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.
In my city we finally decided to install a tram line over a long avenue. Do you know that “classic” 4 lanes avenue where one lane on each side is practically reserved for assholes to “temporarily park” with hazard lights blinking?
So it becomes from
42 lanes to 2 lanes + tram. Win, right? I read an article about a sports goods store where the owner says “we decided to close shop now (when the tram construction isn’t even started) because next year without the space for customers to park (there isn’t now) how we could we continue business?”They won’t close. They just want the attention.
This is simple urbanism. Cars don’t stop in to see what a new business has to offer, pedestrians do. Pedestrians don’t need parking. Good urbanism makes local business boom. They are terrified of it.
Tell it to fucking swanston and bourke, dickheads
I don’t understand the logic behind this. Are they expecting folks to shop whilst still in their cars?
The argument is that people won’t go to the street if they can’t park, this is a stupid argument, especially in Montreal
I don’t understand this attitude. My town is having the same arguments. We have a central street filled with shops and restaurants that everyone wants to pedestrianize. It worked great for pandemic, and in smaller doses since. It brings huge amounts of foot traffic, tons more business, and gives people a place they want to go.
The argument against seems especially silly - there’s tons of public parking running behind the shops so it’s not like anyone wouldn’t go there
My optician is one of those opposed. They apparently think those couple street parking spots in front of their building are critical to their business. I’ve always founded it more convenient to use the public parking lot immediately behind them, no big loss. If the place is welcoming to pedestrians, I’m more likely to also walk up the street for an ice cream, or stop at one of the restaurants for dinner. If they think they get impulse shopping, they should want those hundreds of extra pedestrians when the street is closed
In my country they do both: the roads have crazy car drivers and the sidewalks are covered with these vendors
There’s nowhere to walk. It’s a nightmare
In addition to creating more pedestrian only zones, I like our “Verkehrsberuhigter Bereich (Living Zone?)” too.
Verkehrsberuhigt isn’t pedestrian-only. That would be Fußgängerzone.
Any small, local business owner that believes foot traffic will hurt their business should just close up shop already. Because they are idiots.
Not only is it better for the health of the community not to have cars there, but it strengthens the community by allowing people to interact with each other like human beings, and not caged animals.
I think I told this one here at some point, but in my town we had a particular storeowner who aggressively opposed making a street pedestrian-only. I’m talking camping in town hall as a protest. Threatening a hunger strike. This lady was on a mission. Her storefront was plastered with propaganda about how this was going to kill the town.
She was an absolute nuisance and her karmic punishment for this? She has prime commercial real estate on the most popular street in town while stores in streets open for traffic had to relocate or close because all the business happens in the car-free area.
I don’t think you understand karma.
Pretty sure they were being sarcastic.
damn, I as really hoping the story ended with everyone boycotting her store as she watched her business neighbors thrive before she eventually goes out of business.
Nope. Rising tides floating all boats include the really annoying boats, as it turns out.
Still, she was so spectacularly wrong I do still imagine how she processed that and whether the contradiction ever stuck. She really made a whole personality out of this for years.
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.
It’s nice to see that this asphalt area is being used for something valuable for society!
For sure! I hope they close it year-round so they can put more permanent things like water fountains and trees on the road.
Man, my first visit to Montreal was for heavy Montreal 2019 (BRING THAT BACK DAMNIT), and I loved walking down the pedestrian only streets near where we were staying.
Speaking as a car owner 15 minutes from a big downtown…
Car friendly downtown is impossible, and this is much better. Have some big park and ride areas well outside of downtown and bus people into the area, with some slow scooters if people really didn’t want to walk that much.
They closed one of the big downtown roads to vehicles and it’s so much nicer.
West TO reporting:
TO=Toronto?
Looks great!
Yes baby. Of course we don’t give a shit that we had to divert the street car and replace it with shuttle buses that go around the closed section of the street, but that’s a separate problem. 😂
In the bumfuck town I live in, they are barring the streets in the old town every weekend because it increases foot traffic and local stores were dying off. It’s still pretty run down and in bad shape, but better than before.
Without checking thoroughly, I think I lived near this street. It was really nice to walk there in the summer. Greater Montreal has several streets that close for cars in the summer. In French it’s called “piétonnisation”. But even here, there is resistance from stores. This year the City tried to make the Ste Catherine st. a big walkable street. It’s already like this in the gay village. They wanted to do also in downtown near Eaton Center where some streets already close for big events, like the F1. It didn’t work out. In the south shore, the St Charles st is also closed for cars.
Ouais, c’est dommage qu’il y ait encore beaucoup de gens contre ce genre de projet, par contre, je suis heureux qu’il y ait quand même de plus en plus de routes qui sont bloquées aux voitures chaque année !
L’gros, comment eske que je fais pour me rende au centre-ville si j’ai pas mon char?!
J’habite dans un quartier où je peux faire 99% de mon day to day à maximum 10 minutes de marche et c’est la belle vie. Le moins de temps je passe dans ma voiture, le mieux ma santé mentale se porte.
Sa nous prendrais sa dans des plus petites villes. Malheureusement la ville a pas été designé pour, si ta pas de char, tu va nulle part.
So true. I bought an e-bike last autumn and have been using it for pretty much everything since then, but haven’t considered myself fully car-clean until a few weeks ago when I consciously experienced car brain for the first time. My bike was at the repair shop and I had to drive my daughter to daycare instead of biking there. A 5min ride became a 15min nightmare with traffic, anger and frustration, mixed with anxiety of being late. I don’t think driving does that but traffic messes with our brains and our mental health so much. It’s crazy that we consider this mental state “normal” while going somewhere.
!["Not allowing cars on the street will kill businesses" [Montréal; Canada]](https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/7926cc0a-d955-44b1-8f73-1c3f88b7f2ab.webp){kind=link}