot at St-Catherine and St-Urbain (on St-Urbain). They changed it to no stopping on St-Urbain and yet, they didn’t relocate the handicapped spot. Imagine you are handicapped… it’s painful to walk, now where do you go instead? There is basically no parking on St-Catherine street because it’s often closed. There is no parking on St-Urbain. There are no close parking spots. And if you are just trying to drop someone off, like someone in a walker, there is no place to even stop for unloading anymore, except a no-stopping lane.
Jonathan 16:54 on 2020-06-22 Permalink
Kate, are you able to link to that article from François, I cannot seem to find it. LP only lists his editorials from 2019 on its site. And their search engine just throws me a Google search result!
I’m glad he’s mentioning there’s been research on the origin of customers of the street. It really echos the same for many retail streets in Canada. The King street West study in Toronto shows that store owners believed more than half their customers came by car, whereas I believe the actual number turned out to be 4% or something low like this.
DeWolf 20:06 on 2020-06-22 Permalink
The mass freak-out over Mont-Royal is truly something to behold. People in the media and on the internet are really losing their shit over it and yet the street is full of happy pedestrians every day, so there’s definitely some cognitive dissonance at play.
It’s also strange that there has been so much fixation on Mont-Royal when several other streets have been pedestrianized, including Wellington in Verdun and Ontario in Hochelaga, without a similar backlash. I also noticed that Bernard Street in Outremont is now pedestrian-only to accommodate extra-large restaurant terrasses (which were full to capacity when I passed by this evening).
When Ste-Catherine in the Village was pedestrianized for the first time in 2007, there was a lot of consternation, and now it’s a consistently popular summer attraction. Unless those 10% of people who were driving to Mont-Royal somehow kept the entire street’s economy afloat (which I seriously doubt), this tempest in a teapot will be forgotten by the end of the summer.
Chris 02:15 on 2020-06-23 Permalink
Another reason multi story parking garages won’t work is that they are expensive to build and maintain and make little revenue. The numbers are all in The High Cost of Free Parking.
For one, operators of such structures have to compete against free, which of course is what the city idiotically charges for most on-street parking. Of course, developers aren’t clamouring to build them.
Kate 08:28 on 2020-06-23 Permalink
Jonathan, this text by Cardinal was on his Facebook page, it wasn’t part of a formally posted piece. This is his page – I’ve no idea if you have to be logged into FB to see it.
walkerp 09:26 on 2020-06-23 Permalink
We don’t want multi-story parking garages because we don’t want cars in the Plateau. That’s the whole point of the pietonisation.