The hum of vehicle traffic will soon return to Banff’s main street after town residents voted to remove the contentious car-free, pedestrian zone.
Official results of a binding plebiscite showed 1,328 votes against and 1,194 in support.
Banff council agreed in May to Monday’s vote, in which residents were asked if they supported continuing the two-block, car-free stretch of Banff Avenue every summer from the May long weekend to Thanksgiving.
The initiative, which began as a pilot project in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, was put to a vote after a petition spearheaded by former Banff councillor Leslie Taylor collected more than 1,000 signatures against it.
Taylor said opponents were pleased by the result of the vote, after “a huge amount of hard work by an awful lot of grassroots volunteers.”
She said their work was about preserving the quality of life on streets that aren’t Banff Avenue — where traffic had suddenly been diverted due to the car-free zone.
“Streets where kids used to play ball hockey were now full-on Banff Avenue traffic, and that’s what we were trying to preserve,” said Taylor.
Friends of A Better Banff Avenue member and town resident Allan Buckingham said he was impressed by how many people turned out to vote.
Buckingham is in favour of the zone, saying it was a good tactic to get people to ditch their cars.
“Making it easy for people to drive induces people to drive — making it easy for people to get out and giving them reasons to park their vehicle and get out (to) explore the town in a different way encourages that behaviour.
“Obviously, I and the Friends of A Better Banff Avenue are disappointed in the way things went . . . but that’s the way it goes,” he said.
Town ‘proud to welcome’ visitors, with or without car-free zone
“We are a tourist community and our job is to welcome tourism — and we all understand that — the difficulty is when it’s done at the expense of quality of life for residents,” Taylor said.
Banff council must now pass a bylaw to rescind its previous decision to proceed with the summer pedestrian zone. The earliest that can happen is Aug. 26.
“We know what Banff residents have had to say, and so we will move forward and embrace the result of this vote,” Banff Mayor Corrie DiManno said during a news conference Tuesday.
Town officials, in a news release posted Monday night, said public amenities along the pedestrian zone, including extra public seating, bicycle parking and flower planters, will be removed once the new bylaw is passed.
Restaurant patios and retail displays will also be dismantled, followed by changes to traffic signals at affected intersections, it said.
“We love our visitors, and we are so proud to welcome them, especially our neighbours from Calgary and all Canadians — and we look forward to continuing doing that with or without a pedestrian zone,” DiManno said.
Taylor did not shoot down the idea of having some kind of pedestrian zone in the town, perhaps at a different location.
“You have to ask yourself, is it a pedestrian zone, or is it a commercial zone with people walking,” she said.
Bow Avenue has been proposed in the past to be closed to traffic, becoming a place for walkers, cyclists and picnickers she said.
“That would be lovely, but you wouldn’t be able to buy beer on a patio.”
Parks Canada’s Banff superintendent filed a letter in opposition to the car-free zone’s patio extensions earlier this year, calling them “over-commercialization.”
Despite Parks Canada opposition, Banff council voted 5-2 in January that the car-free zone would return for the warmer months, while discussions continued with the federal agency.
“We’ve been told (Parks Canada’s disapproval is) not direction, it’s suggestion. It’s going to take time to resolve this,” DiManno told council at the time.
Too many vehicles ‘underlying problem’ for Banff
With record numbers of visitors flocking to Banff National Park in recent years, vehicle congestion is an issue, more so than people.
Taylor believes that Parks Canada and the Town of Banff should work on ways to diminish vehicle use. “We’ll see how parks and the town get to work on that fundamental underlying problem.”
“Let’s not just create Disneyland on the main street and shuffle all the problems off into the neighbourhoods . . . let’s figure out what we’re going to do for the whole town,” Taylor said.
“The ideal situation would be the majority of day-use vehicles remaining in places outside the park — and visitors coming in by bus,” Taylor said.
DiManno is confident that the town will move together on the “shared challenges” that came up during conversations about the much-debated pedestrian zone.
“No matter which side of the vote you were on, a shared challenge is that we just have too many vehicles on our road network,” DiManno said. “It was very clear that a large portion of our residents saw the detour onto side streets as a tipping point.”
She noted that the Banff townsite has been four square kilometres since its incorporation, but now their neighbours are some of the fastest growing municipalities in Canada.
“We need to work together and with Parks Canada to come up with solutions for keeping cars out of our town, either parking on the periphery or just coming by mass transit.”
Congestion ‘not going to go away’
Stephane Prevost is a chef and managing partner at Block Kitchen + Bar and Shoku Izakaya, both of which are on Caribou Street — just steps from the pedestrian zone.
He fully embraced the zone and feels it aligns the town with other world-class destinations in developing sustainable tourism.
“The pedestrian zone, keeping it alive was crucial to keep this momentum, in order to reduce regular traffic in the downtown core and elsewhere,” Prevost said.
“It was irrefutable that the overwhelming majority of visitors to Banff were absolutely in love with the pedestrian zone.”
He’s saddened that it must be dismantled, and noted that it also affects sidewalk-patio extensions at his establishments and others that lie near the car-free area.
“Everybody knows that the pinch point in Banff is the bridge, and that’s not going to change, said Prevost. “Those (congestion) problems are not going to go away with the (pedestrian) zone — they will still be here, and we will still need to tackle those.”
He hopes to continue pushing for the return of a pedestrian zone, saying, “As huge (of) a setback this is right now for us in favour of the pedestrian zone, I’m actually convinced that it will be back at some point, and hopefully sooner than later.”
— With files from Bill Kaufmann