Sainte-Julie

“The Montreal suburb of Sainte-Julie adopted a unique Complete Streets approach in July 2017 that uses a five-step process of citizen engagement in order to bring about ‘Rue Conviviale'” redesigns.

Sainte-Julie has created a map of streets in city that meet the criteria for potential Complete Streets transformations. They must be local streets with no transit, and have vehicle counts below 500 a day. Once confirming a street is eligible, the city will send out questionnaires to every resident on the street. At least 33% of residents must respond in favour, and once this threshold has been met, the street will be designated as a “Rue Conviviale,” and receive some traffic calming measures, such as a reduced speed limit and planters in the middle of the street.

As of July 2017, this strategy is quite different from most other Complete Streets policies or approaches in Canada, in that it specifically excludes transit, is not municipality-wide, and it is fairly modest in the scale of its interventions into the city’s streetscape. However, it is worth highlighting due to its unique process of citizen engagement as a means of bringing about Complete Streets, and has the potential to grow into a more ambitious policy for transforming Sainte-Julie’s streets.”