Although car-free zones remain a popular idea for 17th Avenue visitors and shoppers as temperatures warm, not everyone sees the positives in opening up the busy retail and entertainment portion of the street to pedestrians.
The results of a survey with area business-owners saw many answer with an “outright no,” and those results suggest the thoroughfare won’t be closing down to motorists any time soon.
The poll conducted by the 17th Ave. Business Improvement Area asked businesses their thoughts on the idea of a “car free zone” along the corridor.
According to BIA executive director Tulene Steiestol, approximately 70 per cent of the respondents said no to the proposal.
“Our role in it was to go to our businesses, we represent about 730 businesses within our corridor, and get a sense of what their opinions were,” she says.
Steiestol says there’s always a lot of chatter online about the topic as winter turns to spring and the weather starts to improve. The BIA’s survey was prompted by a long Reddit thread that popped around the start of summer last year that floated the idea of a ‘no car zone.’
“We don’t know who started that thread,” she says. “We took the survey to our business community, and it was an outright no.”
A major factor for businesses, according to Steiestol, is a lack of parking in the area, and with the street shut down, the stakeholders say a big chunk of the limited parking is lost.
Some businesses responded to the survey saying the move would result in a loss of customer traffic and sales.
Steiestol says the BIA is interested in pursuing other options that wouldn’t limit access to businesses and services along the corridor.
“It’s not that the conversation is off the table,” she says. “We’ve got about 40-plus blocks that are within our corridor. It’s looking at alternative spaces.”
She says the BIA does a lot of summer programming in Tomkins Park, and one option could be looking at how that could be decentralized to other nearby streets that typically don’t carry as much traffic as 17th Avenue itself.
“How do we move programming out of the park and into other parts of the corridor? Options that were just kind of throwing out there right now is 11th Street,” she says.
“There isn’t a really big east to west commuter road, when you think about 17th Avenue, there’s a lot of traffic that uses the road.”