As Sauble Beach begins to reopen in a limited walkthrough capacity, mayor Janice Jackson says the Town is planning to close a portion of Main Street to vehicles.
Jackson says they're shutting down the parking lanes on the first block of Main Street to allow people to have more room to physically distance, “That first block from the water has very narrow sidewalks,” says Jackson.
“We've got those metal fences that we use at the beach and so that's going to expand those sidewalks. So we'll be able to double the width of the sidewalks.”
She says for now, there will still be two lanes of traffic, but notes in the future, the Town is looking to close the whole first block of Main Street up from the beach.
“Ideally, it would be just fantastic to have that whole main part of Sauble as a big pedestrian mall, and have benches and trees and nice little twinkle lights over the street from side to side. We could make it look spectacular and create a lot more area for people to just move around.”
She says staff are looking at it now and discussed it on Monday (June 8th) but one obstacle that exists is a single street in front of the Sauble Beach sign which allows access to about 20 cottages on Lakeshore Street South by the Gift Bowl store.
“If we can possibly do it, we'll do it as soon as we can,” says Jackson.