Plaza won’t be pedestrianized this summer
Plaza St-Hubert won’t be pedestrianized this summer, even though the borough felt last summer’s experiment, from July 4 to August 25, was a popular success. But merchants on the street didn’t agree.
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Kate
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Nicholas 22:50 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
100 merchants against, 70 in favour, 230 didn’t vote; 88% of residents in favour. And so the borough decides not to do it. I biked past there a bunch of times last summer during the pedestrianization and a few times it was so packed I could barely even walk with my bike. (Otherwise it was just busy.) Imagine being that bad at running a business with that many customers at your doorstep.
Daniel 12:30 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
It was busy when I went there, too. And yet people — myself included! — did not seem to be spending money. We were just ambling around. Which I think is a fine — even great — use of a pedestrian space, but not one that businesses would get excited about. The La Presse story included a suspiciously precise amount of business the merchants lost — and I say suspicious because it would have been based solely on on those who reported, presumably.
Honestly, my take-away impression of it was how many business just rolled racks of (may I say unappealing) clothing out onto the street, which I found strange and not enticing to say the least. It’s a shame we don’t get a second crack at this, perhaps with some business coaching or seminars on how to make a buck on this kind of thing. I know that’s too much to hope for, but a blog commenter can dream.
DeWolf 12:36 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
La Presse had some interesting data in its article:
“La mesure avait fait bondir de 85 % le nombre de visiteurs, mais les commerçants avaient vu leur chiffre d’affaires reculer de 7,3 %.”
That is astonishing. How are you so bad at business that the number of people walking past your shop nearly doubles and yet you are losing money? If your job is to sell things to people, and you can’t sell anything to the masses of people outside your front door, maybe you’re selling the wrong thing.
Of course we have no idea where this 7.3% figure comes from and exactly who it represents. News reports last year had quotes from some of the old ball gown places claiming a huge drop in business, while other businesses (eg La Vie en Rose) said there was no impact and others (especially restaurants) said there was a big surge in customers.
Maybe the real problem here is that people aren’t buying chintzy ball gowns the way they used to and stuck-in-the-mud shopowners are looking for a scapegoat instead of adapting their business to a changing market.
DeWolf 12:44 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
@Daniel – “Just ambling around” is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. Shopowners seem to think we owe them our money, but it’s the other way around: they need to give us a reason to buy their products.
Tim S. 13:49 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
Years ago I used to work at the Jean Talon Market, and our most crowded times (weekend afternoons) were not when we made the most sales (weekend mornings). Sure, ambling around is a perfectly legit thing to do, but I get why businesses would be annoyed that existing customers who come to them for particular items are driven away by people enjoying the scene but not in the mood for an impulsive crate of tomatoes/first communion dress. I like pedestrian streets as much as anyone else, but a good city has a mix of uses, no?
jeather 13:59 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
I definitely try to go to the market earlier and not later when I have stuff I specifically want to buy.
Blork 15:56 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
@DeWolf: re: “How are you so bad at business that the number of people walking past your shop nearly doubles and yet you are losing money?”
I’m just speculating here, and doing so with no agenda or bias, but it’s probably because the people walking by are not the same people who used to go to St-Hubert. The people walking by are now highly on the “ambling” side — which as you say is fully legit — but they probably don’t shop much, or if they do, it’s in different shops than the ones where sales have dropped. I’m guessing that the complainers are people who run shops where people used to come from afar to shop there, not just neighbourhood people. If those “from afar” people think they’ll be inconvenienced by the lack of parking (whether or not they actually will be is irrelevant; it’s what they THINK that matters), then they will shop elsewhere.
If that’s the case, then it’s not that these shops are bad at business per se, but that their customers have moved on and the new influx of amblers are not interested in their products.
FWIW, I don’t often go to Plaza St-Hubert, but when I do I always enjoy it and I envy the people who live nearby. It’s come a long way since the days when every second store was selling wedding dresses and ball gowns.
DeWolf 18:45 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
It was a rhetorical question, mainly because I can imagine very easily how someone can ignore the massive increase in footfall: just do nothing. There are a lot of people who, despite running a business, just aren’t very entrepreneurial.
By contrast I can think of quite a few St-Hubert businesses that made the most out of the pedestrianization. The ones who put their goods out on the sidewalk were at least making an attempt to draw in new customers; I certainly saw a lot of people browsing. Many of the Latin American businesses started selling food on the sidewalk or out of the front of their shop: tamales, fresh fruit and veg, tacos. Tenorio’s built an outdoor bar on its terrasse which created a funny Malecón kind of vibe. I have no idea if these were lucrative ventures but at least they made an effort.
At the very least, I hope the borough uses the funding already approved by City Hall to bring back the pop-up terraces that were on St-Hubert last summer. They were really nice, comfortable places to sit and well-lit enough that I often saw people sitting there reading books late into the evening. They’d need to be redesigned to account for the fact there will be cars on the street, but that could easily be done.
Poutine Pundit 01:28 on 2025-02-07 Permalink
St. Hubert is already pedestrian-friendly without full pedestrianization. It has a single narrow one-way traffic lane and another for parking and summer patios. Traffic is generally light and slow-moving because the traffic lane is so narrow, never bumper-to-bumper. The sidewalks are wide. The same goes for Duluth—another street where pedestrianization adds little tangible benefit.
In contrast, pedestrianization makes a real difference on wider streets like Mont-Royal and Wellington, which have four lanes, two of which are wider and have faster moving cars that make spontaneous pedestrian crossings more difficult. Mont-Royal has more traffic. There, it meaningfully improves the pedestrian experience.
On St. Hubert, however, the impact feels negligible. I live right next to it, don’t own a car, walk everywhere, and feel mostly indifferent to the fact that it won’t be pedestrianized this summer.
DeWolf 13:12 on 2025-02-07 Permalink
I disagree about Duluth. It’s exactly the kind of street that should be pedestrianized year-round. The sidewalks are very narrow and when cars are allowed, you’re shunted onto them and it’s not nearly as much of a pleasant experience as it should be. Despite the fact that it’s narrow and bumpy, lots of drivers use it as a ran run between St-Laurent and St-Denis, and they’re often pretty aggressive. I’ve had several close class with impatient drivers running stop signs on Duluth. For such a small street that really shouldn’t be the case.
In the summer it’s the perfect street for ambling: less busy than Mont-Royal, but still cosy because of how narrow it is. Plus you have a lot of street performers, which isn’t possible with cars because there would be nowhere for people to stand and watch.
At the very least, I think there should be a modal filter at Duluth and Laval, so that anyone travelling east from St-Laurent will be forced to turn, eliminating it as a thoroughfare. That would probably eliminate 90% of the traffic. And of course make it a shared street so you can legally walk down the middle.