Freeway-Free City - Something Winnipeg can be proud of
 

I was looking at another forum about large U.S. cities without freeways and it might be that Winnipeg may be the only large city of over 500,000 people. Whether it was intentional or good fortune, I think it is something Winnipeg should be proud of: that we haven't made the mistake that has blighted so many cities on this continent.

Now, hopefully we can get around to improving public transit and urban life to kill any ideas of building freeways in the future

While I wouldn't want any bridges over neighbourhoods carrying high volume freeways... I definatley would support a more interchanges being built inorder to improve traffic flows on Bishop Grandon, Route 90 and Lag. I am always sickened at the amount of pollution as a result of inefficient high volume roadways.

I also know the trucking industry is pushing for better traffic flows. The new underpass on route 90 has definately improved things at that spot... but there are still many enefficient areas to be improved on, especially as the level of commericial traffic areas in the city expand, while the city wants to attact higher levels of the transportation distribution business.

On this point I heard that they will be building a new underpass on Waverly.

yes they are going to build a new underpas on waverly... its kinda needed...

anyhow there was a proposil for a freeway system in winnipeg back in the 60's theres pics on the web of it somewhere we also were supost to build a subway damit :(

Where on Waverly, and is it JUST an overpass?

it was in the news recently

Yes the underpass is definitly needed. It will provide alot of relief in that area.

that waverley development is horrible

we should ban building culdisacs

What is wrong with freeways? Deerfoot trail in Calgary is my favorite road to drive on because it is a fast efficient way to get from north to south (except when there are accidents of course). Raised freeways are a different story of course, but having a big fast road without any lights is a very good thing IMO.

Well the point is we're trying to get people away from cars and sprawl to living on a more human and sustainable scale. Calgary is horrible in this respect!

A Waverley Underpass is more money wasted that should be spent actually improving the city! I'm surprised and disappointed that it is getting so many endorsements from people on this forum.

unfortnatly lee its needed not just for whats going to be built but also for whats there already...... i personaly would love to see them suffer

... ummm are you from another century?

... Modern transportation has long been built into the economy, especially in the transportaion hub like Winnipeg. That underpass on Waverly will encourage more light industrial develoment in the area. This will help the city's economy expand and is nessesary for the future well being of the city.. even if a few pedestrain focused people don't appreciate it. That part of Waverly is rapidly becoming a tax driver for the city.

Not everthing can or will be built downtown... and many sectors require efficient transportation... in zoned areas which support those companies. I also think people should live close to there work.... and those areas also require effienct transportation. Winnipeg is more than just a downtown .. its a city.. and if it wants to develop as a modern city it needs to continue to enhance its infrastructure... including roadways.

In the coming years we will continue to see more expressway type upgrades, as Winnipeg looks to expand its commerical transportation industry. I wouldn't nessesarily say we'd need a Deerfoot, but as Winnipeg continues to grow the city needs to keep up, or face the problems which plague a city which falls behind on its roadways. (ie: lost opportunities). There are some significant developments in the offing which will require even more upgrades of traffic flows. It is looking very promising.

Yeah we do need efficient movement of goods, but that's what the perimeter and railways are for. Building interchanges in the city will do little to make things more efficient; you'll just end up with a more inhospitable city and the roads will be just as clogged in a year or two. So you spent a ton of money and just made things worse.

Lack of investment in roadways is not the main problem with Winnipeg, it is the lack of investment in schools, neighbourhoods and other more efficient forms of transportation that has been the problem. Right now Winnipeg isn't growing; it's sprawling. There's a difference.

Wouldn't they be "just as clogged" because there is more traffic using the same road? So even if what you claim will happen will in fact happen, the city is actually better off because more cars are able to travel, even if it is only at the same speed as before. If the post-construction clogging occurs because traffic increases from (say) 100 to 150 (arbitrary units of volume), then the result of the road-building program is that 150 can travel at a speed at which, before construction, only 100 could travel. So that's progress.

The population is increasing .. and the numbers of business is increasing .. therefore it is growing. The GDP of the city is also growing a very good pace... projected to be 3rd next year in all of Canada.

Winnipeg is a transportaion hub.. and roadways are a very important part of that. You are right though the demands on Winnipeg roads will continueto grow, as long as the city continues to grow.

Yes the perimeter is a very nice peice of infrastructure ( Edmonton and Calgary are bother imitating it as we speak), but the last time I looked there wasn't much industry on the perimeter Hwy. Winnipeg will continue to see demands for better roadways on the inner portions of the city as they are the most conjested... and end up costing the local economy the most money in wasted transportaion costs. The trucking association has stated it costs the city and provincial economy millions of dollars a year in delayed transport costs alone, not to mention the image from companies to disregard Winnipeg as a viable hub, due to the weak infrastructure.

Capital infrastructure is just as imporant to the local economy as low taxes.
Without the nessesary means to compete.. Winnipeg's economy will not fair very well in the future .. hense the problems of the 70's, 80's and 90's. Winnipeg needs to move beyond that .. and realize that we need to compete for investment.

Yes it nice to pretend that Winnipeg is in a buble... but its simple not true and the misconception need to be overcome.

A freeway is modern transportation? Maybe in 1950. So that people in Linden Ridge can drive through my neighbourhood faster? Screw that. Put the money into transportation for the new economy, namely light rail.

Winnipeg not having a freeway system has nothing to do with us being some mecca to new urbanism.

Rather we don't have a freeway because we're a backwards anti development kinda town.

It would be one thing if our forefathers said no to freeways and yes to some form of rapid transit, i.e. subway, L-train, monorail...etc.

But this is not the case..Winnipeg has neither a decent freeway system nor do we have rapid transit. Ohh yaa and we still have sprawl.

At the moment we're living in the worst of both worlds.

At least you don't have a "freeway" with red lights every mile or so. You finally get it up into high gear and you have to shift down again to stop! :rolleyes:

:haha: :haha: :haha: :haha: yeah.

Except that it's as easy, and usually easier, to get around Winnipeg than in almost all the cities that have freeways and/or rapid transit.

I've always wondered from an economics point of view what the real cost of being a freewayless town is in terms of lost efficiency, pollution from idling cars, etc?

How about lost opportunities from companies who decide NOT to invest in the city because the lack of infrastructures?

Most companies in Winnipeg are in the manufacturing business, and it is easy enough to locate near the Trans-Canada Highway or Highway 75 (=Interstate 29) if you want easy access to the U.S. and Canadian road networks. An upgrade of Highway 75 to limited access status would help, but that is a provincial matter and there are no NDP MLAs from south of the city so it won't happen for awhile.

Are you kidding me? in the past we have been bad, but the fact that we are going to triple the population of downtown in the next 5-6 years is pretty damn impressive. Our suburbs will continue to sprawl outwards with no geographical boundaries to inhibit them, but they are going to be far more dense than anything built in the last 20 years. Our transit is a model system that all small major cities should follow, we have about 100 000 people working in our downtown core, and about 40% of them actually drive, the rest either take transit or walk, and look for the number of drivers to shrink as our downtown population increases.

As for Winnipeg, I can't really speak to the traffic situation there, but having a major high speed road without any traffic lights can only be a good thing as more people will want to live in a house than a town home or a condo simply because it is a more comfortable lifestyle. I think focusing on actually building a LRT would make much more sense than developing a freeway.

This is a trait missing from most public officials in Winnipeg (and obviously a great number of private citizens too), and a big reason why LRT won't be happening here for a long while.

^ that is truly sad.

It is. -_-;

not really, if you consider what percentage that is of the overall growth....arguing that calgary is anything but a model for suburban sprawl is to ignore the obvious.

Have to agree with TV on this one, though I don't think that Calgary is a "model" for suburban sprawl. Many freeways are built under the assumption that they will help move goods, but end up being clogged by commuter traffic. Instead, focus on public transit and get people off the roads, and improve the existing infrastructure to a point where truck traffic can move reasonably well.

In some respects it is a horrible model, but also avoids many of the pitfalls of typical suburban sprawl in a metro.

There is no leapfrog development, density is consistent and getting increasinly dense with most coming in around 12 UPA, which is extremely high by Canadian standards (for instance, the most dense greenfield subdivision in the GTA - Cornell, in Markham is less than 12 upa. There is a much better unit mix in Calgary subdivisions than in most canadian or north american subdivisions. We also don't have edge cities that suck the life and primacy of downtown as the employment node for the city.

Calgary has by far the LEAST employment sprawl of any city in North America. To me, that is at least half of what you should consider in terms of the sprawl of a city. 80% of the Metro's office space and most employment is in the centre city. This makes rapid transit viable. Density is not an end in itself, and Calgary has some good outcomes such as high transit ridership despite a spread out city.

I said our transit system is a model system, please read carefully before criticizing.

But looking at those photos of houses in Calgary subdivisions absolutely jammed together, I'm not sure what the advantage of this kind of density is supposed to be. It looks like some sort of upscale version of a Brazilian shantytown. Of course, I'm going by photographs so I could be misunderstanding the reality.

josh and borris, i agree completly...those are all very good points.

i just got back from the rugby world cup in france and spent some time in nice....they are right now constructing a tramway system throught the downtown...it looked so simple to build and will completely transform the city.....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramway_de_Nice

it made me so sad to live in a place with such a small minded attitude towards what a city should be.

winnipeg has no freeways because freeways cost money to build, not because we are any smarter than anyone else....our luck was a result of our backwards attitude not our vision.


btw josh, i apologize for not responding to your e-mail a while back...i read it and closed it to give you a proper response later, and then completely forgot....for what its worth, i know nothing about what is going on at that site...the developer is doing his own thing right now, without our involvement....i will let you know if anything comes up....i didnt even know there was anything happening there...neither did my boss....he was disturbed to find it out actually.

So is there even any discussion of putting a mass transit system in the Peg? what is traffic like there?

we have no traffic issues.....there is lots of discussion but it wont happen under this mayor

the previous mayor had 50 million dollars from the 3 levels of government to implement the first leg af a BRT system from downtown to the U of M....the drawings were done and the system ready to go....when he stepped down to run federally, the new mayor's first act in office was to cancel the initiative and re-direct the money into community rec centres...it has been almost 4 years and not a cent has actually been spent on rec centres....the feds ended up taking back their money.

as well, winnipeg's mayor argued successfully with the feds to get an exclusive exemption for winnipeg to use the new gas tax money that is supposed to be spent on public transit, for road and sewer repair.

there is yet another task force set up to look into the feasibility of a system, but he did this just to placate the opposition....they are going to put GPS systems on the busses and they spent 10 million on a system that will time stop lights...thats winnipeg's vision.

the bus system is inadequate, but it actually does serve a pretty high level of ridership...it is dropping however.

Wow, sounds exactly like Halifax. And we have the same voices here saying that we need light rail instead of something better than our existing 2-lane cartpaths with 4-way stops. I have yet to see a load of cargo moved from the store to my house by light rail.

Perhaps there could put commuter cars on cargo trains??? This might apease everyone. It could be cheap ... and in Winnipeg's case would link most of the city. ;)

I would support an LRT .. but Manitoba doesn't have the funds to build it.

Manitoba needs to build its economy to the point of being able to support an LRT system... it is coming along. I for one am hopefull for this day within the next 10 years... but it would be without economic growth.

I would hate to live in your bend world of modern trasportation.. but in the case of servicing the massive industry of transportation and distribution a little LRT won't cut it... and a having a BRT line will do little to nothing to enhance ridership. I think they figured it would cut up to 4-5 minutes off the trip from downtown to the University.

Sure it would make a few hundred students happy, but I would put a much higher priority on enhancing Winnipeg's roadway inhancement for the purpose of increasing efficiency of the roads, as a means to build Winnipeg's position as a transportation hub. In the end I am sure this is the direction which willbe followed as there is increased interest in cargo distribution investment in the city .. but Winnipeg needs to modernize its infrastructure. Winnipeg is turning towards attracting this type of investment, as can no longer sit idlly by and watch opportunities walk by, as it has been for far too long. Winnipeg has finally put its economic growth and investment growth at a higher priority than glossy brochure mega projects. I couldn't be happier as it will pay huge dividends for the city and province.

Out of couriousity what is the funding breakdown of Calgary's new LRT expansion?

Normally the freight speeds through cities are way too low to make commuting viable. Nobody is going to ride the train in Winnipeg if it averages 20 km/h.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Halifax region had just about the highest highway lane km per capita in Canada, but there aren't very good highway connections in the city. The fact is that it is usually very painful to build a full highway right into the middle of a city. It costs a fortune, requires mass expropriation of land, and cuts off neighbourhoods from each other.

Traffic is always going to be an issue in successful cities because land is at a premium. Most of the cities with no traffic problems are half dead. Downtowns where there is tons of parking and where it's easy to drive around have usually been torn apart to the point where they look like suburban office parks anyway, so why not just leave that kind of thing to the suburbs?

I second this sentiment.:previous:
I kind of laughed at the title of this thread.

Well, when you're building an insta-city out of nothing (like Calgary) you can put freeways wherever you want, but in the case of established cities like Winnipeg or Toronto building freeways means destroying significant parts of the existing social or structural fabric. The freeway plan that existed in Winnipeg in the 1960s would have totally destroyed large parts of the city with unsightly raised roads. Developments like the Forks and other riverside projects would have been impossible. Many older neighbourhoods would have been sliced up and cut off and even worse off than they are now. So it's fortunate in many respects that the freeway plans were shelved. Even the Disraeli Freeway, a short elevated road that did get built, managed to devastate an entire inner-city neighbourhood.

Building an underpass at Waverley isn't going to make Winnipeg a transportation hub. Traffic on Waverley is increasingly single vehicle occupant cars. It will serve residential neighbourhoods, not commercial routes. These are two separate issues, LRT/BRT vs. commercial traffic. Does anyone in the world build an LRT to enhance cargo transportation? Obviously not.

By the way I specifically wrote light rail, so don't go throwing BRT into the mix. That was your comment not mine.

true, but it wouldn't be very hard to at least convert the perimeter highway to freeway status, for safety sake

freeways cause sprawl, increase commuting distances, increase air pollution, increase reliance on automobile travel and destroy the urban fabric of a city.....there is a reason american cities are so much larger than canadian ones....and why cities with freeways are larger than ones without:

http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/3...deacalgzw3.jpg

The Perimeter is a provincial trunk highway, not a city street. It is pretty substandard, but I doubt that there is a real need to spend hundreds of millions to make it completely controlled access. Some of the existing interchanges need to be rebuilt, though.

That would seem to be belied by the experience in Halifax, which has terrible sprawl and terrible roads.

Is that Winnipeg superimposed over Calgary?

I believe it would be 2 winnipeg's that are superimposed over Calgary. (1 Calgary would still be better then 2 Winnipeg's combined. Also interesting to note, Calgarys 1 downtown would still be bigger then 2 Winnipegs...LOL)

Absolutely correct, TV. You can never build your way out of congestion, it's been proven over and over. The rate of trip making goes up, you're back into gridlock. Having an effective goods movement network is important but smart land use decisions will drive that more than simply adding capacity where trucks are competing with cars. Nobody builds freeways anymore except Calgary, Edmonton, Dallas, etc. Surprise.

Winnipeg road network isn't much different than Vancouver....Vancouver simply invested in rapid transit and coordinated land use and accomodated alot of growth that way whereas Winnipeg did nothing. Forget Calgary as a model, that's the only city I can think of that invests hundreds of millions in LRT expansion while in the same corridor enhances road capacity.

BTW, those who slag BRT, try the Ottawa system. Far better transit than what you'll get in any Prairie city.