TRUWinnipeg.org

Here are 11 facts regarding the $138+million, 3.5km dedicated busway that was recently announced.

1. Buses are not rapid transit. Nor can they ever be. Rapid transit, by definition, involves rail vehicles running on their own right-of-way—above or below the ground. In the strictest sense, most LRT systems are not even rapid transit, but streetcar lines running on their own limited surface rights-of-way (often blocking, and sometimes colliding with, vehicle traffic at the surface level). In a truly Orwellian attempt to redefine the phrase, the local media has used the term “rapid transit” as a synonym for “busways,” usually with the pretense that there is no other possible form of rapid transit.

2. BRT will never become LRT. Assuming this metamorphosis takes 30 years, as has been the case in Ottawa, if you are over 45 chances are you will die before seeing busways become LRT lines. If the whole concern is cost, why are we talking about building two systems—a “BRT” busway and then an LRT atop it? Would it not make sense to build the system correctly in the first place? The Winnipeg Sun, in response to a letter lamenting the decision to go BRT over LRT, replied that “LRT will never happen here,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that light rail vehicles ran throughout the city (and eventually beyond) from 1891 to 1955.

LRTs were popular in Winnipeg in 1906 but in 2008 the Winnipeg Sun says they’ll never happen here?

3. Contrary to common misperception, the aim of Rapid Transit is not merely to move persons from A to B more quickly, but to add value to the land surrounding stations. So-called “Bus Rapid Transit” has never demonstrated the ability to do this (unsurprisingly so, since it relies on bus freeways and freeways are detrimental to urban land values) whereas the most effective mode for adding value and fostering density is underground heavy rail—subways. While the BRT advocates (who say we “can’t afford” a subway) ridiculously claim that tax-increment financing will pay for the busway project as properties near “stations” are developed, the entire inner city of Winnipeg remains grossly undervalued and filled with derelict homes and vacant lots. The Wilson subway would bring 8 high-volume subterranean rail stations to the downtown, and dozens of stations throughout the inner city, with each having a supercharging effect on adjacent land values, prompting dense development on vacant lots and the further infilling of already medium- and high-density neighborhoods. Such a collection of high-density, high-foot traffic nodes together would constitute a safe, high-value, tourist-magnetic strolling experience that would significantly expand our city’s tourism industry. Needless to say, a busway cannot accomplish any of this.

4. Our winters are unbearable. Regardless of outsiders’ observations that we are “a hardy bunch” when it comes to handling the snowy season, the fact remains we are an Extreme Cold Weather city that requires a transportation lifeline ensuring quick, easy, comfortable travel in conditions of heavy snowfall and ultra-cold temperatures. For good reason, human beings are naturally repelled by temperatures in which they would not long survive outside, and a subway system represents the only solution to this significant drawback to life in Winnipeg, and our only hope for consistently attracting visitors and new residents to endure the harsher months.

5. Winnipeg has a poor reputation. Nationally, internationally—all the Guy Maddin movies and Take Pride! sloganeering can do nothing to alleviate the terror felt by the family from Fargo as they stroll outside their downtown hotel at night and struggle to find a cafe or anything open as they are accosted by roving groups of aggressive, solvent-huffing panhandlers. This is not so much an issue with the panhandlers (every downtown has them) as with the lack of perceived value in the downtown that created such a void as to remove almost everyone else at night, and thus leave tourists with the perception that, at night, the streets are overrun with derelicts. In most parts of downtown there is more land taken up by surface parking lots than by building structures. In the 8 years I have been publishing articles on this subject this fact hasn’t at all been alleviated. A busway, or even a full-scale rapid bus network, will do nothing to help our reputation either. Regardless of whether you think “I live here and I love it!” the fact remains that perceptions of a city are formed by the state of its downtown, and even the most patriotic of residents would agree that our downtown is among the country’s most foreboding and dangerous. Curing our ailing core once and for all ought to be our city’s first priority, and the Wilson subway plan is the best hope, indeed the only hope, for a quick and total transformation of the inner city’s economic conditions.

6. It doesn’t go where most people are going. The proposed BRT “stations” are isolated some distance from major concentrations of residence or commerce. The “Osborne Station,” for example, will be at Osborne & Warsaw, in the dead industrial no man’s land between Osborne Village and South Osborne. (The Wilson subway plan, by contrast, would put underground stations on Osborne Street at River and Corydon Avenues.) “Morley Station” lies in the middle of a rail yard, hundreds of meters from the corner of Osborne (an existing commercial cluster where the Wilson subway would have a two-line stop) and from Pembina Highway (which isn’t exactly pedestrian-oriented). If you thought a winter walk to the bus stop was too far before, wait’ll you try getting to these new BRT stations. This use-it-because-it’s-there approach to piggybacking a freight line does not make sense since it fails to deliver passengers directly to major intersections. Moreover, the initial aim here is to speed travel to and from the University of Manitoba, to where 30,000 students and faculty arrive regularly. But what about the other 670,000 Winnipeggers who seldom have occasion to visit the University? The Wilson subway plan’s hub-and-spoke system saturates coverage within a 8km radius of Portage and Main–returning the focus of the city to our downtown and main intersection, not far-flung suburbs.

7. Inner cities are for the wealthy. It’s not just rising gas prices that are prompting prosperous persons—married, single, young, old—to live closer to workplaces, shopping, dining, nightlife, and friends. It’s a lifestyle choice, a social pendulum swing as the flight of the ’60s and ’70s inverts itself to a return in the ’00s. Small lots are easier to maintain—what do suburbanites do with all that lawn? The value in neighborhoods like Chicago’s Lincoln Park or Vancouver’s Grandview or Toronto’s Riverdale is in the proximity to services, especially rapid rail transport. While Winnipeg neighborhoods such as Wolseley are equipped with superb housing stock, the concentration of services is insufficient for the neighborhood to become ultra-desirable. In the absence of a cohesive storefront shopping district, Wolseley residents are obliged to procure goods and services via automobile along the strip-malls of a highway-like Portage Avenue, or among the big boxes of the St. James Industrial Park. The Blue Line (Portage-Main-Mountain) of the Wilson subway would turn stations into multi-storey development nodes, creating a Champs-Elysee effect along Portage Avenue, sending Wolseley and West End property values nearer to their neighborhood counterparts in other major markets. In other words, wealthier persons are more likely to be drawn from the suburbs to a dense urban setting if they can walk from their homes to a happening strip with cafes, groceries (notice the plural), gyms, dog spas, phamacies, mobile phone retailers, etc. that is fed customers from other neighborhoods, cities, even countries from an underground subway station that carries passengers to other happening strips throughout the city grid.

8. Regular bus routes once ran much more frequently. In 1993, during late weekday evenings, the 18 North Main-Corydon bus ran every 13 minutes; now it runs every 21 minutes. That’s the difference between just waiting at a stop or having to call TeleBus. Given the hassle of that extra step, many of us (OK, most of us) would rather just get in our car, even after a few drinks. And by 1993, route frequencies had already been cut. TRU Winnipeg belives the $138 million would be better spent making existing routes run more frequently—i.e., putting more buses on the road—and extending service hours (with major routes running round-the-clock) rather than paving an inconveniently placed busway that will, at best, shave mere minutes off travel times.

9. We can afford a subway. If a 3.5 km busway is going to cost $138+million without adding any appreciable land value to the tax base, what would an entire network run? Two billion? For that price, you can build a lot of subway—which has a proven effect on bolstering land values. A trebling of tax revenues from our dangerously devalued inner city will go a long way to paying for the construction costs of the 40km Wilson subway.

10. The Letellier Line (CN tracks west of Pembina, south from Jubilee) is owned by CN, which has stated it will not relinquish the land to the city for BRT, LRT or any other purpose. How the busway will be extended from Jubilee to the University has not been explicity said.

11. Winnipeg is not Calgary. Nor Edmonton. With our vast pre-1920 built up area of packed-together houses, three-storey walk up blocks, gridded streets, front porches, and back lanes, we are better suited to developing a larger urban culture. The notion that Winnipeg’s downtown is “too big” is an absurd myth. How can you have too large a concentration of commerce, industry, and residence? Our downtown isn’t too big, just too sparse (everywhere you see an empty lot or surface parking lot downtown today there was almost certainly a building in 1946), a developmental result of being under-serviced by transit since the dismantling of our streetcar (LRT) system in 1955. The Park-’N'-Ride, rail-rights-of-way LRT model more befits a city like Calgary which is mostly comprised of post-1960s low-density suburban sprawl, but an older city such as Winnipeg is, like Toronto, better suited to subway and streetcar vehicles that deliver people along the busiest streets and directly to the busiest intersections. As Jeff Lowe and others have written, the covert aim of BRT is indeed to facilitate sprawl by making the suburbs, rather than the inner city, the focus of transit service. Putative “progressives” who claim to oppose sprawl yet support BRT are only being hoodwinked.

–DALLAS HANSEN

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