A street scene from a summer past: Bar and café-goers gather on quaint patios, with flowers bursting from wooden planter boxes, and lights strung overhead. Bicycle riders meander through the crowds, passing church pews used as benches.
That scene is not from Europe, but is rather a snapshot of Mont-Royal Avenue, a car-free zone spanning 30 blocks near Montreal’s core. As of Thursday, vehicles have been barred from all 11 of Montreal’s designated pedestrian streets.
The city will keep those areas car-free longer into the fall this year, given the doubling of pedestrian visitors since the project started in 2021. Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante has credited the project with a reduction in commercial vacancies on Mont-Royal Avenue to 5.6 per cent in 2023 from 14.5 per cent in 2018, as other cities struggle with empty storefronts.
Montreal’s experience is a demonstration of the power of pedestrian-only areas to revitalize cities, at a time when the rise of hybrid work and other aftershocks of the pandemic have helped to hollow out urban cores.
The amenities that spring up in such pedestrian-friendly areas should be seen as a valuable asset as cities aim to convince more people to live in denser downtowns. Multilane streets jammed with vehicles and plumes of exhaust are not a compelling sales pitch for downtown life.
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Other Canadian cities should look to Montreal’s example, and stop dragging their feet on creating pedestrian-friendly zones. It is a question of philosophy, not geography.
One prominent example is Avignon in southern France. In the 1970s, walking the city’s narrow roads was a dangerous prospect, given the predominance of vehicles whipping around within its medieval walls. A visit to its almost 700-year-old papal palace meant navigating a cramped parking lot in its forecourt. The city began to reverse the dominance of the car that decade.
Since the 1990s, Avignon’s city planners moved more aggressively and started to ban cars outright from the commercial centre outward, making streets one-way, and constructing a tram ring and bike lanes around Avignon’s historic core. Today, public squares, cafés and bars once again proliferate.
The lesson from Avignon is that cities now famed for favouring pedestrians were not always so foot-friendly. They were only made so by careful planning. Some of Canada’s biggest cities – Toronto, Ottawa and Winnipeg – also have dense, walkable urban cores developed before they were overrun by the advent of the automobile.
It’s a shame that cities are slow-walking on barring cars from already bustling areas where there is public support for doing so: for instance, the ByWard Market in Ottawa, Kensington Market in Toronto, and parts of the Exchange District in Winnipeg and Old Strathcona in Edmonton.
Be warned: In order to be commercially successful, pedestrian areas need to be considered as part of a comprehensive strategy. History has shown that pedestrian streets located far from where people live often fail to draw visitors out of their way. Sparks Street in Ottawa, often empty outside of federal office worker lunchtime, is an example of this.
Business owners frequently express concerns that cutting access to customers arriving by car will also cut their revenue. There are also worries about accessibility, access for deliveries, waste collection, and emergency services to support businesses and residents. Given how tightly small businesses must run their operations to stay afloat, such concerns are understandable. But they are also not insurmountable with proper planning. Further, experience has shown, from Copenhagen to Vancouver, that encouraging people on foot and bikes is good for business. It’s exactly what happened in Montreal on Mont-Royal Avenue.
Much can be done to reduce the dominance of vehicles, even without going to a full-scale ban. Brussels is one example of how this has been done well. The city implemented a variety of measures in conjunction with pedestrian-only areas, including lowering speed limits, making many streets one-way and implementing automatic camera ticketing systems to control car access.
Canadian cities are facing two immense challenges: how to keep urban economies afloat in the age of remote work, and the need to convince people to forsake the placid pleasure of suburbia for downtown living. Pedestrian-friendly areas are an obvious first step to solving both.