Car-free Kensington wouldn’t work
Re Struggling with the obvious — removing cars — in Kensington Market:
Hume, Feb. 7
Toronto is lucky to have a visionary like Christopher Hume reimagine our city without its crippling addiction to automobiles. Invoking places like New York City, Copenhagen and Paris is a great start to breaking free from the continuum of car culture. Suggesting, however, that Kensington Market should be permanently pedestrianized is way off the mark in achieving any such grand visions.
In other examples Hume has cited, removing cars from an interconnected network of streets and public squares, along with sincere transit and cycling infrastructure, showed us a new form of urbanism. It sometimes also changed the economics of these areas, drove up property values and chased away businesses that couldn’t adapt quickly enough to gentrifying forces.
Pedestrianizing Kensington Market would destabilize the raw food vendors that made this neighbourhood a market. It could reduce our community to a hipster-bar food-court Disneyland while doing nothing to deter the war on pedestrians everywhere else. It could only work if we took the car-free notion to Yonge, Bloor, Queen, King, Yorkville, Liberty Village, and so on, all at once, albeit temporarily, say on some Sundays like we do in the market.
Many of us naively thought when we instigated Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market that permanent pedestrianization would be a good thing. We now understand how fragile the business climate and residential needs of the community are and how pedestrian prioritization works in cities around the world.
Toronto has to take bold measures to combat the motorized apocalypse that we are facing. Thank you, Mr. Hume, for having the guts and imagination to show us another city is possible — keep it up and maybe we’ll get there some day. Shamez Amlani, Toronto