By Joseph Kornelsen
This post was originally published on Facebook in response to a mayoral candidate claiming there are bigger priorities than public transit.
Of all the things cities do, transportation is among the most important. At the end of the day, moving people and goods around keeps our society and our economy running. We need to be able to get to our jobs, schools, daycares and grocery stores. Our city’s infrastructure connects us with our family and friends; it connects us with the movie theatre, the curling rink and the park. A solid transportation network is fundamental in order for people to live their most basic lives.
The reason transportation is so important for elected city officials specifically is that it’s challenging to move people through densely built up urban environments. Elected officials need to think about how to comfortably move lots of people along roads that are crowded by the very houses and workplaces they must travel to and from.
Investing in public transit in Winnipeg is important for the future of the city. Private automobile infrastructure incentivizes sprawl and is financial suicide for cities. The bigger and faster our highways, the further away people live, the bigger the parking lots, the less productive each unit of urban land becomes. In sprawling cities, when people choose to continue to live within city limits and a sprawling city, a city is faced with increasingly costly infrastructure serving a smaller number of people. When people choose to move outside city limits, the city has lost them as tax paying citizens altogether.
Further to this last point, the City of Winnipeg’s population relative to its metropolitan area is one of the highest in Canada. We need to preserve this situation, not exacerbate it. Well-funded public transit reduces sprawl, making the city more affordable for its tax paying citizens. Public transit itself is a more efficient mode of transportation for individuals (and it should be for families too) and it works better in and promotes the development of more walkable neighbourhoods – neighbourhoods in which people overall need expensive fuel consuming vehicles less.
Transportation is a fundamental priority for elected municipal officials. It keeps the economy running and it connects folks to all the places they need to get to. Because cities have relatively more people occupying relatively less space, public transit is a key piece of the transportation puzzle because it uses less space to move more people. Finally, public transit is a way to build our city to be more affordable for its elected and administrative officials and more affordable for its citizens.