NORTHVILLE, Mich. (WXYZ) — The Northville community remains divided on whether or not the downtown area should be open or closed to vehicle traffic year-round.
Restaurants say the closure helped increase foot traffic and sales. Fed up residents, however, say the closure negatively affected traffic around the downtown area and made the town hard to get around.
Despite both sides still at odds, the city opened the downtown area to vehicles for the first time in over three years on Wednesday.
Northville decided to close Main Street in 2020 to help struggling restaurants during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The area became a hot spot for outdoor eating, concerts and activities.
“They loved being able to be walking around, kids roaming freely, you don’t have to worry about them if they run in the streets," Browndog Barlor & Restaurant general manager Zeina Shaman-Schelter said. "It was great.”
Even though it's only been a day of the reopening, Shaman-Schelter says she already is seeing the impact on her business.
"We’re dead slow. Having the patio brings a lot of life," she said. “There’s no more community here, it’s just cars.”
Northville City Council decided the area would be permanently closed to vehicles last year. This year, they changed their tune after pushback from the community and decided on a seasonal schedule instead: Six months open to traffic in the colder months and six months closed to traffic in the warmer months.
City Manager George Lahanas says it was a compromise to please all residents.
"Council had a lot of deliberations about this and they really settled on what I think is a sort of compromise position," he said. “Some people think it’s better to have the streets open — some people have preferred having the streets closed."
However, residents like Barbara Eckhout say a seasonal schedule is still not good enough. She and the organization she's involved with, Let's Open Northville, say the downtown area needs to be open to traffic year-round because of congested traffic that spills out onto residential streets, the vintage look of downtown needs to be restored and the area needs to stay open to people who need vehicles to get around.
“The traffic is horrendous. The traffic on my street alone has quadrupled," she said.
She doesn't see the seasonal schedule as a compromise and says now that the pandemic has passed, it's time to return to the way things originally were.
“I was OK with it during COVID, completely. We supported all the restaurants. We all did. But then they took it a step further," Eckhout said.
She and other residents filed a lawsuit against the city last week to reopen downtown to vehicles permanently and say the city doesn't have the authority to make it seasonal.
“The lawsuit will continue, so there’s going to be a lot of work we’ll have to do for that," she said.
Lahanas says he cannot comment on the lawsuit, but says he's excited about having both options available for the city and residents.
The intersections downtown are a four-way stop at this time as Wayne County has to come by and reset the traffic lights.
