No Cars, Less Violence
Early on a Friday evening in August, without any prior announcement, the Vancouver Police Department barricaded intersections on Granville Street’s violence-plagued entertainment district.. Pedestrians and cyclists were free to cross, but vehicles were barred from turning onto the street. According to figures in The Province newspaper, police typically deal with 20 brawls and 70 to 100 individual fights on the strip during a typical weekend. During the first street closure, police received only one report of a fight.
momentum contacted the Mayor’s office and asked who had the idea to close the strip. The mayor’s director of communications, David Hurford, said that the trial comes from the Mayor’s Project Civil City initiative.
The strip was closed again during the evenings of the first weekend of September.
Despite the apparent success of the closures, Hurford wouldn’t say whether they would happen again in the future. The Mayor has been quoted as saying that the cost and impact of the test closures will be officially evaluated to see if it could become official city policy. Police spokesperson Tim Fanning has been quoted in the Vancouver Sun newspaper describing the trial as “costly.”
