When I delegated to city council this week on the importance of running this summer’s patio program with as minimum an impact on transit as possible, I never would have guessed that it would still be such an active topic of conversation five days later.
I also didn’t expect that conversation would be as bitter and negative as it turned to be.
Despite the shiny happy talk about the good vibrations from last year’s Downtown Dining District, the sense of community it created, and the pride in supporting local businesses it fostered, the decision to scale back at Monday’s committee of the whole was received with some of the worst kind of social media toxicity. Even worse, the mayor has been directing a lot of that.
It began on Tuesday when Mayor Cam Guthrie phrased the final vote on the patio program at the March 29 council meeting as an “election issue.”
Implied there is a threat that if you don’t vote with the mayor and re-instate the full downtown street closure this summer then he’s going to make the re-election of others more difficult. One would have thought that after “Slategate” in 2018 that Guthrie might have had his fill of self-selecting his council colleagues.
On Wednesday night, a downtown eatery posted a link to a petition to get support of the street closure, and the mayor responded with a joke saying he thought the dining district “only helped five bars.” Through his humour, the mayor’s implying that despite city staff's own engagement revealing that some downtown businesses felt disadvantaged outside of the district, such complaints aren’t really true.
The truth, evidently, is that everyone loved the dining district last summer, and the city councillors that voted against the months long closure of the major intersection through downtown are wet blanket babies that see a blue sky and want to rain on your parade.
Oh, and they’re also hypocrites because they say they’re in favour of improving the environment, but they clearly have a secret love for cars, smog, and sprawl.
It can’t be because there were lots of concerns from businesses that weren’t on that corner who felt some businesses downtown got a leg up over others.
It can’t be because there are a lot of people who have raised accessibility concerns, unable to get prime parking near their destination so that their mobility issues aren’t quite so burdensome.
It can’t be because people in neighbourhoods around the downtown noticed a concerning increase in traffic on residential streets.
And it can’t be because transit was hobbled with a self-inflicted limp of missed stops, missed transfers, and frequent delays as the vast majority of bus routes were unnaturally deformed to go around the dining district.
Taking part in the debate the last few days, it’s become dreadfully apparent just how uninformed so many people in Guelph are about the issues of transit, the mechanics of how it works, or even the enigma of the layout of downtown streets. To them, altering transit is easy. What they don’t know is that the way the city altered transit last summer, with all its problems, was the easy way.
That brings me to the essential conundrum of the dining district debate: how can you call this a progressive and environmentally friendly measure when it’s built on the idea that you drive downtown to go car-free?
I’ll let everyone stew on that one, and return to the main point, which is that thanks, in part, to the mayor’s tweets, the debate has now been phrased as yes or no. Us versus Them. Some people on council want a dining district while others (insert frowny face) don’t want one at all.
This is a false dichotomy.
Are there curmudgeons out there allergic to fun? Probably, but I think if you were to present the issue to people as a choice between pedestrian friendly closed roads, or a traffic-palooza in the core, most people would like a nice European-style promenade downtown.
The trick is getting there, and it’s a process that will take years, not months. We’re talking about undoing nearly 100 years of car culture.
A good compromise would be the one already proposed by staff: closing the streets on weekends. How many people last summer were enjoying the patio at 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday? I can tell you, not that many.
The weekends were prime time, and it also takes a lot of pressure off traffic, off transit, and it allows people more time in the day to wander down areas of downtown beyond the immediate borders of the closed intersection.
The vote to close Wyndham at Macdonell failed 5-8, which means the mayor would only need to convince two or three councillors to come over to his side. He could reach out to them, talk about the best way to address their concerns, and see if there’s a way to get to ‘yes.’
To do this, the mayor need only use his phone the way it was intended, as a phone, and not as a tweet delivery device no matter how satisfying that delivery is.
