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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

Buffalo tried this a few decades ago and it did NOT work. The entire area died, all the restaurants & retail closed. It took millions of dollars and many years to undo it and now the area is back and full of people. I don't know for sure the blame lies entirely on the clearing of cars idea, but that sure didn't help. The city (like many) fell pretty hard for a bunch of reasons at the time they tried this.

https://www.buffalony.gov/1054/Cars-Sharing-Main-Street

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Part of the problem in Buffalo was that they closed main st for 5-6 years to car traffic in the late 70s / early 80s while they built the above-ground portion of the metro rail. During this time, business along the construction zone withered and died because they were too hard to get to, and the department stores retreated to the suburban malls. By the time they finished it, there was no reason to go there, except to transit through that section on the way to Sabers games / concerts at Memorial Auditorium.

It was a popular urban-renewal Hail Mary in the 1970s and 80s. My hometown did it, too, and it was a spectacular failure. [0] Indeed, most of them failed, but I wouldn't read too much into it; a lot of them were done in neighborhoods that were already bleeding people, money, and businesses. It's not a panacea and it's definitely not enough to turn the fortunes of a declining area.

But it can make sense in the opposite kind of neighborhood -- neighborhoods that are growing, that already have a lot of density and foot traffic.

The context matters a lot.

[0] http://www.urbanreviewstl.com/tag/14th-street-pedestrian-mal...

Likely differences in population density caused the different results

I have read some of the restaurants along that stretch of road in Toronto have closed or will be closing. They have said business has fallen off the cliff.

https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2018/07/pearl-king-street-t...

https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/king-st-pilot-forces-...

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/01/22/king-st-business...

King street restaurants have high turnover anyways - most of them have not been open that long to begin with. The area has a lot of competition so you really can't get away with being mediocre for very long.

Lots of business were crying foul at the start of the pilot, but credit card transaction data the city has hasn't borne that out.

Pearl King Street in particular was an overpriced restaurant with poor positioning. Chinatown is a few minutes away and offer much much better food at 1/3 of the price for each dim sum dish. Right beside are some better dining choices and no one ever went in there even when cars were allowed on King St.

I think either way Pearl was destined to close.

It’s important to not conflate cited causes as some of those owners also blame increases in the minimum wage.

You simply cannot trust the reasons people give for going out of business. If there is a visible villain they can blame, they will. Nobody ever says, "look, we just weren't that good," or "we spent too much money," or "we didn't understand the market very well," or "my wife has a cocaine habit and put us in debt," or "we didn't differentiate very well" or any of the thousands of other banal reasons small businesses fail.

If they can say, "it's because of that big new development over there!" or, "it was the street closure!" then that's what they're going to say. It's the story they'll tell their great-great-grandchildren. But who honestly knows? Companies go out of business all the time. That's the default. Keeping a restaurant open is very hard.

My rust belt city removed main street parking in favor of bike lanes to the same effect but they did it as business was picking back up post-recession. It really pissed people off because all the businesses that folded were the ones that weathered the recession. Our city is somewhat of a commerce destination for the surrounding towns. When they decided to go the bike friendly route all the commerce redistributed itself. The businesses off of main street benefited greatly. They did bring back the prior on-street parking on most of main commercial area of main street and several years later there's a lot less boarded up store fronts.

I think the lesson is that you can't just cave to the bike special interests group or the walk-ability lobby, you have to look at how the economics of your city work and make sure that any changes you make will not shoot it in the foot.

This statement from the article would have me very worried about surviving the next downturn if I were a Toronto business owner.

>Toronto reports business receipts are up along the corridor as well, albeit a tiny 0.3 percent. The rest of the city was up 3.8 percent over the same period.

Did people also live on the same streets? That would change the entire nature of the area. It can't be an amusement park with a giant parking lot around it, it's a city.

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