Roads and parking, bis and bis
I try not to get too repetitive with themes on the blog, but it seems every day brings a new article about how merchants on some street are annoyed about temporary displaced parking. This time it’s in Sud-Ouest borough.
I can see why. But did the same merchants get annoyed when streets were closed for festivals? Was there enough parking before, and did people actually drive to shop along there? I ask this last question because a recent study showed that most people shopping along Mont-Royal were not driving there. They shop there because they live in the area. There’s still a place for local shopping streets.
Mtlparking 09:17 on 2020-07-30 Permalink
I own a business for 25+years..we always experienced our worst weekends of the year when the street would be closed for the sidewalk sales and never liked/wanted them but always felt it was ok to sacrifice a couple of weekends if closing the street benefited the majority of merchants so kept quiet (turned out it didn’t so they ended a couple of years ago but that’s a whole other discussion..) Removing parking would be disastrous to our business..Joe McMillan expresses our sentiments exactly https://twitter.com/joebeef/status/1288796709905195008
walkerp 09:46 on 2020-07-30 Permalink
We are in a period of transition. If your urban local business is so dependent on automobile traffic, then it is doomed. Taking away parking is only a small factor in that. People with cars who live outside the city have access now to most of the services in their suburb. Joe Beef is complaining because his is a hipster destination restaurant, so people from the suburbs drive in. That’s not the case for most local restaurants, so he may want to not act like he is speaking for everybody.
Ephraim 10:11 on 2020-07-30 Permalink
Sometimes I wish these people would travel to cities like Phoenix and see what happens when you don’t have a central core… you travel 30 to 60 minutes to go to a good restaurant, if it can survive and the marketplace is dotted with chains, because no one else can really survive.
Kevin 11:02 on 2020-07-30 Permalink
People get upset when they aren’t told what’s happening in their neighbourhood. They get more upset when they realize that only a select few were informed and so they feel excluded.
But after Projet Monteal doing this for 3 years for the entire city, it’s not going to change.
Kate 11:27 on 2020-07-30 Permalink
Kevin, I see that, but do these merchants get involved in the commercial associations (SDCs) for their streets? In some ways this evokes the people who don’t vote, but then go on to complain about issues. I’m sure the bureaucracy around the SDCs can be a pain, but how else can a group of businessmen with common concerns unite to communicate with the city?
Of course, I don’t know if the city has made these changes via the SDCs, or whether the SDCs are staffed up to the max with city fonctionnaires and not, in fact, representatives of the businesses concerned. Knowing this city’s style as I do, I suspect the latter may be the case.
DeWolf 12:02 on 2020-07-30 Permalink
The Joe Beef guy is complaining about the SDC being “corrupt” but apparently it did reach out to merchants in May asking them about Notre-Dame summer configuration. Maybe there was a communications breakdown after that. His “take back our city” histrionics on Twitter are a bit much.
Kevin 12:08 on 2020-07-30 Permalink
Kate
During the Monkland street festival debacle a couple years back, the main complaint from merchants was that nobody could ever reach the guy who ran the SDC. It was, for all intents and purposes, a one-man organization pretending to represent every business on the street.
Much like the way you feel about Fergus Keyes being the voice of the Irish community 🙂
Ian 13:17 on 2020-07-30 Permalink
The Gazette version of the article is slightly different and not quite as reactionary as a lot of the comments here…
“Sauvé, the councillor, urged merchants to “keep the conversation going” if they’re unhappy with the project. City officials will be monitoring traffic patterns over the coming days and will be ready to act if issues emerge, he said.
“People can talk to us,” he said. “We’re super open to doing adjustments. This is a temporary project, and nothing is set in stone. Our merchants are having a hard time and we’re in a period where we have to try new ways to make things work. We wanted to be proactive.””
https://montrealgazette.com/business/sud-ouest-merchants-up-in-arms-over-notre-dame-st-traffic-changes
The big thing to remember here is that PM isn’t trying to suppress cars, it’s trying to increase business. That might seem like semantics to some but the thing is that if making streets into pedestrian zones and allowing for temporary terrasses instead of having parking doesn’t increase business, then obviously this one-size-fits-all implementation is not the answer to how to keep businesses from failing. Remember the main source of income for the city is property taxes, they definitely don’t want businesses to fail. They are largely powerless over many aspects of this so they are flailing about trying to come up with ideas, which is why they are so eager to hammer square pegs into all the holes – this idea worked on Mt Royal and they want to see if it can made to work in places like the Little Burgundy – St Henri corridor because they have no other good ideas.
Maybe they could send in the clowns.
Em 14:49 on 2020-07-30 Permalink
Quite a few people in St. Henri seem to be mad about this, and not just business owners. Buses have been rerouted up to St-Antoine, which is pretty far to walk. Some are also unhappy about how much construction there already is in the area, and are worried about traffic being pushed onto small residential streets or St-Ambroise, which already had a fatal accident involving a child just recently.
I think removing a few parking spots would have been fine (well, except normal grumbling), but turning a main artery into a one-way does cause some chaos on already-clogged streets.
And while I like Projet Montreal, there’s a perception in some circles that they’re being a bit sneaky, and using the pandemic to push an agenda. I think they need to be careful not to go too far, because citizens don’t like politicians who are seen as deliberately making their lives harder (as Coderre learned during the Formula E debacle).
Ian 17:42 on 2020-07-30 Permalink
“there’s a perception in some circles that they’re being a bit sneaky”
QFT
Even in the before times when I was getting my license my driving instructor used to take me driving on Notre Dame, he said it was good practice dealing with crowded unpredictable streets with aggressive drivers and heavy traffic flow. He was right! Got me used to honking and aggressive behaviour from delivery rucks, too. I can only imagine what an utter shitshow that area must be now with all the construction & one-way streets. Dave M, whatever, he’s a fancypants gentrifier who from the sounds of his tweets does too much blow. On the other hand, I’m not surprised the guy at Nouveau Systeme is freaking right out. I lived in the bowels of Saint Henri for years, and it’s not teh same thing as the Plateau. PM has never really understood the gritty working class side of the SW and it really shows here.
jeather 18:14 on 2020-07-30 Permalink
The other issue is that with the turcot closed most weekends we already have all the people driving through, mostly along St Jacques, to get back on the 15, and now they are funneled even more.
CE 22:35 on 2020-07-30 Permalink
@Ian, have you been on Notre-Dame between Atwater and St-Remi lately? I have some clients on that stretch so I’m down there often now (after quite a few years of almost never being there). It’s amazing how much of the grit has been completely wiped away on that street! I was really surprised by how expensive most of the people’s clothes/dogs/cars/coffees looked. I sat outside of a pizza shop eating my overpriced slice of pizza one day and was treated to a passonate one-sided phone conversation about strategic use of hashtags for her startup. That conversation is about how I would sum up the new demographic of St-Henri.
Ian 07:26 on 2020-07-31 Permalink
Well see that’s the thing – there is certainly a lot of that. Long gone are the days of buying a triplex for 60k – or even 350k per floor. My old favourite place to get breakfast turned into an artisanal $20 hamburger place, the old biker bar on St F is now an ice cream parlour… but all those people that are poor working class still live in and around there, just pushed to the margins, and a lot of the older businesses still exist. Same thing is going on in the Point & Verdun. Gentrification is a huge problem in many parts of town – basically the gentrifiers are pushing out the older inhabitants. PM talks a good game about slowing gentrification but in reality they are very much part of the gentrification.
Joe Beef and its ilk aren’t part of the old neighbourhood either, that whole strip of ND by Atwater of pricy restaurants is also relatively new – and they aren’t there to cater to people in Little Burgundy that live in social housing, for instance. I’m not saying the neighbourhood should be reconfigured to suit the needs of the fancy new money businesses, either. This is the whole problem these neighbourhoods face, they are rapidly changing with new money coming in and the older residents & businesses feel that they are being simply ignored and even further marginalized – but now in their own neighbourhoods. I don’t know what the solution is, but one-size-fits-all street planning isn’t it.
Kevin 07:53 on 2020-07-31 Permalink
Dorais announced (on Facebook :/ ) that the borough is backing down