A King Street with no cars? City may consider a car-free corridor pilot project

The city is considering a number of options for a King Street pilot project, including making it solely a transit, pedestrian and cyclist zone in the downtown core, Toronto's chief planner told a conference Wednesday.

At a Green Cities conference Wednesday morning, JenniferKeesmaat,announced the launch of awebsitethat will look at a range of pilot options for King Streetalong the six-kilometercorridor fromDufferinStreet in the west to River Street in the east.

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"We want to make sure that theareas of thecity that we are directing growth to in fact have excellent transit service and the King Street corridor can be a big win," she said.

The idea of King Street going car-freeis just one possibility floating around.Keesmaatwon't confirm what the options are yet but says the city will propose them at a public meeting Feb.13.

"There are aseries of options that we will be bringing forward tothe public looking at how we can essentially get cars out of the way,"Keesmaatsaid. "We'll get the public's response and then we'lltry it so we can see how it works in practice."

Sarah Thomson is with the Toronto Transit Alliance, which organized the Green Cities conference. She supports the idea of pedestrian, cyclist and transit-only King Street but says the pilot project is necessary to test whether it can work.

"Because King Street is so congested, if we can get justtransit and allow pedestrians and bikes on thestreet, we may end up diverting a lot of that pedestrian andcycle traffic to King Street rather than other streets that have traffic and cars on them," Thomson said. "If it doesn'twork we'll go back to thedrawingboard."

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Keesmaatsaysan estimated 65,000 streetcar riders andabout 20,000 vehicles useKing Street on a typical weekday. The options being considered for the pilot study are all ways to "essentially get cars out of the way."

"The big idea here is that focusing on walking and cycling is in fact the most important thing we can do to become a green city," she said.

For downtown residentHamishWilson, the changes possibly coming to King Street arenot enough.

"We need new corridors and we need to build subways in the right places. King Street is a little narrow to actually make it into just a straight right-of-way quite honestly."