Comment 26066

By jason (registered) | Posted July 24, 2008 at 22:44:21

Hey Mr. Dolbec. thanks for chiming in and joing the discussion. Great to have you!

I suppose your organization is in a tough spot considering you are supposed to represent your businesses, but at some point it would seem prudent for the Chamber to promote ideas that are proven to help business (as you have with LRT for example). I can think of several other boarded up and collapsing reasons why a business owner on King William might be getting 'killed' these days. The fabulous effect of two-way on James and John can't be disputed. Downtown streets should be all about people. I was in TO this week on College and Queen East in the Beaches. Both neighbourhoods were full of shops, patios, cafes, and TONS of people. As a previous poster mentioned, you can go around the corner onto one-way streets in downtown TO that are dead by comparison. People spend money. Speeding cars don't. We've used downtown as a cut-through freeway for far too long. I fully believe that downtown can become the centre of Hamilton's retail economy once again, but it will never happen with trucks roaring past the Farmers Market at 70km and 5 lanes of screaming traffic flying down Main on their way to somewhere else.

I hope the Chamber can do some more analysis on the issue and promote the formula that will help to bring more people downtown every day and evening to spend money in Chamber shops/stores and allow hundreds of new shops to open up in our core.

Thanks again for your thoughts John.

Permalink | Context

Events Calendar

There are no upcoming events right now.
Why not post one?

Recent Articles

Article Archives

Blog Archives

Site Tools

Feeds