“Friends of Parkdale Avenue” take on planning challenge
Following on a walking tour held earlier in the the month, a community workshop was held this past week at the Urban Element on Parkdale Avenue that brought together local residents and planners from McGill University to come up with ideas to make Parkdale a more pedestrian-friendly and livable street.
In the 1980s Parkdale was treated by regional road planners as little more than an off ramp for the Queensway, and the legacy of that mindset is a two-lane neighbourhood street choked with heavy traffic especially in the area between Scott and the Queensway.
Longtime residents of the street were in attendance at the workshop, and told of their frustrations in trying to get the city to implement traffic diversion schemes that would ease pressure on the notorious bottleneck.
In one of the planning exercises, participants were asked to mark a map of the area with their “problem hotspots” spots using red dots. The off-ramp at Westmount was the clear winner in this contest but the green dots for “favourite places” were more widely distributed, with the Carleton Tavern, the old fire station, and the NCC trails at the north end of Parkdale in the running for best locations.
Another activity saw the group tackle questions like: “what is the street missing”, “how do want the street to look and feel” and “what kind of activities do you like to or want to do on Parkdale”.
The McGill planning team recorded data from both large and small group sessions and will present their preliminary response a follow-up meeting in November, with details to be announced soon.
In the accompanying audio (link below) Michel Frojmovic from Creative Neighbourhoods, sponsor of the event, stresses that exercise is strictly a community planning initiative with no commercial interests behind it. He expects that the process will produce a plan that local residents can use as a point of reference in the years to come as the problems with Parkdale become more acute and the call for solutions becomes louder.
[...] planning partnership that held the community workshop in October to come up with ideas for a more pedestrian-friendly, better-designed Parkdale Avenue has [...]