Pedestrian-friendlier Government St. eyed
Councillors consider more test closings, put off exploring permanent vehicle ban
Victoria won’t explore turning Government Street into a pedestrian mall until at least 2020-21.
Meanwhile, the city will make up to $25,000 available to support test closings of Government Street to vehicles similar to those undertaken last summer.
The idea of permanently closing Government Street to vehicles is supported by the majority of councillors, but Coun. Geoff Young said it “is a failure of imagination.”
“Government Street is by some arguments the most successful street in the downtown. Rather than taking the best street we have and changing it we should figure out how we can make other streets more like Government Street,” Young said.
That would mean making other streets more pedestrian friendly and easy to cross while still carrying a reasonable traffic load.
“To me the idea that something really works great, let’s change it, is just not the approach we should take,” Young said.
Last summer, in a move backed by the Downtown Victoria Business Association, a section of Government Street was closed to vehicles on Sundays from noon to 5 p.m.
Councillors agreed during budget deliberations Wednesday to allocate up to $25,000 to help continue the closing test this summer, and to explore options for a pedestrian mall in 2020-2021.
The concept of closing Government Street to vehicles, or as Mayor Lisa Helps prefers to say, opening it to pedestrians, has been around for decades.
“I take Coun. Young’s points,” Helps said. “The worst thing possible would be to ruin Government Street by pedestrianizing it. The best thing possible as Coun. [Charlayne] Thornton-Joe said, was to keep the people who already come there because they love the street and attract more.”
Since the 1970s, there have been calls to turn Government Street — one of the city’s main tourist strips — into a more people -friendly pedestrian mall.
But not everyone agrees. Some argue that more than 2.7 million pedestrians already use Government Street every year and cars bring customers.
There are also worries that without programmed activities a pedestrian mall could become a magnet for drug dealers, vagrants and panhandlers.
Helps said the test last year became more successful when the city supplied large chess pieces and some other amenities such as chairs. “It certainly made the whole street feel different. People were spilling out of Murchies and sitting in the street,” she said.
In an interview, Helps said she supports a cautious approach but not a do-nothing approach.
“We learned that you need to program the space in order to make it feel like a place rather than just a closed-down street. We learned there is business interest, particularly in animating the street. They wanted to, I think, extend their patios a little bit, but their liquor licences didn’t come through in time,” Helps said.
“So we’ll do another pilot this year maybe for a few more days or some different days and then get our staff to look at what it would look like to make it a pedestrian-only area in 2020 or 2021.”
City director of engagement Bill Eisenhauer said last year’s effort was volunteer driven and the city lent equipment.
“One of the things we heard was when it’s ad hoc and you’re mustering volunteers, that it wasn’t as successful as it could be if it had a program with a dedicated plan and source of funding,” Eisenhauer said.
Helps said a large funding allocation isn’t needed for the test. “Obviously our staff will go put out barricades and signs and so on, but I think $25,000 is probably adequate and we can work with the DVBA.”