Hey Toronto, here’s something America could teach you about weathering COVID-19
WASHINGTON-Our house here in the suburbs of D.C. backs onto a ravine valley, and in it there is a very busy road - a parkway that is one of the main traffic arteries for navigating our part of town. This past weekend, Rebecca and I and our three kids went out to stroll on it, wander down the middle of street, and explore the stream banked with boulders and crossed by fallen trees beside it.
There were other people out there, wandering and biking and jogging and playing in the roadway. There's something magical about walking in familiar places usually reserved for cars - as Torontonians know from street festivals like Taste of the Danforth. Here, unlike on the nearby cycling paths and park trails, it wasn't crowded - the normally busy street offered lots of room for keeping a distance.
For years we lived on Keele Street, on one of the busiest stretches of road in the southwest end of central Toronto. We used to joke about getting the city to implement pedestrian Sundays there like they did in Kensington Market. The punchline, obviously, was that it would never, ever happen in Toronto, because city hall would never limit car traffic on any street where you'd actually notice car traffic in the first place.
I would have thought the same would be true of the express road behind our new house, but thanks to a pandemic, and the improvisation of local officials struggling with the challenge of needing recreational space that won't be overwhelmed by people, we got our pedestrian Sundays. And Saturdays, and Fridays. A bunch of them.
Toronto, of course, is grappling with a similar problem right now: I've been following the news about the decision to close down High Park during cherry blossom season, the posts about people's insistence on visiting the beach boardwalks, the fierce debates about closing roads because sidewalks are overwhelmed. There aren't too many things related to coronavirus response in which I'd say people in Canada should take a lesson from the American response, but here's one.
In D.C. and suburban Maryland, local officials decided for a time to close some major parkways to car traffic on weekends, opening them up as recreational space for residents. The metropolitan area has a bunch of these roads - "scenic bypasses" along valleys and rivers that function like the urban expressway systems in many North American cities. They aren't quite highways - most are only a few lanes wide. But imagine a city where neighbourhoods are knitted together by a bunch of Rosedale Valley Roads.
What a wonderful difference it makes to open them up. Like the Rosedale Valley, roads like Beach Road in Northwest Washington and Little Falls Road in Bethesda are surrounded by nature. Without a constant stream of cars, they're basically masses of discovered parkland.
The city needed it. Washington has a cherry blossom season, too - it happens mostly in March, and while it was on during the coronavirus outbreak, enough people were crowding around them near the monuments beside the Potomac River that the government needed to shut local parking lots to limit visitors. The National Capital Trail - a kind of cyclist and pedestrian expressway in an old rail corridor - runs through many neighbourhoods rich in cherry trees, and the kids and I had to stop using it for our family bike rides because it was attracting so many people that distancing was becoming impossible. Even with the cherry trees gone to leaf, the local parks and usual green spaces are thick with pedestrians, desperate for fresh air and exercise.
Opening the parkways helps.
Perhaps Toronto ought to find some inspiration in the example. Toronto doesn't have a similar network of parkways - though it's fun to imagine the Don Valley Parkway temporarily converted into a massive, pandemic-friendly central park, and maybe the downtown condo crowd could enjoy the view of the lake from a pedestrianized Gardiner Expressway. Allen Road has a huge concentration of people living just west of it who could probably use a place to walk. More realistically, the example the city ought to be taking is examining which assets already exist near where people live that can be converted to walking and exercise space to provide room for people to get outside and stay away from each other at the same time.
Perhaps that could mean closing roads or lanes of traffic to relieve overburdened sidewalks. Perhaps it could mean opening up or directing people to spaces like golf courses or school grounds or even retail parking lots. Premier Doug Ford just announced the lockdown will likely go at least until around Victoria Day - this thing could drag on for while. People can't just stay inside for months, and they can't all fit safely in the obvious usual spaces.
It's understandable the city would be concerned enough that folks would crowd into High Park to take action. It's just that the action could include providing some alternatives.
Edward Keenan is the Star's Washington Bureau chief. He covers U.S. politics and current affairs. Reach him via email: ekeenan@thestar.ca