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Why Winnipeg Warrants a Subway

Presented to the Mayor’s Rapid Transit Task Force
Thursday, January 27 2005

by JEFF LOWE

General Factors

  • commutershed population approaching 700,000 (close to threshold figure of 750,000 cited by experts)
  • well-defined central business district and core (as well as numerous other areas of concentrated economic and social activity)
  • heavy trip volumes (30,000 person-trips and up in peak hours) in one or more travel corridors

Locally Unique Particulars

  • severe cold. ice and snow that hamper surface (especially, road) travel for half the year or longer
  • since it mushroomed to metropolis size long before other major population centres in the Canadian west came into being, boasts development densities and cityscape comparable to that of older, eastern Canadian cities; hence inherently more capable of sustaining high-capacity, high-impact forms of transit
  • a socioeconomic and demographic profile (preponderance of blue-collar workers; higher than normal proportion of seniors and youth) which provides transit with a solid ridership base
  • historically unusually strong response by the general public to good-quality transit (peaking at 105,000,000 passengers during the era of streetcar service in 1946: this was on a par with Toronto and Montreal cities which were two and three times larger than Winnipeg)
  • when total and per capita ridership on Winnipeg’s all-bus, all on-street system peaked in the mid-1980s, they were nonetheless substantially higher than that being recorded in several other Canadian cities which had already inaugurated light rail lines - suggesting the potential for greater gains to be captured in new ridership (were a rail-based rapid transit system to be built) here than were achieved elsewhere
  • since while traffic congestion - though significant - isn’t yet as severe as elsewhere, not being able to rely on the deterrent effect necessitates that the transit option be that much quicker and competitive; busways (which can better be termed, “pseudo-rapid transit”) and LRT (”semi-rapid transit”) while somewhat helpful, therefore will not do the trick
  • a public-opinion survey commissioned by TransPlan in 1995 revealed that 71% of Winnipeggers felt that “it is more important to build a rapid-transit system (expressly defined as, “a subway or monorail”) than more or bigger roads”: this was by far the most enthusiastic response to any proposition posed

Pragmatic considerations

  • being largely weather-protected, subways afford a city a transportation “lifeline” in snowy or stormy conditions
  • in consequence of the latter, even the staunchest of auto enthusiasts will willingly turn to transit as a serious commuting alternative for much of the year
  • an exclusive and fully grade-separated right-of-way ensures maximum operating efficiency in terms of safety and speed
  • rapid transit that is maximally useful can be calculated to induce, maximum use by the maximum percentage of the populace
  • politically this imparts a sense of ownership and, leads to “buy-in” on the community’s part
  • immense economic and environmental payback on investment - in terms of fostering intensification of land development and enablement of avoidance of excessive and unnecessary reliance on automobiles
  • results in the creation of a form of transportation infrastructure so durable as to require minimal restoration and infrequent replacement of vehicles and physical plant; and which will last an eternity

Putting the prototype to the test

As a research project in a Transportation Engineering course at the University of Manitoba in December 1983, I designed and administered a test of how people’s propensity to use public transit would be altered by two differing sets of radical overhauls to transit infrastructure and, service:

  1. bus-based improvements (up to and including, express-bus corridorways)
  2. an area-wide network configuration of “heavy-rail”, subways

My purposes (at which, I succeeded with flying colours) were threefold:

  1. To demonstrate a means of more meaningfully and accurately modeling modal split at the “micro” level (i.e., through “taking it to the people” by familiarizing each of them in great detail with the workings of what was being proposed and by as precisely as possible, specifying how it would affect them individually)
  2. To critically assess the dubious but widely-held transportation-planning construct (first postulated by Professor Marvin Manheim of M.I.T.) of the “abstract mode assumption” (or, the “hypothesis of choice-independent utilities”) — which claims that given equal levels of service, people don’t discriminate between buses and rail vehicles
  3. To prove (at least hypothetically) that given a willingness to commit sufficiently generous resources to the task, in terms of attracting a following transit can best the private automobile

In Phase I, use of the existing on-street, all-bus system was gauged:

This proved significantly higher than what was being officially reported at the time.

In Phase II, exhaustive and high-impact improvements to bus service were proffered:

  • This propelled transit’s proportion of work (including education-related) trips to around 60%
  • The other 3 major types of purpose-trips were nudged upwards into the 30+ per cent range

Phase III saw the revelation of a network of subway lines (positioned so as to yield area-wide coverage:

  • 3 radial-spaced so as to be more or less equidistant from each other — plus 1 circumferential enabling crosstown, suburb to suburb travel at mid-city
  • use of freight-rail rights-of-way only in instances where situated in reasonable proximity to the traffic arteries to whose vicinities, built-up development has gravitated
  • transit’s share of work and education trips surged to 70%
  • the other three major types of purpose-trips rose from verging on to in excess of, a 50% share
  • suburban-based respondents, in particular, took pains to single out the circumferential line as a particularly valuable feature of the system layout saying that had it been omitted, their responses probably would have been different

Conclusions

  • clearly, people draw a distinction between buses and rail vehicles (markedly preferring the latter): otherwise there’d have been no room for substantial gains in transit’s share between Phases II and III of the survey
  • you can entice suburbanites from their cars, onto public transit — provided you take steps to specifically cater to them
  • half measures fetch half results
  • the mediocre is the enemy of the great
  • the Winnipeg public is (and has for decades, been) light years ahead of the politicians and the planners, on this issue