If you were riding on a streetcar on King St. W. through the Theatre District this week, you might have noticed a strange marketing gesture aimed at you. A giant ice sculpture on the patio of the Kit Kat restaurant, in the shape of a raised middle finger.

Why would this restaurant be flipping you the bird? A handwritten sign on the door of the restaurant cleared up any doubt about who the “profanity” was aimed at. “The King Street Pilot Project is hurting our business,” it reads. And by mid-week, the fingers were multiplying as more of them appeared, flipping off potential customers along the route.

For people who say business is down because of streetcar traffic, I gotta say the owners have chosen a really bizarre way to try to welcome riders in.

Despite the TTC’s reporting on the ridership and transit-travel success of the pilot project, recent headlines have been dominated by the complaints of business owners about sales declines they say correspond to the yearlong pilot’s launch in mid-November. These business owners say the elimination of street parking and imposition of local-traffic-only car travel restrictions are responsible for the downturn.

Fred Luk, owner of Fred’s Not Here, another Theatre District restaurant, wrote an op-ed in the Star recently making the case that transforming the street into an “urban freeway for streetcars” has turned the strip into “a wasteland. No vibrancy, no pedestrians, no culture . . . and soon to be inhabited by ‘Closed’ and ‘For Sale’ signs.”

It’s worth noting that Luk has a bit of a habit of declaring that the end is nigh for his restaurant and the businesses around it. My colleague Shawn Micallef recently enumerated how often Luk has cried “wolf” in the media: last year Luk called the increase in the minimum wage a “small business killer,” and said that businesses like his “cannot survive” their Toronto Hydro bills. In 2011 he said the G20 threatened his business, in 2006 he said SARS and parking rates and the theatre season were “a killer.”

And the Ontario Restaurant Hotel and Motel Association (ORHMA), whose members have been vocal along with Luk about business declines they attribute to the pilot, has a similar record of doomsaying: at various times in the past few years they said that a hotel tax, a liquor tax, improved employment standards and banning smoking were all things that threatened their industry. Back when the health department first started posting inspection reports on restaurants where customers could see them through the DineSafe program, the ORHMA took them to court to try to stop it.

And Al Carbone of Kit Kat, originator of the icy middle finger? When he said condo development would destroy King St. in 2014, local political representative Adam Vaughan told my colleague Jennifer Wells, “Al likes a fight, and he’s having one.”

Launching this spring, their designs will create Temporary Public Space Installations and Destination Parklets, and offers an opportunity for everyone to contribute to the rethinking and success of King St. The call for entries opens Tuesday and further information can be found on the City of Toronto’s website.

Indeed he is, again.

All this does not mean these people are lying, or even wrong, necessarily. It just means no one would accuse them of ever understating their fears about change.

It may well be true that business is down. The city is tracking point-of-sale data (from King St. and for other areas for comparison purposes) and will report it later this year. Meanwhile, I think it’s fair to take the complainers’ claims of year-over-year sales declines at face value.

But is it necessarily obvious such a decline is related to the pilot? I’m not sure it is.

Last year at this time, the Theatre District was home to the record-smashing run of the Broadway-bound Come From Away. This year it is not.

Not only that, but urban planner Gil Meslin (a frequently vocal cycling and transit advocate) pointed out on Twitter that the main theatres of the district were dark on more than twice as many days in 2017 as they were in 2016. Following Meslin’s lead, I checked historic performance schedules and found that the Royal Alexandra and Princess of Wales theatres’ combined 3,500 seats, for example, saw theatre showings on 83 dates between Nov. 12 and the end of 2016, versus only 58 dates in the same period in 2017. Not only that, but Meslin also points out those theatres were showing kid-oriented fare such as The Lorax this year — drawing a bring-the-whole family crowd one might guess would be less likely to go out for a meal or drinks in upscale local joints before or after the show.

This winter has also been, so far, astonishingly, dangerously cold. Any consideration of the number of pedestrians on the street has to take the weather into account, doesn’t it?

And we don’t — yet — have numbers about how businesses across the city are doing this season for comparison purposes.

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There could be any number of factors involved in a seasonal decline in business. I’m not certain which are most persuasive, or have had the biggest impact. But the explanation offered by business owners that it’s simply and only the car-travel changes don’t seem all that logical, either.

Only 180 parking spaces on King St. were removed, spread out between Bathurst and Jarvis Sts. Meanwhile 8,000 parking spaces remain within a five-minute walk of the street. Surely before this project ever began, the overwhelming majority of the thousands of nightly patrons of the theatres, nightclubs and restaurants on the strip parked in lots nearby, or took taxis or transit. They still can.

Toronto Star reporters Ben Spurr and Tamar Harris rode the TTC's King streetcar along the pilot project route and drove a car on corresponding streets to see if travel times have changed during the morning rush hours. (Toronto Star)

Similarly, the changes to car travel don’t actually change much about driving to a destination on King St. During rush hour, city tracking shows average car-trip travel times have increased by less than a minute. All the streets that would lead you to a destination on King remain the same as before, including the ones that (unlike King) you would actually want to drive on: Richmond St., Adelaide St., Wellington St., Lake Shore Blvd. Getting to King St. in a car is no harder than it used to be. It’s just not a street to cruise on anymore, if it ever was.

Just as many people live and work there as ever. And in the meantime, many more people are in the neighbourhood on the streetcar. The potential seems to be there for an increase in business.

It does seem possible to me — even likely — that all the rhetoric from some politicians (and worried business owners) have scared some people off. Many possible customers may have heard that King St. is now some kind of nightmare, a total no-go zone for car travellers, and are just staying away.

Some of the drop in street life could be attributable to those cynically stoked misunderstandings.

At the same time, it is obviously true that one of the main aims of the pilot project, besides improving streetcar travel, has not been fulfilled yet. The “pedestrian realm” was supposed to be improved, but perhaps because it is both early and still winter, it really has not been. Rather than patios and interesting parkettes, up until the last couple of weeks there had just been car delivery lanes and empty stretches of asphalt.

Fixing this should make the street more lively than it was, rather than less, especially as spring and summer arrive and events and promotions can kick in. Improvements announced last week and already underway should begin to make it so.

And perhaps the two-hours free parking at local Green P lots the city also announced will draw some people down. If it does, people will see that even if you’re driving, it’s not too different than it was before, and certainly it’s not a disaster.

The reason a pilot project is scheduled for a year is to gather enough information and allow enough adjustment time to understand the results. I don’t doubt the business owners are genuinely concerned, and I don’t doubt they are being honest when they say business is down. But I think there are lots of equally plausible explanations for what has caused the downturn, and I think it would be a mistake to abandon key parts of the pilot so soon in response.

Of course, I would have thought giving a giant icy middle finger to potential customers was a mistake. But it’s a pilot project, after all, a time for testing unconventional ideas. If nothing else, a big frozen F-you to the city is that.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire