Avenue de l’Épée, a one-way street outside L’École Alternative Nouvelle Querbes in Outremont, Montreal was temporarily blocked to traffic as part of a pilot project exploring street safety around the school.Transport Actif Outremont
Taras Grescoe is the author of Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, as well as High Speed, a newsletter about transit, urbanism and the global passenger rail renaissance.
For the last four years, I’ve been working with parents at the elementary school my children attend to bring a small – but in our opinion, important – change to a single street in Montreal. To make the trip to and from school as safe as possible, we asked the borough of Outremont to close Avenue de l’Épée, a one-way street outside L’École Alternative Nouvelle Querbes, to cars, trucks, and other through traffic. This June, we finally saw our efforts pay off.
In the final weeks of the school year, municipal work crews dragged three large concrete blocks into place at the south end of the street. Another trio of blocks was placed farther up the street, creating a 50-metre-long stretch where no vehicular traffic was permitted.
The street instantly became a miniature piazza. Kids chalked hopscotch ladders onto the pavement, badminton nets were erected, and a neighbourhood organization held bike-repair workshops. When the afternoon bell rang, students from the private school on the other side of Avenue de l’Épée, which has a much smaller outdoor courtyard, turned the newly liberated street space into an impromptu playground. Many of the families who live on the street belong to Outremont’s Orthodox Jewish community, and Hasidic kids were among the first to join in the fun; on the weekend, they played on scooters and bikes in front of their homes, as safely as if they lived on a suburban cul-de-sac. The street hadn’t so much been closed to cars, as opened to people.
Then, on the last day of school, the concrete blocks were removed. That morning, I watched a driver swerve around the slower car ahead of him, jump the curb, and drive up the street at full speed with two wheels on the sidewalk. (Fortunately, there were no kids walking on it at the time.) The street closure, which had been approved with the understanding it was a temporary pilot project, was officially over: The flood of traffic had returned, and, for the foreseeable future, the street once again belonged to drivers, rather than kids.
The street hadn’t so much been closed to cars, as opened to people. Children played on scooters and bikes in front of their homes, as safely as if they lived on a suburban cul-de-sac.Transport Actif Outremont
It shouldn’t be this hard to keep our children safe. In many cities, it isn’t.
There are now more than 500 “school streets” in Greater London, where traffic is limited during school opening hours; drivers who enter the zone are automatically ticketed by enforcement cameras. When schools reopen this autumn, Paris will count 300 rues aux écoles, up from 185 last year. That means streets outside fully half of all kindergartens and elementary schools in the city will be closed to cars and trucks with permanent or retractable bollards. Under a variety of names, from “school exclusion zones” to piazze aperte, versions of the school-street have also come to Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Lyon, Antwerp, Turin and Milan.
After the pandemic, a handful of cities in Canada, among them Gatineau, Hamilton, Toronto, Markham, Mississauga and Vancouver, began to experiment with closing streets outside schools. But Canadian versions of the school-street concept have tended to be timid affairs, involving half-hour morning closures, or pilot projects that last for a couple of weeks. This year, the Coalition Avenir Québec’s transport ministry has fallen short by $18-million on a commitment to reduces crashes and injuries around schools in the province.
Montreal, under the mayoralty of Valérie Plante, is the city that has most fully embraced the concept; the boroughs of Rosemont, Ahuntsic, and Hochelaga-Maisonneuve have all implemented European-style school streets. Ms. Plante’s party, Projet Montréal, is well known for its green initiatives, including the pedestrianization of such major commercial arteries as Wellington, Mont-Royal, and Sainte-Catherine, the expansion of the Bixi bikeshare system, and the construction of what is rapidly becoming North America’s most ambitious network of fully protected bike lanes. Under its latest Vision Zero plan, which aims to reduce road deaths to zero by 2040, the city has committed to establishing as many school streets as possible; this week, another was announced at a downtown elementary school.
Unfortunately, Montreal’s green revolution is unevenly distributed. The borough of Outremont, where my kids’ school is located, is bordered by the Plateau, Rosemont, Côte-des-Neiges, and the downtown Ville-Marie boroughs, all of which have embraced Projet Montréal’s efforts to connect the bike-lane network, calm traffic, and to make alleyways green. But Outremont stands apart. Traditionally an upper-middle-class neighbourhood, its east side is full of duplexes, triplexes and multifamily apartment buildings, while the west side tends toward multimillion-dollar townhouses and mansions. The borough is dense enough to be highly walkable, and well-served by transit, but its central location also means it is traversed by major thoroughfares.
And that’s a problem, because not only does Outremont have more residents under the age of 14 than any other borough in the city – they make up 26 per cent of the population – it also has two dozen schools within its boundaries, meaning kids pour in from other parts of the city to get to class. On Rue Fairmount, which is perpendicular to the street we’ve been trying to close, there are three elementary schools, with a combined student population of 900. That’s a lot of kids, parents and teachers jostling to get to class every morning.
Does setting slower speed limits on residential streets make them safer?
The mayor of Outremont, Laurent Desbois, belongs to Ensemble Montréal, the main opposition to Projet Montréal. Under Mr. Desbois’s mayoralty, no new protected bike lanes have been built in Outremont; cyclists trying to cross the borough have to make do with “sharrows,” fading paint on pavement and, at best, some poorly maintained flexposts. A recent study from McGill University found that while nearly 10 per cent of residents of Outremont used bikes, scooters, and other forms of micromobility to get around, the borough placed dead last in terms of street space devoted to bike lanes. After a sustained campaign by parents at another elementary school, the borough agreed to close a single street – a stretch of Boulevard Dollard that has no residential addresses – that runs between the school and a large private high school.
After surveying other parents, we found overwhelming support for a similar school street at Nouvelle Querbes. Our committee publicly launched the campaign at the spring fair in 2022, and Mr. Desbois came by our stand, introduced himself, and said he supported the project. But when we followed up with the borough, and diligently attended council meetings to ask what progress was being made on the file, we got excuses and obfuscations; meetings with the mayor were scheduled, then cancelled, often at short notice.
In 2023, the borough finally gave us the approval to close the street to cars for a single afternoon. Because it happened on the last day of the school year, though, the event looked less like a full-fledged school street than a poorly planned street fair; it probably annoyed more parents than it won over to the cause.
After that, I kind of gave up. As a student of recent urban history, I know that, when the political headwinds are against you, battling for safer streets can be an exercise in exhaustion. One of the other members of the committee formed a community organization, TAO (Transport Actif Outremont) to promote the cause. I watched his posts on Facebook veer into dark irony as Outremont congratulated itself on introducing an unenforceable anti-idling bylaw, even as the Plateau continued to announce the building of another bike lane.
Then, to our surprise, early this year we learned that Avenue de l’Épée was going to be shut to traffic, and not just for an afternoon. For three days at the end of May, we were given permission to participate in a week of activities to promote school streets around Quebec, launched by the non-profit organization Centre d’Écologie Urbaine. And that was just the beginning: the borough had voted in favour of a pilot project that would run until June 24, the last day of school. If all went well, the Nouvelle Querbes school-street would return at the end of summer.
The closure was everything we’d hoped it would be. Not only did the street immediately fill up with parents and kids, we also saw an immediate improvement in both the morning drop-off and afternoon pick-up. Parents and children arriving from the north could safely venture into the street without facing a tide of oncoming traffic. Gone were the Kias, Teslas and Subarus, which, left idling in crosswalks, had forced kids to make a dangerous detour into the middle of the street. Gone too were the near-misses we’d all witnessed on a near-daily basis, in which a third-grader on a two-wheeler would dart off the too-crowded sidewalk, only to be almost clipped by a late-for-work parent pulling away from the curb. Chauffeur-parents could still drop off their kids on an adjoining street, or, if they had business at the school, park in one of three public lots a three-minute walk away.
There was opposition, though, and it was vociferous. With another parent, I’d attended a council meeting before the launch of the school street, and it was packed with residents, most of them members of the Hasidic community that live in the neighbourhood. They raised a series of objections, which were answered patiently by councillor Caroline Braun. What if somebody had a heart attack, and the street was closed to traffic? (Emergency vehicles, she explained, could easily push the concrete blocks aside, almost without having to slow down, or just enter the street from the other side.) How will school buses pick up our kids? (They can walk the short distance to the end of the block.) Where will we park? (On-street parking will still be permitted, and besides, almost all the homes on Avenue de l’Épée have private driveways.)
I was tempted to bring up a tragedy that had happened earlier that year. A Hasidic boy had been run over by a truck on a busy street a couple of blocks away; people were still leaving flowers on the corner as a tribute. By then, though, I’d stopped listening. What was more important, after all: the well-being of nearly 1,000 school-kids, or the complaints of a few grown-ups outraged by the inconvenience of not being able to drive their cars on a couple of dozen metres of city street?
In an event related to the temporary closure of Avenue de l’Épée to traffic, kids chalked hopscotch ladders onto the pavement, badminton nets were erected, and a neighbourhood organization held bike-repair workshops.Transport Actif Outremont
In the weeks after the school-street pilot project, there was a flurry of construction around my kids’ school. Work crews enlarged the sidewalks on Avenue de l’Épée, narrowing the south end of the street near the school to a single lane. A bike lane of sorts was added to Fairmount, the perpendicular street, though, because it only runs for one block, it doesn’t connect to any other bicycle infrastructure. These were improvements – but not the one parents at Nouvelle Querbes had been looking for. We’d long been promised a fully separated, protected bike lane for several blocks on Fairmount, but it looked like what we’d gotten was the only thing Outremont dares to deliver: more paint on pavement.
The school year is starting with at least one piece of good news. Over the summer, the council had voted to renew the school-street pilot project, which will run until Oct. 10. One councillor voted against it: Mindy Pollak, the first Hasidic woman elected to public office in Canada. Though Ms. Pollak is a member of Projet Montréal, which champions safer streets and green infrastructure, she joined members of her community in opposing the school street.
There is change coming. Montreal’s municipal election is scheduled for Nov. 2, and this time Projet Montréal’s Valérie Plante, who announced her retirement from politics late last year, will not be running. The Ensemble Montréal candidate, Soraya Martinez Ferrada, is running on a classic bikelash platform: To capitalize on the perception that cyclists are responsible for congestion, she’s promised an audit of all existing bike lanes. (This is a vote-seeking tactic that will be familiar to residents of Toronto, where Ontario Premier Doug Ford has also promised to rip out bike lanes.) Meanwhile, a new party, Transition Montréal, headed by former Projet Montréal councillor Craig Sauvé, has made school streets based on the Dutch model of the woonerf, or shared street, a key plank in its platform.
In Outremont, Mr. Desbois won’t be seeking a second term as mayor, and Ms. Pollak will not be running in the upcoming election; Ms. Braun, of Ensemble Montréal has announced her candidacy for the mayoralty of the borough. (School streets are not a part of the Ensemble Montréal platform.) Ms. Braun, who is a parent at our school, will be running against Alain Bakayoko, of Projet Montréal, who also has school-aged kids in Outremont. Mr. Bakayoko recently made the effort to meet with our committee to find out more about the Nouvelle Querbes school street.
Who will I be voting for? I’m still making up my mind. But I’ll definitely favour any candidate who promises to work hard to improve my kids’ chances of getting to school safely.