Walk This Way: Pedestrian Streets on the Rise
European-style pedestrian streets are coming to B.C. It’s a move widely praised by local academics and community activists – but is it good for business?
Standing on the loading dock outside Starbucks at downtown Vancouver’s Davie and Mainland intersection, it isn’t difficult for urban planner Ian MacPhee to imagine the future. Where today there’s a Canada Line SkyTrain construction site, in seven months over 1,500 people a day will congregate at the newly opened Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. They’ll funnel along the narrow sidewalks of Yaletown, jaywalk, clog traffic, stop for coffee or sushi, and wonder how might the city better accommodate their efforts to move around. MacPhee has a solution.
Sitting in the window of the Abruzzo Cappuccino Bar on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, activist European-style pedestrianized retail streets are coming to B.C. It’s a move widely praised by local academics and community activists – but is it good for business? Carmen Mills can see the future too. Five years ago, amid a lot of skepticism from local merchants, she helped organize the Drive’s first one-day car-free street festival. Now, with an estimated 60,000 people attending the 2008 event – and with retailers reporting an average 80 per cent increase in gross sales (according to a recent East Vancouver Celebration Society survey) – she expects civic authorities will respond to merchants’ new-found enthusiasm and institute more Sunday street closures there.
From his window overlooking the intersection of Vancouver’s Cordova and Water streets, SFU’s director of Urban Studies, Anthony Perl, has a view of the future too. What will happen, he asks, when the downtown trolley system – now running on tracks between Granville Island and Science World – is extended north, as is planned, to Water Street and the retailers there realize that money might be made if those three blocks of Gastown were converted to a pedestrian-priority transit mall?
Restoring downtown vitality
All over the world, in hundreds of cities and in a variety of ways, planners, politicians and merchants have sought – in the face of urban traffic congestion and the lure of big box suburban malls – to restore the vitality of downtown retail streets. According to Perl, many North American myths of how cities work – and how merchants make money – have been disproved in recent years by what has happened in Europe. Instead of making cities easier for cars, make them harder. Instead of emphasizing traffic flow and parking spaces, encourage the use of foot power downtown. And instead of car-only streets or pedestrian-only streets, allow walkers, cyclists, transit and slowed automobiles to all exist together, just as happened a century ago at the dawn of the Autosaurus Age and as happens today on Vancouver’s popular Granville Island. “Traffic engineers realized,” says Perl, “if you take away some cars and widen sidewalks, you get more people. A parked two-tonne container takes up a lot of space compared to a person. More people: more shoppers. More retail revenue: higher real estate values. Look what happened on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive with their annual car-free Sunday. At first retailers suspected it. But after a few years, it’s one of the retailers’ busiest days of the year there. Businessmen like making money, right?”
But marketing isn’t just about making money. It is – as advertisers, resort operators and mall-owners know – about the Snap! Crackle! and Pop! of selling things. The pizzazz. To regain favour with urban shoppers, streets need – to use the words of Andrew Pask, director of the 2,000-member Vancouver Public Space Network – “a profound sense of invitation.” It’s his view this occurs when streets have texture and don’t just serve as noisy rights-of-way for vehicles (or, for that matter, not just for pedestrians either). “You can’t just close a street and expect it to work. Businesses have to see the advantage. You want layering. You want transit. You want wide sidewalks. You want zoning that supports a vibrant mix of uses: high-end retail, chintzy tourist shops, galleries, outdoor cafés. You want benches and public toilets. You want to manage the place, with buskers, fashion shows, kiosks. You want low-rise three- to five-storey buildings around so people don’t feel intimidated. You want a place people go.” Pesk points to sections of Amsterdam or Copenhagen as examples of how European cities have converted their downtown streets to mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly areas, while maintaining adjacent commercial vitality. In fact, there are 174 car-free or pedestrian-priority urban zones in Europe today plus 44 in the United States and 15 more in South America, including Argentina’s famous 12-block Florida Street district of Buenos Aires, which is packed daily with tens of thousands of strollers who crowd its adjacent stores.
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