City must face reality of rapid transit
Jeff Lowe, Winnipeg Free Press
July 13, 2008
As one who has written extensively on the subject, it has been difficult to fend off the frustration one feels at the small-town tone the “debate” over rapid transit in our city has assumed.
The reportage has been framed as if the only “realistic” choice is between building a short, insufficient initial length of exclusive “bus rapid transit” (BRT) or setting aside bus-only “diamond” lanes on major thoroughfares.
It has been sorrowing to witness the parade of supporters of better public transit clambering to lend their support to an “environmental improvement” which contemplates further defacing our city by pouring hundreds more lane-miles of concrete pavement.
Worse, rail reservation land would be confiscated to create a “freeway for buses”: whereas a rail rapid transit line sympathetic to the context, can be fit into drastically less space.
Air quality and the emission of greenhouse gases would realize scant improvement.
Why, too (given our adverse winter climate) would we for one moment consider staking our transit future on a system whose mainstay remained shackled to rubber-tired vehicles?
Consider Ottawa’s experience. Instead of BRT serving as a transportation “lifeline,” the inevitable winter storms and snow-packed conditions turn “transitways” into obstacle courses littered with jackknifed articulated buses.
Whatever the weather, Ottawa’s transitways discharge buses by the dozens onto streets designated for them spewing clouds of diesel fumes.
Opponents of urban sprawl, too, should be given pause by spiels that BRT “is perfect for this city because we lack the density of development to support a rail system.”
In other words, entrench a deplorable status quo, a tacit admission that bus rapid transit is an arrangement designed to serve sprawl, not curb it.
Rail-based rapid transit, by contrast, acts as an impetus for a denser urban form by creating the structural framework to attract and nourish intensive development. Only rail has demonstrated that it can attract development; the bus, no matter how gaudily you dress it up, is a bust.
This last point is illuminating in that within it lurk two clashing visions as to the optimal role of mass transit.
The bus vision contends that most people will normally shun transit and drive almost always. This option (which unfortunately seems to have buy-in from Winnipeg Transit) assumes that even an upgraded bus system’s ordained place is to supplement the almighty, owner-driven automobile.
The better rail vision projects a scenario under which a greatly enlarged and enriched transit system is outfitted to credibly offer an urban transportation experience superior to the car.
In this view, rail and bus are not antithetical, but function together within a citywide network. It seeks to move decisively “beyond petroleum” and render Winnipeg Transit fully and aggressively competitive with all other urban transport options.
Every city in Canada the size of Winnipeg or larger has either built rail-based rapid transit or pledged to do so. Likewise for the U.S. Even cities smaller than Winnipeg — Hamilton; Quebec City; Waterloo Region; Victoria — have recently joined the ranks.
In most that possess both bus corridors and rail rapid transit, the BRTs function strictly as adjuncts to rail lines — the “South Busway” delivers commuters from the far reaches of Dade County to the southern terminus of Miami’s MetroRail; the Orange Line BRT to the northern terminus of the Los Angeles Red Line subway).
It has become a popular expedient for cities endlessly debating rapid transit to break the logjam by building a greatly less costly and complicated downtown streetcar circulator as a sort of prototype.
These include: Indianapolis, Providence, Birmingham, Cincinnati, Spokane, Omaha and Columbus (Ohio).
(Winnipeg Transit and The Forks North Portage Partnership commissioned a $75,000 feasibility study of just such a downtown streetcar circulator for Winnipeg. But they’ve kept it from the public since 2003.)
The streetcar system connecting Portland’s downtown to a de-commissioned docklands and railway-yard area is an oft-cited example of the power of a rail transit line to generate handsome economic paybacks.
The streetcars attracted $2.2-billion in new construction within a two-block radius of the tracks in just nine years.
In cities where rail rapid transit has been built, it usually been the case that the local Chamber of Commerce (keenly aware of the huge dividends for the business community) led the charge. The Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, meanwhile has never publicly expressed the slightest awareness of the issue.
The ever-expanding LRT systems in oil-soaked Alberta’s two major metropolises run on electricity; indeed, the “juice” that powers Calgary’s C-Trains is entirely wind-generated.
It beggars belief that the principal city of hydro-rich Manitoba could, against economic and environmental logic, cling to a transit policy that requires an all-bus fleet that is 100 per cent diesel-dependent. Why does our provincial government tolerate this?
It’s a source of shame that of the five major hydro-electric-producing provinces, only Manitoba and Newfoundland have not taken advantage of their clean, abundant and renewable energy to power big-city transit.
Curiously, in Winnipeg the original hydro-electric system was created as a subsidiary of and, initially, underwritten with profits from, the private street railway company. (Assiniboine Credit Union — so named because the central streetcar barn stood on the site now occupied by Bonnycastle Park — was founded by employees of the Winnipeg Electric Company that ran both.)
But whereas elsewhere that laudable linkage was maintained, in Winnipeg the two were wrest apart and the streetcars were scrapped.
In the 1950s, Toronto and Winnipeg (at the time, Canada’s second- and third-largest cities by population) faced similar decisions.
Both commissioned plans that recommended subway systems be built.
Toronto kept its surface streetcar lines and installed its first subway: Winnipeg tore out its streetcar tracks (building no subways to take their place) and substituted buses.
That Toronto has since risen to “world city” status — and Winnipeg declined in stature — in retrospect can be explained to some degree by this starkly contrasting valuation of public transit.
If this city could somehow afford (at the turn of the 20th century) to assemble the far-flung and well-patronized streetcar system it once boasted, it can manage in the year 2008 to display similar moxie and foresight.
Full-fledged cities — cities that court admiration by acting with a firm belief in their abilities and potential and revel in their urbanity — all have rail rapid transit.
Let’s grow up.
Jeff Lowe is an expert on urban transit and its relation to land use, economic development and the environment.
