Retail businesses will be permitted to reopen for curbside pickup as of Monday morning but Mayor John Tory says that there will have to be some special considerations made for those in densely populated areas, including staggered pick up times to prevent large lines from forming on sidewalks.
Tory made the comment during an interview with CP24 on Thursday morning, though he conceded that the city will largely rely on the “cooperation” of the retail sector to ensure compliance with whatever recommendations are ultimately made.
The city has also announced a plan to create additional space for pedestrians and cyclists by limiting some streets to local-traffic only.
“It is being considered right now,” Tory said of staggered pickup times. “We recognize the fact that you can’t just have all of a sudden a mob scene where everybody shows up. So we are looking at encouraging businesses to think about things like making an appointment to pick up your goods to avoid big lineups and to avoid crowd scenes, which of course avoids the possible transmission of the virus. I think going forward we are going to look at a lot of these things and it may be the same with restaurants. Maybe it will be the case that you can’t just walk off the street anymore in the early phase of reopening.”
On Wednesday Premier Doug Ford surprised many when he announced that garden centres and hardware stores would be able to fully reopen on Friday and Saturday, respectively.
He also said that any retail store with a street entrance could open for curbside pickup on Monday, though he later admitted that such a system could impose unique challenges in some downtown Toronto neighbourhoods and said that Tory would have to put the “proper protocols” in place.
“I don’t think it is going to look radically different than what people have become accustom to with going to grocery stores, which is that there are orderly line ups with physical spacing,” Tory said Thursday. “We are very hopeful about it and we are working very closely with businesses. We started planning for it the minute I heard from the premier on Tuesday night. I hung up the phone and got started on planning.”
Tory said that he in support of restarting a retail sector which has been mostly shuttered since mid-March but he warned that precautions do need to be taken “so we don’t slide backwards into another shutdown.
That would, of course, mean taking action to limit crowds and prevent mob scenes like the one that was seen outside a Yonge Street video game store on March 20 when dozens of people lined up ahead of the release of a new product.
“I am glad the premier recognizes Toronto is different. People don’t like to hear that who don’t live in Toronto but is a fact,” Tory said. “We ae a city of three million people, we are densely populated, we are dense in terms of how our retail is set up on streets downtown and that needs to be taken into account with the speed and the manner in which we open the city back up.”
