Post

In Montréal, what started as an emergency pandemic response has evolved into the continent’s most ambitious car-free scheme. Across 9.3 kilometres of 11 commercial arteries in seven boroughs, entire corridors have been handed back to pedestrians, helping some 2,100 businesses thrive in the process.🧵

Credit belongs to ex-Mayor Valérie Plante, whose two terms from 2017 to 2025 made the city a leader in public space reclaimation, with pedestrian streets the most visible expression of this legacy. What might elsewhere have remained a temporary measure became a permanent fixture of Montréal summers.

Plante’s political insight was to frame pedestrianisation not as a sacrifice, but as economic development policy. Her argument was clear: a shopping street can either attract cars or people. It can't effectively do both. When shops can no longer compete on convenience, they must do it on experience.

The backlash was predictable. Business owners feared removing cars would remove customers. But, as Plante told us in an interview, “the converse was the case.” These streets filled with terraces, pedestrians, children, cyclists, events and shoppers. Transportation corridors turned into destinations.

This transformation reveals what was most courageous about Plante’s leadership: she was willing to act before a consensus existed, and let people experience the alternative for themselves. In a political culture where reallocating road space is always intensely polarising, that takes a lot of nerve.

Plante never pretended change would be painless. Resistance, she acknowledged, was inevitable. But she regarded discomfort as part of the job. “I’m not here to please everybody,” she said. This was therefore never just a traffic intervention, but a bigger argument about what—and who—streets are for.

Cars are not disappearing from Montréal anytime soon. But on a growing number of streets, they have been relegated to guests. That is Plante’s greatest achievement: once people have experienced a different way of using public space, it can be surprisingly difficult to convince them to give it back.🔚

Former Montréal Mayor Valérie Plante is one of 19 inspiring female leaders profiled in our book 'Women Changing Cities: Global Stories of Urban Transformation’: www.modacitylife.com/women-changi...

One thing we neglected to mention in this post: the Dutch Cycling Embassy can claim a small share of the credit for this success story. Here is Chris giving Mayor Valérie Plante a tour of Amsterdam shortly after her election in 2019!

Did her policies cost her reelection?