For context, Water Street in Vancouver looks like it was taken straight out of Paris or Amsterdam. It’s one of the oldest parts of the city and one of the few streets that were developed before cars. It should be an absolute no brainier to make it car free permanently, but carbrained North American city council gonna carbrain. This is less than the bare minimum and is absolutely not praiseworthy.
More importantly, they’re proposing it to be car free on the day with the least transit service and what little there is randomly gets delayed or cancelled without notice. Great idea!
Seriously, as someone who exclusively uses transit in Vancouver, the weekend service is infuriating and basically unusable if you’re under any sort of time pressure. You show up at a bus station, transit app says the next one is in 30 minutes when it would be 5-10 minutes on weekdays. So you resign yourself to a 30 minute wait only for the bus to not show up with zero announcements, even though they’re pretty good at notifying you of these things on weekdays. So now you have to wait for the next one in an hour, which might not show up either, and when it does, it’s packed to the brim because it’s carrying three buses worth of passengers and the driver puts on the “sorry bus full” sign and refuses to let you on even when several people get off at the same stop. It’s genuinely like they want you to drive on the weekend.
Calling it now: when car free Sundays inevitably flop because no one wants to bother with the shitty weekend transit, city council will go “see? car free streets never work!” And it will be used to shoot down every subsequent car free initiative. Wonder if that was their plan in the first place.
Once people have actually experienced it, it might gain political support, and doing it on the least busy day hopefully might minimise losing support for it from car brains because “iTs cAuSiNg tRaFfIC jAmS”, but probably equally likely to actually cause traffic jams even on a Sunday as people who aren’t aware of it will still try to drive through and have to turn around, which will be used as an example that “iTs cAuSiNg tRaFfIC jAmS” and “wiLl nEvEr wOrK” …
It sounds bad, but it’s a start. The city I live in there’s an area of downtown that was gentrified, then they slowly did this. Evolved to being completely car free permanently. Took a couple years, but it happened. They might be testing the waters like this to make sure there’s adequate parking in the surrounding areas for people that commute to get there? Idk, just giving feedback. I’m just about to ask ‘fuck cars’ as it gets. To me progress is progress as long as it’s not backward.
Same happened where I am. They did this to some streets on the summer time, and changed an entire lane into an extra wide bike lane. They were so popular, they were kept year round.
The transit issue sounds bad, but the next phase is people demanding more weekend transit, then it will improve, too!
Yeah, my city does this at the historical site where tourist usually flock to. Used to be just closing the road for a night market on friday to sunday, but now they start to make that particular area car-free from friday night to sunday night. Some trader bitch about it because their carbrained customer now can’t park right in front of their shop so they stop going there, but other shop like dessert and souvenirs reported a significantly rise in revenue because the foot traffic is even more incredible than it used to. It’s been a year now and the detractors is very silent about it considering they even did a politically motivated protest for this early on.
Sure it’s for just 2 days, but now some other city is reportedly looking to do the same thing. It takes time to fight a bad habit, and small win is still a win. Now i hope they do even more with this.
I will literally take whatever we can get rn
It would be a real shame if someone organised a protest on every Saturday and maybe sporadically during week days.
