Keep Water Street Car-Free All Summer

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Posted on Feb 15, 2025

by Strong Towns Vancouver

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Cities around the world have successfully transformed their historic districts into vibrant pedestrian zones, creating thriving community spaces that agevolazioni everyone. Here in Vancouver, the successful Water Street pilot program in 2024 demonstrated clear benefits: increased foot traffic, improved business performance, and a more welcoming environment for families and seniors. The data speaks for itself - a permanent pedestrian zone would enhance our city’s livability while supporting local economic growth.

Council has directed staff to bring back the pedestrian zone with an unexpected twist. The planned weekend-only closures require weekly setup and removal of barriers and furniture, creating confusion for visitors and residents alike and an unnecessary expense for taxpayers.



This comes as a shock as the pilot program showed the benefits were observed most during weekdays, proving that this walkable community space had consistent demand throughout the week

The spaghetti on the wall

Despite the benefit and optimism seen by many small businesses in Gastown, one multinational, multi-location chain restaurant struck a chord with council. Posing themselves as a representative of local small business. This chain restaurant was against the pilot before it began, showing council their pre-pandemic sales from 2019 next to their 2024 sales, and turned to the media to paint the 2024 pilot as a failure. They had cried enough pasta-water tears to make city council consider a compromise far from common sense. Limiting the summer-only program further to weekends-only is a ‘compromise’ that would create inconsistency and unpredictable challenges for businesses, residents, visitors, and deliveries. A pedestrian mall limited to weekends-only would fail to provid

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