Bloor Street Gets New Benches

Sitting down is kind of awesome. So it is with great happiness that I noticed new benches popping up on the stretch of Bloor between Spadina and Bathurst a few weeks ago. These new benches replace the previous benches on the street, which, to put it nicely, were showing their age.

The new benches are love-seat size, with wooden slats joined up with a curving metal armrests that look almost floral, like out-turned petals. It's not the most beautiful of designs, but it is functional and, I'm glad to see, doesn't contain the middle armrest that is used to discourage those who would want to lie down on a bench (although the short length means lying down would be a bit uncomfortable).

The benches are also backless, which usually I don't like, but makes sense here on a busy street where people are unlikely to sit and read for hours and more likely to sit and wait for their friend to get out of Book City. It also means you can choose to face traffic or the street. Benches with backs make that decision for you.

It's great to see these included on a stretch of street that sees lots of people milling around outside of various establishments and using the incredibly bulky planters as impromptu seating.

[edit: Further investigation reveals that these benches are part of Astral Media's street furniture contract with the City of Toronto. Think Toronto's hideously ugly and functionally terrible garbage cans. At least there is no advertising on these benches.]

Four Days in Montreal

I got back last night from four days (well, three and a half if you subtract bus travel time) in Montreal. This was not the first time I had been to the city, but I noticed a lot of new stuff since I was last there for two weeks in the summer of 2007. Namely, more and better public spaces, changes to the street system, and perhaps most drastically, the addition of the Bixi bike share program and a slew of amazing separated bike lanes.

Streets

The above picture is Rue St. Catherine, which is one of the main drags in downtown Montreal, spanning the gay village, the Place des Arts, and the major shopping street. The city is undertaking a massive change in tone to the streetscape along certain stretches by taking out the curbs that separated cars from pedestrians and laying the whole road in the same material. Although only parts were open, it's already obvious that this changes how the street feels entirely. Given that when I was there in 2007 for the jazz festival this street was the one closed off for the largest outdoor stage, it only makes sense to be able to create a space that converts easily between road and pedestrian plaza.

This is another section of Rue St. Catherine in the gay village. For multiple blocks beginning at Rue Berri the street has been shut to car traffic from May until September in order to create a pedestrian street where the many bars and restaurants in the area are able to extend their patios. The result is an amazingly vibrant area filled with all sorts of people. We drank many a beer and people-watched along this strip, as it was busy even late into weekday nights.

Montrealers seem to love their patios (who doesn't, actually?) and examples abound all over the downtown. Sometimes it's just a few tables and chairs out on the street and sometimes it's more formal, like in the above picture. While it makes walking the crowded streets sometimes difficult, it definitely adds to the atmosphere and makes for a more interesting walking experience. Plus, you get to see what everyone is eating.

Public Space

Montreal's waterfront, while still littered with industrial remnants, has some really great spots with wide walking and biking promenades and plenty of green space to sit. However, it didn't really feel all that coherent to me, meaning that as I walked along the waterfront there wasn't a sense of unity between all the different pieces. There were a few gems, though, like the small pond/canal featured above.

The area around Place des Arts, where much of the jazz festival takes place, has really bloomed with public spaces since I was there last. There are a lot of plazas, including the one above with some cool water spurts that glow different colours at night. The area consists of a bunch of medium to large-sized public spaces, some with grass, but most with hard surfaces, that all connect up to each other. My other favourite, which I didn't manage to get a picture of, was a grassy field with a strip of sidewalk down the middle that oozed water vapour that was lit up different colours at night. Biking through the fog was a good way to cool down on a hot day.

Here's a strange piece of public art on Rue St. Catherine. The letters looked randomly placed until you stood in the right spot and they coalesced into a sentence. If only I knew French.

And of course there is the square at the Berri-UQAM subway station that turns up in many a tourist photo of Montreal. This square has a sloping grassy hill complete with water features and a hard surface plaza on which you can play oversized chess. At night they moved in a giant movie screen and played Persepolis while a truck nearby handed out free food to those who needed it.

Bikes

I only took the (bouncy--it has tires!) subway system once in Montreal. The rest of the time I was on a Bixi bike or walking. Twelve dollars bought a three-day subscription to the system, and, with the amazing and connected separated lane network, I could get virtually anywhere I wanted in the city without feeling squeezed by traffic. There was a Bixi station on almost every block, so we didn't have to worry when we went somewhere about where to park. It seemed like every third bike that road by (and a lot of people ride bikes in Montreal) was a Bixi bike.

Summer Streets Gets New York Moving

(This article originally appeared on Spacing Toronto, August 15, 2011)

On my recent trip to New York I found myself walking Broadway on a sweltering Saturday afternoon, negotiating the sidewalk amidst hordes of people and attempting to stay out of the way of what I have come to think fondly of as the dance between New York’s homicidal drivers and its suicidal pedestrians and cyclists.

So it was with much relief that my travelling partner and I stumbled upon the fourth annual Summer Streets, a Saturday shut down of Park Avenue and connecting streets between Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park (roughly the equivalent distance of shutting down Yonge St from Front St all the way to Eglinton Ave). As a Streetsblog NYC video shows, shutting cars from the street allows for cyclists, pedestrians, joggers, rollerbladers, and parents with children from all over the city and the surrounding area to flood out into the normally hectic street and enjoy themselves.

We rented—if you can call a free rental a rental—bikes and suddenly the open road was ours for the next hour (if we didn’t bring back the bikes in an hour they charged our credit card one dollar per minute. Ouch).

There are five rest stops along the route where, if you are so inclined, you can partake in activities like the “Belly, Butt, and Thigh Workout” or “Barefoot Running” or “Salsa Lessons”. Since we only had an hour before we began to lose our lunch money with each late minute, we zoomed past these rest stops, which were packed with people and music.

Many cross streets were also shut down, but since the stretch of closed roadway cut through so much of lower Manhatten, a few remained open to allow traffic through. There were volunteers at each of these crossings holding Stop/Go signs as well as traffic police posted to make sure cyclists and pedestrian didn’t accidentally coast through. It might have been the only time in New York that I saw cyclists stop for red lights. Or drivers and pedestrians, actually. The only thing crazier than New York cyclists are New York drivers and New York pedestrians.

After the experience of New York’s famously clogged streets, it was amazing to fly down this wide road with thousands of other cyclists. This was a great way to see a large swath of New York and experience the city in a way that is impossible on a regular basis. As we made our way through the elevated roadway around Grand Central Station, we were treated to a view of the normally busy New York streets.

Could we do this in Toronto? When I moved to Toronto, I was immediately impressed with the amount of street shut downs in the summer for street festivals, but would the city be so keen on shutting down multiple kilometres of central roadway so people could ride their bikes and walk?

Spurred on by Bogotá's Ciclovía, these car-free events have been popping up all over the world. Vancouver is attempting their version of this with LiveStreets, which sees eight kilometres of roadway shut down to cars from Kitsilano to Commercial Drive through the downtown core. Not only does this encourage people who may be too timid to get on their bike and ride, but it shows a different kind of possible city, one that gives space back to people.

I went back to Park Avenue a few days later. It was filled with cars, the pedestrians all crammed onto the sidewalks. I saw few cyclists. The air was filled with the sounds of honking.

Street as Sidewalk

One of the things about living on a busy street in a downtown neighbourhood is that there are always people outside. I have gotten used to opening my front door and being immediately caught up in a stream of people on the sidewalk; however, I was unprepared today when I went out to buy cat food and stepped right into what was a fairly robust street festival.

It's always a bit strange when you see a street, usually reserved solely for cars, taken over by hordes of pedestrians and sticky-fingered children. For one, I got a perspective of my street that I have never seen before: right down the middle. It's a view of the road only seen from those in cars or those navigating Google's street view. Normally, as bipeds, we aren't treated to this perfectly symmetrical cleaving of our streets, having to choose one side or the other to walk on, and it's quite pleasing to the eye to be able to stare right down the middle to the vanishing point.

It's funny, too, that when the streets are closed to cars people still tend to gravitate toward the sidewalks. It's as if streets have some intrinsic centrifugal force that spin the pedestrians out towards the edges. The thing is: people like order. We like knowing that on escalators you stand right and walk left. And street closures, by definition not-ordinary, upset this order. They're chaotic. People bump into each other not because they work against the stream, but because there is no stream. There's just a bunch of people walking. Slowly.

And I like interacting with the street in a way that I normally can't. It's a good reminder that streets don't simply have to be a way to get around, but can be a place to gather. I never realized how fast I walked down the sidewalk until today, when, as I slowly made my way down the five closed blocks, I actually noticed buildings I hadn't even seen before. Usually, I'm in search of a can of beans for dinner, powering through slow-walkers and dreaming of having my own personal jet pack. Or at least wider sidewalks.

I went out later as the festival was in take-down mode. Vans, cars, and trucks wound their way slowly through the stragglers on their way to be loaded up with disassembled tents and BBQs. Seeing your street closed to cars is kind of like seeing someone naked for the first time. I'm not sure if I'll be able to look at it quite the same way again.