Taking in the improbable scene around him, on a sunny weekday afternoon in Montreal, Jean Beaudoin looked like a kid who just stepped through the gates of some enchanted theme park.Instead of roller coasters and a supersized Mickey Mouse, he gazed at everyday life on Mont-Royal Ave. in the city’s Plateau neighbourhood: families strolling with ice cream cones, meandering cyclists, seniors sitting in the shade and – the kicker – not a car in sight.
It is not an empty boast, however: Voting with their feet, Montrealers have turned the street into a daily festival, with thick crowds almost around the clock, shopping, wandering, packing private patios, or sinking into the baby-blue Adirondack chairs laid out for public use. “People would lose their mind if you did that to St. Clair,” said Angus Knowles, a Toronto housing developer and urbanist writer, referring to a major artery in his city that has been a battleground between drivers and public transit.“In some Canadian cities I think pigs would have flown before this kind of thing would have been allowed...To use a technical term, it blew my mind.“
But banishing cars from the Plateau’s main street was also a longstanding goal of Ms. Plante’s political party, Projet Montréal, a formerly fringey left-of-centre outfit that got its start in the neighbourhood of tightly packed duplex and triplex apartment buildings.