One of the nice things about being the author on a blog is that you can bring responses to comments to a new post.  Below is a response to a comment by “phred” on Bank Street.

There are three ways in which the current obstruction is potentially a hassle, all of which are because it is temporary and so we have ineffective work arounds:

1) For the businesses in the area. I feel bad for the people that work at businesses in the area, but would posit that any decline is because the street is blocked off to everyone (not just vehicles) and there is much uncertainty as to what is going on. I also point out that anyone that drives there to shop would all but certainly park on a side street or at Hartmans, both of which are still possible.

2) For commuters on the Bus. Frankly, it sucks if you are taking the bus down bank right now, but mostly because having the southbound route two blocks from Bank doesn’t make much sense. Any permanent action such as this would obviously come with redesigns of the routes that serve the area (perhaps a Kent/O’Connor split?)

3) For motorists. Now, as I said at the other blog, congestion encourages people to take mass transit, and increased mass transit use is a good. But the hassle of the current situation is not that bank is closed, it’s that Somorset is closed, meaning that you are stuck on side streets that often don’t let you cross the north/south streets. That problem doesn’t extend to the Kent/Lyon or Metcalfe/O’Connor pairs. Again, that’s a hassle because of the ad hoc nature of the current situation, not the inherent situation of Bank’s closure.

In any case, I think we need to start looking at what Bank in Centretown could be. The Market is a lot of fun precisely  because it is so pedestrian focused, and the shops and restaurants have adjusted accordingly. It’s also important to note that with a good residential core surrounding it, there is a sufficient critical mass that realistically could walk to a Bank Street pedestrian mall.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have my heart set on kicking the cars of Bank, but I do think that it is something worth talking about, even if we only block traffic on Sunday, as per the parkways in the summer.  So rarely do cities get to experiment with what happens in these sorts of situations, and yet here we have a potential data set forced upon: pity us if we waste it by not thinking outside of the box.

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