Winnipeg | Portage and Main

[WinCitySparky]

City hall is scared shitless of…its citizens who do not even turn out to vote.

[GreyGarden]

Originally Posted by trueviking

Yeah. The street stuff like lighting and paving patterns is fine but do we really need city wide public consultation for it? Just do those things. Who cares.

Agreed, the whole public consultation part of this for a downtown intersection is frankly embarrassing. There are 4 office buildings and a hotel. Look at any corporate intersection in Canada and just do what they do there. I don’t understand why they need to make this so complicated. I don’t need P&M to be great, I’d just like it to not be terrible.

[esquire]

^ Good point... we all know the big ticket stuff like the sky bridge or whatever won't be built (thankfully), so ultimately this is a long, drawn out consultation about penny ante stuff like new lighting. Now that you mention it, it is somewhat absurd that there is a full consultation process going on for something that minor.

[Ozabald]

Originally Posted by BlackDog204

Technically, you are correct. Then again, technically, the City of Winnipeg has more people than the City of Vancouver.

However, you are being disingenuous by deliberately excluding Vancouver's suburbs, which include 3 freeways. City boundaries are useless, when the majority of the population lives in it's suburbs. Plus, nearly every city in Canada, sans Vancouver, has amalgamated at some point.

Not at all. Vancouver has been lauded by many urbanists as a city that got it right with not having any freeways in/leading to its downtown core. Much of the traffic into Vancouver from the suburbs uses surface streets (ie: Granville, Georgia, Hastings, Lougheed, Kingsway, Marine Drive, Boundary Rd. etc) which all have pedestrian crossings at intersections. The freeway system in the Lower Mainland is very limited; resulting in much point-to-point travel using surface streets. Travelling from YVR to the North Shore, a driver will not use a freeway.

Anyhow, the reasons for pedestrian barriers at P&M are disingenuous. The barriers were basically a cop-out to a developer to force pedestrian traffic into the retail portion of their development.

[esquire]

Originally Posted by Ozabald

Anyhow, the reasons for pedestrian barriers at P&M are disingenuous. The barriers were basically a cop-out to a developer to force pedestrian traffic into the retail portion of their development.

That used to be a well known fact, but somewhere along the way a myth grew that the pedestrian barricades were somehow essential to moving traffic along efficiently.

[bomberjet]

From what I here from the traffic engineers/city employees and non-openers, is that it was utter chaos. People were being killed all over. It was a blood bath at P&M.

[bomberjet]

I generally like the lane configurations and the transit lanes on Portage East. And of all the silly stuff, the lighting poles are the best and rather easy to do.

[BlackDog204]

Originally Posted by Ozabald

Anyhow, the reasons for pedestrian barriers at P&M are disingenuous. The barriers were basically a cop-out to a developer to force pedestrian traffic into the retail portion of their development.

Winnipeg definitely should open Portage and Main to pedestrians. The optics look terrible, and it should have been done ages ago.

[Jammon]

Originally Posted by BlackDog204

Winnipeg definitely should open Portage and Main to pedestrians. The optics look terrible, and it should have been done ages ago.

I agree. I don't know at this point why they wouldn't. The main argument against it was the viability of Winnipeg Square as well as the traffic downtown. Well, the pandemic took care of both of those "problems". Open it up and focus on residential development downtown with some new commercial here and there.

Have they done any traffic studies to see how much traffic patterns have changed since the pandemic?

[esquire]

Originally Posted by Jammon

Have they done any traffic studies to see how much traffic patterns have changed since the pandemic?

Speaking anecdotally here, but to my eyes traffic has never fully returned to the levels it was at pre-pandemic. The odd time I do a rush hour commute it is generally way faster than it would have been in 2019.

I'd love to see some AADT numbers for major routes. I'd be very surprised if they have recovered to 2019 levels.

[esquire]

You can't cross the street at only one of these intersections... hilarious/pathetic

[drew]

Not too far from Portage and Main...:

Stradbrook @ QE Way (Main Street) is 91% of the traffic at Portage and Main. And I can disrupt traffic in both directions to cross as a pedestrian.

[pspeid]

Isn't the city's most dangerous intersection for pedestrians actually at Leila & McPhillips? Shouldn't the folks who play the "pedestrian safety" card for keeping P & M closed be worried about those folks? Just asking.

[Kinguni]

Originally Posted by pspeid

Isn't the city's most dangerous intersection for pedestrians actually at Leila & McPhillips? Shouldn't the folks who play the "pedestrian safety" card for keeping P & M closed be worried about those folks? Just asking.

Honestly it's got nothing to do with pedestrian safety, and one councilor was saying the biggest reason is extra cost for transit due to extra delays. If they can speed up implementation of the transit master plan and find the money to get Union Station and Portage and Main Station done the impact will be nil. It makes the most sense to get the Portage and Main station at the same time as they do the membrane replacement.

[drew]

^ that's the part that doesn't compute with me tho, the whole it's gonna add X amount of time to each bus trip. So we need something like a thousand more buses on the road to compensate for ONE intersection. And a new storage facility to house them.

It's all a bunch of nonsense and special interest political noise IMO. Just open the intersection to pedestrians. The sky will not fall. Buses will not cease to operate. There are pedestrians and buses at every single other intersection in this city, and wait for it.... often at the SAME time! *gasp*

[esquire]

Originally Posted by drew

^ that's the part that doesn't compute with me tho, the whole it's gonna add X amount of time to each bus trip. So we need something like a thousand more buses on the road to compensate for ONE intersection. And a new storage facility to house them.

It was the most preposterously hysterical doom and gloom scenario imaginable.

Get real, those barriers weren't placed there to keep buses moving. It was done to make Trizec happy, to make sure that they got a proper return on their 1970s investment. There is a book by late urban studies professor David Walker that explains all of it... "The Great Winnipeg Dream".

[pspeid]

Originally Posted by esquire

It was the most preposterously hysterical doom and gloom scenario imaginable.

Get real, those barriers weren't placed there to keep buses moving. It was done to make Trizec happy, to make sure that they got a proper return on their 1970s investment. There is a book by late urban studies professor David Walker that explains all of it... "The Great Winnipeg Dream".

Now that you mention it, I remember it was all part of the promise to Trizec at the time. I think city hall was desperate to find anyone to get some construction happening in downtown, and the Trizec project seemed to fill the bill. There was definitely a feeling that "finally something was happening" at the time, so I guess city hall got want it wanted.

Funny how the whole "transit needs/pedestrian safety/disastrous traffic delay" excuse rose to such prominence over what seemed to be such a short length of time when opening P & M became a real possibility.

If I were a cynic, I'd think the current stakeholders wanted to extend their exclusive access to foot traffic at P & M, so they cooked up the sky-is-falling narrative to scare people into continuing to block pedestrian crossing at street level. It probably wouldn't have been hard to find city counsellors willing to buckle, and scare enough suburbanites into backing their claims.

I'd only believe that if I were a cynic, of course.

[thurmas]

Originally Posted by esquire

You can't cross the street at only one of these intersections... hilarious/pathetic

4,5,6,7,9 and 10 have to deal with every week

[WinCitySparky]

As far as current stakeholders, it’s been made very clear that nearly every stakeholder in close proximity is ardently IN FAVOUR of opening the intersection. Only in Winnipeg can the powerful business lobby apparently have no effect on the outcome of a civic overhaul that benefits everyone. The refusal to simply do what’s obviously the correct thing to do has everything to do with suburban councillors afraid of losing their jobs to angry NIMBY commuters who don’t even live downtown…as if they would even be bothered to go out and be bothered to actually vote. I’m convinced this whole exercise is just the dragging out of the inevitable outcome of people jumping the new barricades to cross traffic, until someone gets hit, and then they finally capitulate and yell “well the jaywalkers have forced our hand, can’t blame us for opening the intersection for safety reasons, not our fault!”

[esquire]

Originally Posted by pspeid

Now that you mention it, I remember it was all part of the promise to Trizec at the time. I think city hall was desperate to find anyone to get some construction happening in downtown, and the Trizec project seemed to fill the bill. There was definitely a feeling that "finally something was happening" at the time, so I guess city hall got want it wanted.

Funny how the whole "transit needs/pedestrian safety/disastrous traffic delay" excuse rose to such prominence over what seemed to be such a short length of time when opening P & M became a real possibility.

If I were a cynic, I'd think the current stakeholders wanted to extend their exclusive access to foot traffic at P & M, so they cooked up the sky-is-falling narrative to scare people into continuing to block pedestrian crossing at street level. It probably wouldn't have been hard to find city counsellors willing to buckle, and scare enough suburbanites into backing their claims.

I'd only believe that if I were a cynic, of course.

The stakeholders stopped objecting a long time ago. Let's face it, the underground concourses are mostly an empty void. It is far from whatever fanciful traffic projections Trizec had back in the 70s. I'm sure the current landlords realize that any changes can only be an improvement compared to what exists.

I honestly don't think anyone has a vested interest in keeping the corner closed to pedestrians. I think it's just Winnipeg's paralyzing fear of change and nothing else.