WHAT HAVE THEY DONE?

I walked downtown yesterday for another look at the mess that is lower Princess St right now. I wanted to know if I’d been too quick to judge the city’s reorganization of that corridor, to see if it somehow made sense after all.

The idea is to make more safe breathing room for pedestrians. And to free up some street space for restaurants to put out a few tables. And you can’t argue with that as a mission statement. But what they’ve achieved instead is something woefully inefficient and desperately unattractive.

When I was a kid our garden backed onto farmland. I’d hop the fence early morning and be gone until supper. I could wander wherever I wanted. And that should have been the idea here. But the concrete barriers and the nearly unbroken half-mile of steel fencing actually seem more like something you’d use to corral cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse. Once you’re on one side of the street, that’s it; there will be no cutting from Balzacs on the north side to The Grocery Basket on the south. The dis-incentive here to pedestrian traffic and to shopping seems so blatant, so sadistic nearly in how impossible it makes things, that you wonder how the plan was ever approved. 

More kindly, it looks like the finishing stretch for an urban triathlon: an ugly mess that will be gone by nightfall. But no such luck with this installation. It’s an anxiety-producing street now. Yesterday I found myself scanning, wild-eyed, for openings in the barricades that would permit me to cross into the sun, but spied only one between Bagot and Clergy. I was trapped in shade, and even the idea of making it home again began to seem remote. By the time I made it up to Sydenham I was writing my will.

I’m being dramatic but my god this is bad stuff. The new space has been mostly created on the south side of the street, which is shaded more often than not, and away from most of the restaurants. There are rumours (false, I hope) that it was done this way to accommodate traffic leaving the McDonalds drive-thru. 

You don’t see cities reversing themselves very much. There’s too much money involved to admit mistakes. But I hope it’s different this time. These are the strangest of days, and sometimes you only find your way through trial and error. Look how long it’s taken us to form a consensus on the use of face masks. Can’t we admit that this seemingly endless dog-run was an error, and fix it while there’s the bulk of summer left?

Surely the answer is to close the formerly so-pretty street to vehicular traffic, outside of some designated hours for delivery. Let’s celebrate our downtown core, and do our damnedest to help out those brave enough to open shops in the first place, and then to re-open them in the middle of a pandemic. Let’s help our restaurant owners by not jamming patios up against the snarling and honking traffic. To be honest, I’d like me and my IPA to be six feet away from the Hummers and Beemers too, not just from Bud in his MAGA hat.