This past Sunday, Halifax made a switch. To encourage Haligonians to cycle, rollerblade or walk, two kilometres of road were shut down for Open Street Sunday, also known as Switch. The event included activities and sidewalk shops.
Ross Soward, a community planner for the event, says Switch is multipurpose.
“It’s a way to use our streets on Sunday mornings. They can be used for people to recreate public-art on, to teach their kids to ride a bike on, to do a scavenger hunt. It’s essentially an organized street party,” he says.
Recent moviegoers may wonder why Switch isn’t called Premium Rush Sunday. The weekend’s event is reminiscent of the movie starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which is essentially 91 minutes of him cycling the streets of New York.
In Premium Rush (2012), Gordon-Levitt plays Wilee, a bike messenger who is given an important message to deliver that will affect the future of multiple people, including his girlfriend’s ex-roommate. There are crooked cops and gambling scandals, making viewers’ hearts race in tandem with Wilee’s accelerated cardio pulse.
Viewers will have to see the movie themselves to find out whether Wilee will save the day, but the movie is exactly what it sounds like: a basic Hollywood formula of action plus Joseph Gordon-Levitt plus an interesting perspective on how people use streets plus a bad guy plus a love interest with complications. The result? A likeable, easy-to-watch movie that realistically won’t be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival.
One thing to say for the movie is it makes the audience think about their own relation to the streets that surround them in everyday life. The main character consistently maps out his routes and weighs what options are best, having to think fast in New York traffic. In scenarios, Wilee sees that he will be hit by a cab if he goes one way and will knock a baby out of its carriage if he goes the other—he has to think fast.
But what does this have to do with Open Street Sundays, again? Switch offers Haligonians the opportunity to learn how to navigate their streets without the traffic. The event is the project of the Planning and Design Centre and has received support from community organizations such as the Halifax Cycling Coalition, North End Business Association, Ecology Action Centre, and Mountain Equipment Co-op, helping to make the first event a success.
After a fight with the city and having to pay an inflated price to make this happen, Switch Halifax is not going anywhere for a while. Switch Halifax promised via Twitter that last Sunday was the first Open Street Sunday but certainly not the last.
Halifax, get ready to take to the streets.
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