The board of Functional Transit Winnipeg is proud to announce that we will be supporting the opening of Portage and Main to pedestrians.
Walkability and public transit go hand-in-hand. In the words of transit consultant Jarrett Walker, transit planners “plan for one method above all: walking. Sooner or later, everyone is a pedestrian.” The value we as an organization have placed on good pedestrian infrastructure goes back to the position we took on the Southwest Corridor. The primary criticism we had was that the route was located in a pedestrian unfriendly environment. Improving the pedestrian experience is key to one of our organization’s main positions: that it should be easy to access diverse destinations from transit.
While pedestrian infrastructure does exist at the corner of Portage and Main, the current arrangement has several issues that are best addressed by opening the intersection. For those with mobility challenges, the underground walkway takes an extremely long time to access during daytime hours and in the evenings, there is no accessible infrastructure at all. Many folks find the underground to feel unsafe and confusing to use. The stairwells accessing the space are also frequently quite unclean. Additionally, urban planners today point to street-level pedestrian crosswalks as being the method pedestrians prefer to experience the street.
The Dillon Report on opening Portage and Main acknowledges several costs to transit in the form of delays to buses because of longer light sequences. The report recommends buying and operating additional buses to address this challenge. The cost of purchasing additional buses is a one-time cost of $5 million and the additional operating cost is $1.8 million per year. However, reductions in private vehicles using the intersection as a response to longer light sequence may result in lower costs to transit over time.
We believe our transit network should be designed, operated and expanded with vision. If the costs of a pedestrian improvement at one intersection are considered too burdensome for our public transit network bear, then we as Winnipeggers need to demand better from our civic leaders on the transit file. Our system should serve the pedestrian and rider and we should be planning our transit system and frequent service network prioritizing both. Opening Portage and Main is a symbolic change for Winnipeg — a change in how we choose to move around our City. Living in a city means sharing space with many people, buildings and vehicles. We believe that opening Portage and Main restores an important part of the city to pedestrians and a pedestrian friendly city is a transit friendly city.
We encourage you to look at what Team Open has to say, to go and walk around the area and imagine how you might access transit and pedestrian experiences differently, and to cast your vote on October 24.