Canada Letter: Sharing the streets

The pandemic made willing partners of retailers and restaurants to rethink how streets for cars can be converted into spaces for pedestrians.

View in browser|nytimes.com August 10, 2024 More Cities in Canada Dabble With Pedestrian-Only Streets Outdoor dining in Toronto's pedestrian-only Distillery District during the first year of the pandemic. Chris Young/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press By Vjosa Isai It's rare for traffic barriers to signal much other than a construction detour, but the bollards and concrete slabs blocking cars from a handful of Montreal roads this summer have a dual purpose. They also represent a type of public space emerging in more Canadian cities: pedestrianized streets. Montreal is Canada's poster child when it comes to these urban spaces. Mayor Valérie Plante has praised the city's seasonal pedestrian streets — known to have a dynamic mix of terraces, activities and outdoor cultural events — as a signature part of Montreal summers. More Canadian cities have become allured by the possibilities of pedestrian-only streets. This summer, in a pilot project, Vancouver turned Water Street in its touristy Gastown district into a pedestrian zone. Halifax, in 2017, called itself the first city in the Atlantic provinces to design a streetscape project in which patios, pedestrians and cars shared the road. Toronto began its outdoor dining program, CaféTO, three months after Covid took hold and then made the program permanent. Proposing a car-free street project was, before the pandemic, a pretty reliable way to get into a turf war with local businesses. Retailers view blocking traffic mostly as a sure hit to their bottom lines because they say it discourages usual clients from shopping, as they arrive by car and need places to park. Pushback from businesses tends to be met with an equal amount of bureaucratic hand-wringing by the city government, which has many of its own considerations to make, like adapting dining bylaws and managing traffic congestion. But operating outdoors was the safer option at the height of the pandemic, and businesses became open to seeing the street as more than a place to park, said Kelly Gregg, a professor of urban planning at the University at Buffalo. "It did accelerate the willingness of cities to experiment with pedestrian and public space design ideas," said Dr. Gregg, who began researching pedestrianized streets during her doctoral studies at the University of Toronto. "Toronto adapted really well during Covid," she said, adding that curbside cafes and dining options provided a lifeline to businesses, allowing them to run under strict lockdowns and physical distancing. Last fall, the Toronto outdoor-dining program CaféTO saw a sharp decline in permits from businesses, which criticized the high fees and clunky application process. On the other hand, the program in Montreal, which also took off in response to the pandemic, appears to be more popular with local business owners. In 2022, the municipality took bigger steps to entrench pedestrianized streets with an investment of 12 million Canadian dollars over three years. The city expanded its list of street closures to 11 from the spring to fall, cutting off traffic through areas where 2,100 businesses operate. The number of visitors has doubled since the program started in 2021, the city has said. On a recent reporting trip to Montreal, I explored a handful of these streets. My last stop was in the Quartier Latin, where salons and tattoo parlors were winding down for the evening as dinner service picked up on lively restaurant patios. Lanterns and colorful flags decorated the outdoor dining areas. Food delivery workers lingered around their bicycles at a kebab shop. Around the corner, a hip-hop dance battle was about to start, and spectators sat around watching competitors warm up. I popped into Arriba Burrito, a Mexican restaurant that opened about five years ago, and I spoke to Karan Singh, its manager. He had mixed feelings about the pedestrianized street project and said that some streets, like the one-and-a-half-mile stretch of Avenue du Mont Royal, were better managed than others. "We lose so many people because they don't find any parking," Mr. Singh said, owing in part to the road construction near the restaurant he manages. He also thinks the mix of activities on Mont Royal, especially the shops, are more successful at attracting foot traffic. The early designs of pedestrianized streets were largely about shopping and retail, Dr. Gregg told me. As modernism took hold in urban design, cities began to rethink these spaces, seeing them as ways to add greenery and promote local climate goals, for example, or to encourage entertainment and leisure. "The pedestrianization idea is much more about public space and entertainment and sort of building a livable city," she said. "It's about consuming an urban experience more than it is about consuming retail goods." Trans Canada Photographs from Wanda Kagan, Kamala Harris's close friend from high school in Canada, showing her with Ms. Harris. Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times Vice President Kamala Harris of the U.S. spent part of her youth in Montreal. It set her on a path to becoming a prosecutor, but that time was also marked by yearning for home. In the documentary "Sugarcane," filmmakers follow communities grappling with the history of St. Joseph's Mission, a residential school in British Columbia and one of many schools in Canada that Indigenous students were forced to attend. Alissa Wilkinson, a Times movie critic, says the film is a must-see. Tracy Ealdama, a Canadian set designer who also makes miniatures, is one of the artists memorializing the architecture of quickly changing cities with tiny renderings, Zoey Poll writes for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Artistic swimming is one of the most theatrical sports in the Olympic Games. For their technical routine, the Canadian artistic swimmers channeled "Forest Magicians." One swimmer on the team, Claire Scheffel, said, "We're really trying to give the vibe of the forest, of the powers that are within it." At a hair salon in the athletes' village, some Olympians are taking a chance on new hairstylists to keep their coifs looking fresh. For Nyl Yakura, a Canadian badminton player, it was a "little bit of a risk" to put his hair in the hands of an unfamiliar barber far away from home, Andrew Keh writes. Jake Williams, a filmmaker and content creator in Toronto, returned to Walt Disney World in Florida for the first time in years and came to a different conclusion about whether the Disney theme park vacation was still worth the price. Matthew Tocheri, a paleoanthropologist at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, weighs in on the discovery of an arm bone belonging to an ancient "hobbit" human. Miles Greenberg, a performance artist born in Montreal, found inspiration from video games to create "Respawn," a daylong performance at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Vjosa Isai is a reporter and researcher for The New York Times in Toronto. How are we doing? We're eager to have your thoughts about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Please send them to nytcanada@nytimes.com. Like this email? Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here. Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for Canada Letter from The New York Times. To stop receiving Canada Letter, unsubscribe. To opt out of other promotional emails from The Times, including those regarding The Athletic, manage your email settings. To opt out of updates and offers sent from The Athletic, submit a request. 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