Open Streets event on Prince William Street. Image: City of Saint John, Facebook
The City of Saint John says its Open Streets pilot project over the summer was a success, but some members of the uptown business community say it could have been better executed.
On Saturdays from early July through to the end of September, the city alternated closing down various uptown streets to vehicle traffic and making them pedestrian-only. The idea was to help drive more people uptown to support local businesses and experiment with the impact of pedestrian-only streets on area restaurants, bars, cafes and retail shops.
“The initiatives came to fruition because it was one of the options that the city and our partners highlighted as being a potential option for the community,” says City of Saint John Growth Manager David Dobbelsteyn. “Pedestrianization of streets is something that’s been advocated in many quarters of the city for a long time.”
For the events, the city took on the work required to shut down the street to vehicles, and then local businesses were invited to “animate” the space in front of their businesses.
“We had a lot of businesses participate throughout the summer. Some of them would set up patios. Some of them would put some of their goods out on the street or the sidewalk and they would have sidewalk sales. We had some vendors set up tents,” says Dobbelsteyn. “Some vendors weren’t able to do that, but they still kept their doors open throughout the summer.”
Germain Street, Prince William Street, Canterbury Street, Grannan Street, and Princess Street were the uptown streets included in the pilot. Main Street West, on the city’s west side, also took part.
Dobbelsteyn says the pilot was successful overall.
“The goal of the program was twofold. It was to drive more customers to our businesses uptown and it was just to give a chance for the public to get out safely into the open air at a time when Covid is running rampant through the world,” he says. “We feel like in those metrics, it was quite successful.”
According to the pedestrian count numbers collected by the city, 13,847 people passed through the Open Street events uptown throughout the summer (the city counted 839 attendees at the Main Street West event).
Dobbelsteyn says they’ve received both positive and negative feedback from uptown businesses on how the pilot went.
“We heard from a number of businesses that they had a really positive experience; that they saw increased revenues. They saw a lot of new customers that walked through the doors for the first time,” he says.
“Then we also saw some feedback from some businesses that they weren’t seeing the customers they were hoping for. Those are the things we’re going to be taking into advisement as we start to review the program and think about the next steps.”
Sale Declines, Better Businesses Engagement Needed
One of the main goals of the Open Street pilot was to drive more customers for uptown businesses. But some businesses, like Rogue Coffee on Grannan Street, say they actually saw their sales decline during the events.
“I think it was a decent shot that [the city] gave,” says Rogue Coffee co-owner Mike Duncan. “But if the initiative was to support businesses, I can’t speak for all businesses but certainly for our business … we actually saw a decrease in sales during Open Streets.”
Duncan says they also received complaints from customers, particularly those who don’t live uptown.
“Some of the feedback we had from our customers was that there was nowhere to park to come in to buy something because the street was closed on a Saturday when parking is free,” he says. “Those are always our best days because people are available to come a coffee and also we get a lot of customers from outside the uptown area on a Saturday because parking is not much of an issue as it is Monday to Friday.”
Anne McShane, who owns the Feel Good Store on Germain Street, says she experienced varied numbers of sales when the events were held on the street, but she’s heard from other businesses that they saw sales decline.
“The first one I was about even. The second one I was down quite a bit. The third I was up a little (but it was also a Backstreet Records celebration which is usually a busy day on the street). All told fair to middling” said McShane in an email to Huddle. “I’ve heard others say they definitely lost sales on those days though which isn’t cool for an economic recovery effort.”
Though McShane commends the city for responding to the calls from the community to engage in economic recovery, there could have been better consultations with the business community.
“It could probably have benefited from some better/deeper engagement with the business stakeholders to get a better result. It’s been a moving target for businesses in how to respond to the ever-changing environment that is the pandemic response,” she says. “That kind of pace has proven difficult for public entities to adapt and keep real engagement happening at the same rate. Like everything in the time of Covid, it’s a learning process. We’re all still learning.”
The city did have consultations with the business community leading up to the events. Duncan says he sat in on two online meetings that included other businesses and stakeholders, like the Saint John Region Chamber of Commerce and Uptown Saint John. He says many in the meeting expressed concerns with the pilot going ahead in the format it did.
“It honestly seemed like once they had a plan, they were moving ahead, despite our concerns,” says Duncan. “We plainly said, ‘please don’t do it’ and they did it.”
Duncan says the Open Streets pilot needed some sort of anchor event in order to be successful, something that’s hard to do with the current Covid-19 public health guidelines.
“We understand that you couldn’t plan big events. I think the public thought it might be like Moonlight Bazaar. But in the end, it wasn’t really much glitz and glamour to bring the people,” says Duncan. “This is not a bash on the workers. They did well at what they did. If they had a chalk station or hula hoops, they manned it well. It just didn’t seem to help the businesses that needed it.”
Dobbelsteyn agrees that having a bigger event would have made the pilot more successful, but the city had to strike “a balance.”
“It’s the middle of a pandemic. If we have attracted the crowd that a Moonlight Bazaar would have attracted, it would have failed. We would have been shut down. The province would never have allowed it to happen. There was a really delicate balance that we had to try to find, and it was very difficult to try to find that balance,” he says.
“How do we create a safe space for customers to get out where they want to go out in the middle of the pandemic, but also drive enough business, or at least enough customers there where a number of them will leave the street and then wander into the businesses themselves, which is also one of the goals.”
Pilot showed potential for future events
Dobbelsteyn says the city is still collecting data and feedback from businesses on how the pilot went. They will use it to help guide how they will approach pedestrianization initiatives next year.
“We will be seeking more feedback from the businesses over the next month or two in collaboration with some of our growth partners to find out how they did in general and get recommendations from our local businesses about the model and whether they’d suggest that we do similar things in the future,” says Dobbelsteyn.
“Whether we should tweak it, whether we shouldn’t do it. We’re trying to take a very collaborative approach, both with the general public and with businesses and trying to meet the needs and concerns of all the parties involved.”
Though he doesn’t consider Open Streets to be a success, Duncan says it did showcase that the city is making it easier for third-party organizers to close the streets for future events.
“There’s a bylaw change portion to it which I think is really positive. They’re going to make themselves able to be more reactive and take less time … to make it easier to close the street and do that stuff,” says Duncan. “I think that’s a great move and that can be a very positive thing that we take away from this.”
Dobbelsteyn says that’s exactly what’s happening.
“That’s something that the Central Peninsula plan called for and ever since we rolled out Open Streets, we now have four applications from people who are wanting to host events on our streets, which hasn’t happened before, with the exception of Moonlight Bazaar last year and few other [events] scattered here and there,” he says.
“To have such a response so quickly speaks to the fact that the broader community sees this as a type of initiative they really like.”
Dobbelsteyn says pedestrianization is “almost certainly” in the city’s future. The city is working on plans to permanently make South Market Street beside the Saint John City Market pedestrian-only. But if Open Streets were to happen next year, it likely won’t be the same format as this year’s pilot.
“We don’t know what it will look like next year,” he says. “There will certainly be pedestrianization going forward. What that looks like exactly we can’t say yet.”
Cherise Letson is the associate editor of Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
