King Street is Vital to Toronto

The Bentway and Stackt are great ideas. Closing King Street to cars is a terrible idea. It has killed the most important street in Toronto. King Street is Toronto’s high street. It houses the financial centre, hotels, hundreds of restaurants and bars, George Brown college, start-ups, tech firms, other enterprises, and thousands of condo homes. Its vitality is essential to Toronto’s prosperity. It makes no sense to murder it. King Street is dead. I live at King and Simcoe. It is now extraordinarily difficult to get a taxi on King Street. It took 15 minutes to find a lone straggler rolling down the street. Zero cars, few people, it looks like an abandoned roadway from ‘The Walking Dead’.  Two months ago there was a slew of activity. This is absolute madness.  Businesses will suffer, tourism will suffer, and many hundreds of important service jobs will be lost. Waiters, bartenders, and bus-people are doing terribly due to plummeting tips. The ban on cars needs to be altered to a rush hour ban on King Street. Transit works very well in non-rush-hours. Educate the public about a rush hour ban, they’re not dumb, they will get it. It’s now or never, King Street won’t recover.