Winnipeg Construction X

[bomberjet]

That's right. Sharp or Overdale? That's why there are some roads with the median in the middle. For seemingly no reason. I think it involved Inkster, east across red to what's now Concordia and on from there. Can't remember where it went in the south end.

Non-unicity kiboshed that. The thought with the merger would be those issues go away. Not so easy.

[OTA in Winnipeg]

Salisbury House at Ferry Rd. and Ellice has been sold. I assume industrial related airport and/or shipping, etc. It's a good sized lot.

[bomberjet]

Kind of an odd location. Packed away in the industry of Ellice.

The few times I've been there it was packed. Usually on a weekend for breakfast after hockey. I know the Pepsi people go there t0o. Old school diner vibes in there.

[GarryEllice]

Originally Posted by bomberjet

Fermor dumps into Riverview.

Riverview was laid out around 1900-1910. Nobody was thinking about reserving space for a future expressway back then, regardless of whether Winnipeg and St. Vital were separate cities or not.

Originally Posted by bomberjet

William Clement dumps in St. James and Charleswood.

This involves a bridge that was built in 1995, to accommodate suburb-to-suburb travel that nobody would have thought to plan for when these areas first developed a century ago. At the time, transportation needs were covered by the streetcars heading downtown.

Originally Posted by bomberjet

Disraeli dumps into Elmwood.

And that's all within the former City of Winnipeg, so this is not a matter of municipal boundaries either. (Also, Henderson is not exactly a piddly residential street. Where else would you want the Disraeli to go??)

I'm definitely not saying that Winnipeg's street network is perfect, just that former municipal boundaries don't play nearly as big of a role as people think. The street network inside the former City of Winnipeg is just as disjointed as it is across former city boundaries! Most of the problems have better explanations, usually boiling down to the fact that Winnipeg is a fairly old city as far as Western Canada goes -- old enough to have been built out before travel patterns were changed by the private automobile.

[WildCake]

Originally Posted by GarryEllice

I'm definitely not saying that Winnipeg's street network is perfect, just that former municipal boundaries don't play nearly as big of a role as people think. The street network inside the former City of Winnipeg is just as disjointed as it is across former city boundaries! Most of the problems have better explanations, usually boiling down to the fact that Winnipeg is a fairly old city as far as Western Canada goes -- old enough to have been built out before travel patterns were changed by the private automobile.

And Winnipeg did not have as big of a post-war boom as other cities did, where rapidly growing cities put the car on a pedestal and bulldozed through (usually poorer) neighbourhoods to accommodate urban freeways to the suburbs.

[esquire]

Originally Posted by bomberjet

Kind of an odd location. Packed away in the industry of Ellice.

I wonder if it dates back to when the airport terminal was situated at the end of Ellice? Kind of like with the Airport Motor Inn nearby. I vaguely recall there once being a pretty big A&W right by the Sal's...

[OTA in Winnipeg]

Originally Posted by esquire

I wonder if it dates back to when the airport terminal was situated at the end of Ellice? Kind of like with the Airport Motor Inn nearby. I vaguely recall there once being a pretty big A&W right by the Sal's...

I think it was that A&W.

[bomberjet]

Last post on the freeways. I stand by my assessment. The 3 examples I mentioned are all part of different plans from different eras. Disraeli for example is the only piece built from the full on Winnipeg freeway system that would've changed the face of the City. I have the PDF's somewhere..

[esquire]

I can live without the freeways. It would have been sufficient in my view to just better connect normal regional streets.

[optimusREIM]

Originally Posted by esquire

I can live without the freeways. It would have been sufficient in my view to just better connect normal regional streets.

I think if that had happened, the freeways would exist today.

[EdwardTH]

Freeways are great if you're looking for a way to spend a few billion dollars, ruin some established neighbourhoods and push development out beyond city limits. We're lucky we never built any.

[H2man]

For a city of Winnipeg's size, I'm honestly fine with stroads with a little more connectivity instead of freeways; specifically with bridges to better get across the rivers.

[drew]

Originally Posted by EdwardTH

Freeways are great if you're looking for a way to spend a few billion dollars, ruin some established neighbourhoods and push development out beyond city limits. We're lucky we never built any.

We wouldn't have been able to afford to maintain them anyway.

[rivercity]

Originally Posted by H2man

For a city of Winnipeg's size, I'm honestly fine with stroads with a little more connectivity instead of freeways; specifically with bridges to better get across the rivers.

The issue I have with stroads in Winnipeg is that they are all historic high streets that would be the most walkable/enjoyable/have the best existing density. Especially Osborne. I walked down it during that warm stretch in January and it absolutely miserable. It has great bones and such potential but you have to avoid getting splashed by vehicles, there is like a lone spindly tree barely hanging on mostly filled with shopping bags fluttering in the wind and meanwhile it is bumper to bumper traffic. It is no surprise that it is suffering given its mostly used as a thoroughfare to GTFO of DT.

Not really sure what the solution is, but i would love to see sidewalks widen and lanes removed. To hell with traffic. Hah.

[GreyGarden]

There is something to be said for saying to hell to traffic and focusing on the core. In my opinion, one of the reasons the core is not that desirable for a lot of people is that its so quick and easy to get out to the suburbs. I think if driving out to the suburbs took longer and was just in general more of a headache, people might consider their commuting time and proximity to the core in their housing choices. Some will argue that it'd have the opposite effect, but I think bad traffic and long commuting times would actually generate interest and maybe some more investment in our core neighbourhoods.

As a spinoff, bad traffic, naturally, slows down traffic. Osborne is by no means a pleasant street in terms of walking, but I find it to be a lot more comfortable than Academy where cars can really pick up some speed.

[LilZebra]

Originally Posted by rivercity

The issue I have with stroads in Winnipeg is that they are all historic high streets that would be the most walkable/enjoyable/have the best existing density. Especially Osborne. I walked down it during that warm stretch in January and it absolutely miserable. It has great bones and such potential but you have to avoid getting splashed by vehicles, there is like a lone spindly tree barely hanging on mostly filled with shopping bags fluttering in the wind and meanwhile it is bumper to bumper traffic. It is no surprise that it is suffering given its mostly used as a thoroughfare to GTFO of DT.

Not really sure what the solution is, but i would love to see sidewalks widen and lanes removed. To hell with traffic. Hah.

Would it be possible to have an underground tunnel for auto and bus traffic and below that a transit subway train tunnel

Then Osborne St. in the Village could be full time pedestrianized.

Would cost a few Billion, but would be worth it, IMHO.

[bomberjet]

So we keep talking about how shitty it is to have cars, buses, etc traveling through our residential areas. Our high streets. St. B NIMBY's don't want the trucks but there is no where for them to go, for example.

But then we don't want to have one dedicated corridor for vehicles to cross residential areas?? I'm not talking about us building mega freeways bulldozing through neighbouhoods.. I'm talking about the shitty job the City has done over it's life to manage traffic. We have bits and pieces. But thats it.

Then our transit system. lol

Okay for real last post on this.

[rivercity]

Originally Posted by bomberjet

So we keep talking about how shitty it is to have cars, buses, etc traveling through our residential areas. Our high streets. St. B NIMBY's don't want the trucks but there is no where for them to go, for example.

But then we don't want to have one dedicated corridor for vehicles to cross residential areas?? I'm not talking about us building mega freeways bulldozing through neighbouhoods.. I'm talking about the shitty job the City has done over it's life to manage traffic. We have bits and pieces. But thats it.

Then our transit system. lol

Okay for real last post on this.

Yeah, like I said, I don't have a real solution here.
Agreed, bomber, that had something been done in some form to funnel traffic/heavy trucks away from high streets and prevent them from becoming stroads it would have been beneficial.

[Spocket]

Originally Posted by bomberjet

So we keep talking about how shitty it is to have cars, buses, etc traveling through our residential areas. Our high streets. St. B NIMBY's don't want the trucks but there is no where for them to go, for example.

But then we don't want to have one dedicated corridor for vehicles to cross residential areas?? I'm not talking about us building mega freeways bulldozing through neighbouhoods.. I'm talking about the shitty job the City has done over it's life to manage traffic. We have bits and pieces. But thats it.

Then our transit system. lol

Okay for real last post on this.

That's a problem I recognized with the way Winnipeg implements transportation plans decades ago. It's always been this way: Let's plan to do x with x street. 10 years later the city decides that it doesn't want to do that anymore and sells off whatever assets it had purchased to implement the original plan. Now that it can't implement the original plan it comes along and pleads poverty and comes up with some "Made in Winnipeg" solution that isn't a solution at all and is usually the cheapest, crappiest version of something that any decently sized city would do properly.

Just look at Bishop Grandin. Now, if it was ever destined to be a high speed arterial, the city capped its capacity by installing lights all along the eastern end of it. There's room for grade separations (or, there was room for them) all along it but their placements don't really make sense. Either way, the city decided to sell some of the land it had set aside for those grade separations because it claimed that it would be a long, long time before it could invest money in building them. But that's stupid because if you sell the land, you're limiting what kind of a grade separation you could build and potentially making it much more expensive. Or, you would be if you actually ever intended to build said interchanges as planned. Instead, the city usually just gives up and calls it a day before moving on to some new, grand plan that it won't see through. Like Kenaston through Waverley West.

[GarryEllice]

Originally Posted by rivercity

Yeah, like I said, I don't have a real solution here.
Agreed, bomber, that had something been done in some form to funnel traffic/heavy trucks away from high streets and prevent them from becoming stroads it would have been beneficial.

But freeways don't really do that anyway. Traffic will fill whatever capacity is provided. While not a freeway, the construction of the Midtown Bridge and the Donald Street extension in the 1950s theoretically provided a faster and higher-capacity bypass around Osborne Street, but that didn't prevent Osborne from becoming pretty stroady anyway.

The real solution is to reduce traffic, which is completely doable through road narrowing, road pricing, and major improvements in transit. But that'll never happen in Winnipeg, and there is literally no other practical solution, so we'd better learn to love our stroads.