I remember doing an interview a few years ago with the City of Regina’s Denise Donahue when City Square Plaza was under construction where she talked about how, once the plaza was built, motorists would be “invited” onto the space and share it with pedestrians.
I’m not opposed to the idea of motor vehicles travelling through the area, but when the idea was first proposed I envisioned an inset road of some sort that would direct and contain the traffic while still allowing full use of the plaza during special events when it was closed to vehicular traffic.
That’s not the way it turned out, of course. And many times, such as the above photo taken earlier today shows, vehicles stray off the prescribed path and abuse the terms of their invitation — which is hardly surprising, drivers being drivers and all.
Wait till someone books a burnout competition on it…
Maybe like this one? — http://www.italianjob.com/what.php — for Mini-type cars behaving badly ballet-style, like in the film — in honour of it being Pat’s Patio and all.
What about some pics of the grubby stanchions, the sandbagged direction signs, and those lines of crooked broken metal ground strips?
By refusing to plan or decide if this is a roadway or a plaza, they’ve managed to make it an awful version of both.
A pedestrian downtown is a nice concept, but they should have just extended Scarth Street mall south onto the 19 block. Vehicle traffic would have been vastly less disrupted.
Then again that plan wouldn’t have provided the 3 and soon-to-be 4 McCallum Hill towers with nice taxpayer funded frontage then would it?