Commercial vacancies: no solutions
The headline here suggests insights into commercial vacancies but doesn’t actually provide them, and I think the analysis of St‑Denis Street fails to see a couple of issues.
In a recent study, some commercial streets were shown to be doing really well, largely because they serve a local clientele. But St‑Denis – between Pine and Mont‑Royal, at least – has never felt like a neighbourhood shopping street. Since the 1980s at least, it’s been a more worldly, upscale street, with no basics like a grocery or hardware store, but rather clothing, cosmetics, home decor and cafés. (Yes, there are a couple of health-food stores – expensive ones.)
But, and this is something we don’t often discuss – St‑Denis is also a highway, literally. It’s Autoroute 335. A shopper can’t easily hop from one side of the street to the other, on a whim. Cars totally dominate. You can’t close the street to traffic for a street sale, as you do on other shopping streets.
And maybe we’re beginning to find this arrangement uncongenial.
DeWolf 09:43 on 2021-11-01 Permalink
It’s a strangely negative take considering the low vacancy rates on most streets, and of course it fails to note the trend over time, which is that vacancy rates are declining. As I mentioned in my comment to the last article, St-Denis has cut its vacancy rate more than half since 2019, despite the hardships of the pandemic. If you only read this Journal article you’d be under the impression that Montreal’s commercial streets are struggling.
The REV has addressed the issues you describe with St-Denis. There are now only two lanes of slow-moving traffic, and there are three new crosswalks with little landscaped islands that make it far easier to hop from one side of the street to the other. The crosswalks in particular have really improved the pedestrian experience of the street, and it’s far more pleasant to sit on a terrace having a coffee when there aren’t cars blasting by at 60 km/h.
Kate 09:59 on 2021-11-01 Permalink
Good points, DeWolf. Thank you.
mare 11:03 on 2021-11-01 Permalink
Yeah, what DeWolf said, St-Denis used to be a real highway and the fastest route between downtown and the North of the island and Laval. Not anymore, and now it’s a much nicer street to walk and sit.
Because of the traffic calming a lot of St-Denis’ north-south traffic has moved to St-Laurent/Clark, Park and also to Papineau, which all have traffic jams during most of the day now. Sitting on a terrasse on Saint-Laurent in Little Italy is not a pleasurable experience.
East-west traffic north of the St-Denis rail underpass coming from Van Horne (which is a main artery to go around Mont-Royal on the north side and connect to the Papineau bridge and the 40-East—and a way to avoid the traffic jam on the 40) has also increased with the Bellechasse REV and the bike path on St-Zotique. Traffic on Rosemont and Beaubien has noticeably increased and the constant chaos near the Beaubien and St-Hubert intersection is not fun for either pedestrians near the metro nor for passengers in the busses that are stuck. St-Hubert is also full of cars that aren’t local traffic, which defeats the ‘woonerf’ experience they wanted to create.
I live in that area but drive only occasionally and mainly observe the traffic as a cyclist, but if it’s your daily commute I can see you’re annoyed. Traffic is a “nightmare”, and most people won’t admit that they *are* the traffic themselves, so they blame other changes.
I guess the anti-car image of Montreal gained some points there, and The Journal loves to feed those sentiments.
Kevin 11:06 on 2021-11-01 Permalink
Do we really need to have hundreds of thousands of people moving from home to office five days a week when we’re in a climate emergency?
Picture Trudeau announcing at COP26 that all federal employees will work remotely, and that companies will be given incentives for not having workers commute.
We keep talking about drastic change, right? Well there’s a drastic change.
Poutine Pundit 11:53 on 2021-11-01 Permalink
The latest St. Denis makeover with the REV has really made it far more pleasant to walk along, and vacancy rates have gone down, as said above. Those planted medians are genius, and I wish they’d done more than three.
The bits of St. Denis near Rosemont and Jean-Talon metro stations could use a little of that love. That six-lane highway in front of Rosemont station and Marc Favreau library needs rethinking to make it more pedestrian friendly. The concrete median strip and narrow crowded sidewalk on Jean-Talon could be replaced with something leafier.
mare 12:02 on 2021-11-01 Permalink
@Kevin I have the impression that *a lot* of commuter traffic that barrels through the streets of Montreal doesn’t go to and from downtown, and they aren’t people with desk jobs that can work remotely. Instead they’re people going between the industrial parts on the North-shore and South-shore, and the industrial parts on the island itself in the East (Dorval, Lachine etc) and West (Anjou, Montreal-Est etc) where they work, to the place where they live, which might be at the other side of the island of Montreal, and often off-island. That traffic came back very soon after the lockdown, because the people working in those businesses can’t work from home (or it’s impractical, like for office staff in factories or suppliers). And it has even increased because more people travel by car because they are reluctant to car pool or use public transport (if that’s even a viable option).
We have 5 bridges that are not *real* highways, but according to Google maps, taking them still makes a faster (and cheaper) route from the North-shore to the South-shore and vice-versa than the blocked *real* highways and tunnel, especially during rush hour. And even if they aren’t *actually* faster (or just a few minutes) people still perceive a straight and more direct route as faster, because brains think that way.
Implementing bridge tolls, with higher tolls on the smaller bridges, and in general during rush hour (congestion charge) might be a good solution to lower the traffic that passes *through* the city. It’s however politically impossible to implement, at the moment or maybe ever, because bridges are under federal and provincial control and the burbs have more political power there.
DeWolf 17:24 on 2021-11-01 Permalink
I’m sceptical how much traffic was actually displaced by things like the REV Bellechasse given that it was a pretty quiet street to begin with. I think the problems we’re seeing now have a lot to do with the fact that there are more cars on the roads than before the pandemic, and also because travel patterns have been disrupted. Traffic is just as bad as it was before 2020 but it’s behaving it very different (and often unpredictable) ways.
Kevin 22:46 on 2021-11-01 Permalink
Rush hour has changed significantly, but the daytime traffic is exposing those areas that are always over capacity because they are poorly designed-like the exits off Decarie North.