!["Not allowing cars on the street will kill businesses" [Montréal; Canada]](https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/7926cc0a-d955-44b1-8f73-1c3f88b7f2ab.webp){kind=link}
Local shopping street in the city of Montréal, It’s the beginning of the summer here, and more and more streets are being closed to cars every summer (although they’re reopened during the cold Canadian winters), the difference in the amount of people there now vs last week when it was still open to cars is absurd.
Since It’s the beginning of the summer there was a marching band to celebrate, which was nice.
Businesses set up stands where they sold stuff, offered free samples and stuff like that, and there was also seating and games set out for kids, like a bouncy castle, some (mini) mini-golf courses and a mini skate park.
Just closing the street to cars made the space much nicer, and there were way more people there than when the street was open to cars.
And yet the shop owners will see this and then decide to just reject reality and still complain anyway about all those imaginary cars constantly stopping by to buy something.
Funnily enough, the closing of the roads has happened enough and is accepted enough that they can’t really argue that in montreal anymore.
Now they argue that it’s bad because it drives up shop rents on streets because demand to start stores on those roads go up 🤦.
That sounds straightforward enough to fix, close a few more roads.
Has to come with a plan for how people in cars get closer, but those options can be pretty terrible and still be way better than trying to drive downtown streets while trying to sort out where the hell you need to park.
I can’t imagine anyone wants to actually drive a car in a big downtown area, it takes forever and you end up walking a long way anyway.
The borough this street is in and the other ones around are completely covered in bike lanes (and bikeshare stations!), the metro has multiple stations not too far with bus connections to the street next to this one. So i wouldn’t say anyone needs to take the car there.
Oh, also, these pictures aren’t from the downtown, they’re from a residential area, so the shopping streets are surrounded by quiet residential streets, so even if all the shopping streets like this were closed to cars you could still get around/near the streets by car pretty well.
I definitely agree trying to drive in areas like these kinda sucks anyways, It’s just not worth it.
TLDR: I agree with you
edit: as an example, I took this pic on a walk yesterday.
Small business owners are not much brighter than gen pop, they LARP whatever local chamber tells them to and chamber of commerce is not pro small business, they just use them as useful idiots.