Quote:
Originally Posted by Winnipegger
3) Transit: Our transportation woes are not easy to solve. Yes, every city struggles with this. But as we've all discussed, our main roads downtown (Portage and Main) are a blight to urban, pedestrian friendly development, but also serve the bulk of downtown and cross-town traffic. Taking steps to fix that isn't easy and will come with high political and citizen resistance. You can talk about mode shift until you are blue in the face, and most people will just laugh at you. Transit's plan to start with making rapid transit in the downtown area is a good step, but shifting Winnipegger's preferences from car to bus is going to be difficult, and more likely influenced by market forces (cost of car ownership/gas/parking) as opposed to better bus service.
...and no, tolls will not work on our terrible road network.
It's important to set our expectations so that they align with reality. "Fixing" downtown will not come overnight. As many here know, most of the revitalization requires one critical ingredient: people living downtown. Without that, downtown in the evening is just an empty (and sometimes unsafe) husk of its daytime self. But getting people to live downtown is the tricky part. It requires solving issues 1 to 3 above under the reality of issues 4 and 5. And we need to chip away at these issues little by little because change will move at a glacial pace, but we need to be consistent over the coming years and decades.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
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Just wanted to address a couple of things. Agree that rapid transit downtown is good, but we keep pretending that somehow Winnipeg will come up with something entirely unique and "made in Manitoba" for transit, which is really fucking dumb. BRT here doesn't really do any of the things that a functional system should because we are ignoring the combined wisdom of all other developed places. Transit needs to serve established routes and dense areas.
Transit is great, but proper roadways are also required. Even places like Rotterdam and Amsterdam have freeways, let's get with the program and have one or two built to at least provide alternative routes to people to avoid them having to go along Portage or Main to traverse the city.
Tolls: tolls will not work on our existing network: correct. To help fund some of the freeways, it may not be a terrible idea to toll them. Tolls don't seem to deter a lot of folks from using freeways in other cities.
Downtown residents: I think it will also take some improvement to the west end and the north end to help downtown. Downtown should be the place everyone wants to be, and all areas radiating outwards should be more desirable as a result. The poverty issue is not one easily solvable, nor any of the other social issues facing us. The only thing that will improve that is some shift at a grassroots level. Leadership can only do so much. But in the meantime, when it comes to strategic investment, we shouldn't abandon downtown either and hope it happens purely organically. We may have to look to other places that went through rough times to get some ideas and try and implement them here.
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