Car-free streets in downtown Montreal took ‘political guts.’ Can Toronto do the same?
Car-free streets in downtown Montreal took ‘political guts.’ Can Toronto do the same?
Closing streets in Montreal to traffic has proven popular with residents, tourists and businesses.
By Lex Harvey • Toronto Star
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I was there a couple of weeks ago and it was amazing. I felt something I missed ever since I left Eastern Europe for Canada half a lifetime ago. This would never happen under Tory. Olivia is the mayor who might do it. That said, given the sorry state of the city finances and infrastructure, she has a much tougher battles ahead of her to expend political capital on this.
So no. 🥲
The irony being, of course that a true "conservative" that cleaved to the values they claim to care about would absolutely want this kind of car-light/car-free downtown.
Time and time again, complete streets and walkable cities are shown to save huge money on the city budget. They cost so much less to maintain and they boost economic productivity so much. The return on investment is just immense compared to car-intensive infrastructure. There's a reason a city like Houston has something like double the per capita spend on transportation of a city like NYC in spite of NYC's massive subway system and there's a reason NYC has something like double the per capita spend on transportation to Amsterdam with its vast networks of bike paths and trains. Car-intensive infrastructure is crazy expensive to maintain. It's unfrugal madness.
And for the non-financial side, car-intensive civic design still doesn't qualify as "conservative". Having car-intensive design requires a huge, top-down approach to urban planning where the city tries to plan every aspect of its citizens lives. Plan for them and fit them into figurative boxes in order to make the literal boxes practical to use. It's practically authoritarian. It's a violation of the traditional values of cities which grew slowly and organically, adapting to the changing needs of their citizens through work done typically by those very citizens' hands.
Switching urban planning models to a car-first approach led to a lot of the other problems of modern cities, including the fact that small-scale/neighborhood developers have been all but run out of business by huge outsider development firms that refuse to build anything other than huge exurban sub-developments and luxury condos. Conservatives should be there to resist and reject this total upending of normal development of society, but they make money off of it so stay mum.
Buddy, no one here is confused that conservatives represent nothing in particular but whatever is going get them power and profit. I began blacklisting libertarians after years of arguments with a few in RL. Now I'm blacklisting conservatives without arguing.
You'll never convince a conservative they're being a hypocrite, but you can arm as many reasonable people as possible with arguments they can use to convince their dumbass aunts, dads, cousins, and friends to show up and vote against evil. At least that's my hope.
But it is also philosophically of interest to me that Strong Towns should be considered the very model of a modern Conservative political force while they are widely considered in pop culture to be WAY far left. The fact that being "conservative" today means having feelings-based political motivations and rejecting evidence-based approaches as its core precepts makes me tired and sad.
When I think about it, dirty socialist policies often have lower costs than "conservative" ones. For example housing people from the street is cheaper than having them live in encampments. Right to repair is cheaper than planned obsolescence. Cheaper for the majority that is. 🥲
Try reading what I wrote next time instead of just projecting all this hostility at me.
Agreed, I was visiting earlier in August and it was such a pleasant experience walking around the city in general but especially the pedestrian only roads. The ones they have implemented in Vancouver aren't nearly as lively and nice. Especially with our new mayor and council essentially just paying lip service to the concept this summer.
If the sorry state of city finances and infrastructure are a problem and priority, then building and maintaining pedestrian, bike, and rail infrastructure are potential solutions.
Take a look at this study detailing the cost benefit analysis of bike infrastructure in Portland, Oregon. Millions of dollars can be saved. https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/43289/8/Gotschi1.pdf
Another study concluded that “creating or improving active travel facilities generally has positive or non-significant economic impacts on retail and food service businesses abutting or within a short distance of the facilities”. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01441647.2021.1912849
“Building a new roadway for automobiles can cost tens of millions of dollars to construct, and many of the pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure projects and facilities are extremely low-cost in comparison. This infrastructure can also serve to improve safety for all road users, while also promoting healthier lifestyles through more bicycling and walking.” https://www.pedbikeinfo.org/cms/downloads/Countermeasure%20Costs_Report_Nov20131.pdf