KITCHENER — Car-free Sundays. Bike Sundays. Pedestrian-only Sundays. Summer Streets.
These are different names for the same thing — blocking off streets to motorized traffic and letting people walk, run, blade, dance, sing, cycle and sell.
And a couple of rookie city councillors are behind the call to transform a 2.7- kilometre length of King Street into a pedestrian-only zone on four Sundays this year.
City councillors in Kitchener unanimously endorsed car-free Sundays from the civic square in front of Kitchener City Hall to the public square in Waterloo.
About three weeks ago city councillors in Waterloo also unanimously supported the move that has spread to 800 cities worldwide, including nearby London, Toronto and Ottawa.
Coun. Daniel Glenn-Graham in Kitchener and Coun. Melissa Durrell in Waterloo want King Street packed with pedestrians, vendors, food carts musicians and artists on selected Sundays.
They want four car-free events this year — one each in June, July, August and September.
“We are calling it Square to Square,” Durrell said.
“We are thinking this will be a regular kind of event,” Glenn-Graham said in an interview. “We are trying to move this along.”
The two city councillors heard about the car-free Sundays at a conference and saw lots of potential for animating King Street.
“June 19 we are hoping to kick it off,” Durrell said.
July 17, Aug. 14 and Sept. 18 are also on the proposed schedule of car-free Sundays.
“Cities all over the world have done this, we can do this,” Durrell said. “What makes us unique is we are talking to three municipal governments, we have an emergency room on our route, so we do have some unique challenges.”
King Street in downtown Kitchener is closed three or four times a year for different festivals. In Waterloo, King Street is closed for special events too, such as the Buskers Festival.
In London, many businesses embraced the idea.
“We want to bring the business community along so they are actually part of this, on the sidewalks selling their stuff,” Glenn-Graham said.
On two Sundays last year the City of London closed a part of Dundas Street to cars. About 10,000 people came out for the first event and 5,000 for the second. This year, four more are planned.
The cost to the City of London is minimal and only two police officers were assigned to the events, said Jay Stanford, the city’s director of environmental programs.
“It was first tied to International Car-Free Sunday and it was so successful we decided to do another one,” Stanford said.
A community group called Our Streets has taken the lead in London and partners with a lot of businesses as well as the municipality.
In Toronto’s Kensington Market, the events are called Pedestrian Sundays and were started in 2004. Volunteers put up barriers and signs. There is very little, if any, extra cost to the City of Toronto.
“We go from May to October, the last Sunday of the month, and it is usually from noon to 7 p.m.,” said Yvonne Bambrick of the Kensington Business Improvement Association.
“It has worked perfectly well just being community run, it doesn’t cost anything.”
Volunteers are needed to watch barricades, explain what’s going on to drivers and show where they can park or how to drive around, Bambrick said.
“They have been very, very well received,” Bambrick said. “What we have seen over the last seven years is there is a much greater interest in Kensington Market and the shops there.”
The National Capital Commission around Ottawa closes about 50 kilometres of roadway to vehicles on every Sunday from May to October. Thousands of cyclists take to the streets for what are called Bike Sundays.
In New York City, the Summer Streets program sees a main street in each borough closed to traffic for several hours each Sunday during the warmer months.
City staff in Kitchener are to have a report on the proposal for car-free Sundays by the end of the month.
“We have the political will and everyone we are talking to is absolutely jazzed,” Glenn-Graham said. “We are definitely convinced it will be successful.”
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