Turning Government Street into a pedestrian mall is an idea whose time has come, says John Vickers, the man behind Victoria’s successful busker and chalk art festivals.

Vickers, who has been lobbying for years to close Government Street to motor vehicles, will make yet another pitch to Victoria councillors about the idea tonight.

article continues below

“What we’re trying to do is to see if we can get a multi-weekend Saturday, Sunday closure effort on the street this summer,” Vickers said.

With an increasing number of for-lease signs dotting empty and papered up storefronts on what is Victoria’s major summer tourist stroll, there’s no time to wait, Vickers said.

But not everyone agrees.

“Anything we do for Government Street needs to be designed to bring more customers to the businesses there,” said Bruce Carter, Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce CEO. “That’s the measuring stick we want to use. Will closing the street do that? I’m not sure how.”

Vickers said support for the idea of turning Government Street into a pedestrian mall from Humboldt Street to Yates Street — leaving Fort Street open to east-west traffic — has been gaining acceptance through successful demonstration events such as the Victoria International Buskers Festival and the Victoria Chalk Festival.

But Carter said closings without special programming are different from simply turning the area into a pedestrian mall. “If there’s nothing going on there and it’s just a pedestrian mall, there is a significant chance that it will end up being a haven for drug dealers, vagrants and panhandlers like we saw at Granville Street in Vancouver.”

Mayor Lisa Helps said there’s nothing to be lost by trying some closings for a few weekends — as long as the results are measured.

“I think we need to take a risk and do an experiment. The world will not end if we try two or three weekends this summer with no cars on Government Street,” Helps said.

Veteran Coun. Charlayne Thornton-Joe, one of council’s liaisons to downtown residents, said any changes to Government Street will have to have buy-in from everyone affected, including businesses.

Coun. Chris Coleman said there’s probably room for “some experimentation” of turning Government Street into a pedestrian mall. “But I go there hesitantly knowing that we’ve gone through this experiment a number of times and it always causes distress from a range of retailers, particularly who see sales drop.”

Ken Kelly, general manager of the Downtown Victoria Business Association, said he will poll Government Street merchants about the idea. As it stands, more than two million pedestrians were counted by the DVBA on the west side of the 1100 block of Government Street last year.

Vickers said the first step has to be addressing the issue of the cruise-ship buses parking along Government Street. “A lot of business people leave at the end of the day but we, as community residents, now have a wall of buses with clogs of people. I tell people that Government Street is its least livable in 10 years for residents and it continues to go south. So we’ve got to stop the bleeding first and, once we get the buses off the street then we can address how we can initiate these closures.”

Kelly said the Government Street bus drop-off was a collaborative decision by many parties. “We as the business community think that is genuinely strategic and important to the economic well being of the downtown.”

Carter said that, from a retailing perspective, it makes more sense to drop cruise passengers where the shops are.

Vickers said it’s important that any closing initiative is for several weekends and not just a one-off trial. “This is like the parking garage issue in the sense that you don’t wean a community into a parking garage by offering free parking for one weekend. This is something where you have to have a vision and you have to hold onto the bull’s eye and you have to do it over a multi-period to get the community into it.”

The number of empty storefronts on Government prompted Helps this week to float the idea of some sort of property tax relief.

bcleverley@timescolonist.com