The public - our government - built the roads, built the sidewalks. it is not right that they should privatized for private businesses. Not when they are needed for the public to walk and drive on.
The public sidewalks are needed for pedestrians walking along Whyte Avenue. Private bar patios should not be allowed to take them over.
The needs of the public, for adequate sidewalks and roadways should trump private interests on public spaces. Patios are fine on private land. Patios on public space are fine if sidewalk or roadways are not needed for traffic flow. But where there is not extra space, patios cannot be allowed to intrude.
The mantra has been - we are all in this together, but we never understood this meant all must sacrifice for the few. For some the pandemic means more power to the few. It is unfortunate this kind of "disaster capitalism" is rearing its head in our own city. Private businesses - and their lobby group the Old Strathcona Business Association (or should I say the Old Strathcona Bar Association as it was dubbed by some merchants in the area) - - are using the pandemic as a time to get private hands on public spaces.
To say that patios work in Paris and how great it would be if Edmonton had the same cafe culture is not based in reality. Paris must have wider sidewalks than Old Strathcona for there is no way that Parisians wold accept their public sidewalks being constrained to less than six feet wide. Such as in front of Next Act or formerly and perhaps again at the corner of 102 Street and Whyte Avenue. Paris patios as far as we see in old movies are not fenced in, completely barring pedestrian traffic.
Heck, Hudsons' patio on 103 Street has four walls, and a roof. People will tell me that that is no patio -- that that it is part of he building. Those who remember know that that "part of the building" is actually built on top of what was once a wide sidewalk.
The pandemic and social distancing has only made apparent the long-standing inefficiency of trying to squeeze patios into already too-narrow sidewalks. There is no way that a sidewalks of only 10 feet wide or less has room for a patio. If two people walking toward each other cannot pass without bumping, there must be a change - That is how narrow the sidewalk is in front of Next Act due to the patio that business has.
If as city administration says, patios are necessary for the survival of bars, that closing road lanes on busy Whyte Avenue is necessary to allow pedestrians traffic, they do not recall that customers of many other businesses,depend on appropriate road access. Traffic slowdown caused by roadway closures hurts all these customers, wastes drivers time, wastes fuel, causes air pollution, causes aggravation, frustration and aggrieved nerves. It will drive people away from the area. It cannot be good for the rebound of the local economy.
As well, appropriate road access across the old rail-line, which happens only at Whyte Avenue and 83 Avenue, is needed for access to the University hospital and for local residents of this densely-populated area. These residents should be encouraged to think positively about the Whyte Avenue businesses, not caused to hold grievances against them. Road access is needed for safety considerations for the city to work at a very basic level. (This does show though how much aggro will be caused by future construction and permanent placement of LRT line along Whyte Avenue, as the city administration envisioned last year.)
Whyte Avenue a long time ago had 20-foot (6.5 metres) wide sidewalks but it did not have seven lanes of roadway. Now with that many lanes used for car traffic, there is barely enough room for the high volume of pedestrian traffic -- in normal times. The pandemic has increased the need for more sidewalk width. City administration should have cancelled patios, not encouraged more. Patios, I think, are never meant to be permanent - they are leases signed each year.
Unfortunately businesses have many factors to consider in their survival. To depend on profitability on access to public land indicates a borderline financial picture. An effect of the pandemic is - we have to look at public good, not always private needs. We should have been doing this before, but we really have to do this now.
That there is no loud voice defending our public spaces is due either to how people vote or how the vote is considered/ignored. With almost half the votes in Edmonton thrown away, with half the voters having no representation in city hall, private corporate or small business considerations have been allowed to overwhelm public needs. It is time for the public, the majority to have control of city hall - not only the business community.
We must demand a city administration that defends the rights of pedestrians for adequate sidewalks, and defends the rights of people and services that depend on car traffic for adequate roadways. We must demand a municipal electoral system that allows our true will to be demonstrated when election officials count the vote. We need a system that provides majority rule by representing the vote of a majority of votes, that allows the representation of more than just one group in each ward or across the city at-large one - First Past The Vote does not ensure this - as I discuss in other blogs.
The status quo never worked - thinning sidewalks to a point where two people cannot smoothly pass each other, angled eight-feet-wide "cattle chutes" funnelling pedestrian flow out on the roadway where pedestrians experience traffic roar and exhaust without the protection and buffer of a line of parked vehicles. This does not work.
Pushing pedestrians out on the roadway where the they have to endure the aggravation of being so close to roaring traffic while private bar patios block the public sidewalks insulated from the traffic roar, is not fair.
And now enlarging patios at the expense of others is not working. A minimum 3-metre -wide sidewalk is required as a minimum in normal health conditions. More is required now. The solution is to open all public sidewalks to pedestrian traffic and open the lanes of parking to pedestrian traffic and placing precast concrete traffic barriers - or other more elegant barriers - along the traffic to blunt traffic roar and exhaust.
Precast concrete traffic barriers or other some other perhaps more elegant sound barriers should be placed in front of the Strathcona Hotel along 103 Street and all the way up to 83 Avenue to blunt traffic roar and exhaust and provide better safety to pedestrians from run-away vehicles. A bench was wiped out in front of the hotel by a runaway vehicle years ago. It could happen again. There is no barrier to prevent an accidental death or injury that way, while the roar of accelerating traffic exiting from the busy Whyte X 103 Street intersection can be a pain to pedestrians walking along the 103 Street sidewalk there. That sidewalks - at least from the alley to Whyte Avenue - where patios have not been erected yet - is about the only sufficiently wide sidewalk in Old Strathcona. It would be a bad thing if the city allowed this to be thinned down by a new patio in front of the newly refurbished Strathcona Hotel.
A 3 or 4-metre-wide sidewalk along high-pedestrian areas such as Whyte Avenue from 99 to 109th Street should be a minimum. It is not too much to ask. We should turf out any city council that cannot give it to us.
Or perhaps we should have a campaign "honk if you hate road (and sidewalk) closures due to patios". The noise created would do nothing to calm frayed nerves but would be a potent sign of public discontent. Without proper democracy, "direct action" of that sort may be required to get change that is needed, to defend our public needs, our public spaces from private incursion
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