Pedestrian losing battle with the auto

Dallas Hansen

November 12, 2006

WINNIPEG is divided, yes, but forget about north and south. Ours is really two, parallel cities: One of motorways, one of sidewalks. Guess who's winning.
 
Walk through Osborne Village, falsely reputed as pedestrian friendly, and the Blockbuster video's sidewalk entrance is locked; you're advised to enter via the rear, parking-lot door. Stroll a sidewalk along a residential street and observe that homeowners have shovelled bare their own walkways while leaving the public sidewalk in front of their property snow-packed and ice-capped. Then try crossing Portage Avenue or Main Street, both of which feature eight lanes of moving traffic during the daily four-hour parking ban -- storefront merchants sacrificing customers to the gods of traffic flow. Find old pictures of our inner-city commercial streets and observe how traditional, pre-1920, two- to five-storey brick or wood-frame storefront-apartment buildings -- the remnants of which today offer the only standing reminder that an age existed wherein the pedestrian was considered before the automobile -- have given way to architecturally worthless strip malls whose parking lots alienate enterprise from the sidewalk.
 
The pedestrian life in Winnipeg has been under siege since 1955, when the once-vast streetcar network was finally dismantled. In 1971, legendary Winnipeg journalist Val Werier wrote, in a column headlined Walking downtown can be faster, "Horse-drawn street cars in Winnipeg did a more efficient job of transporting passengers than in today's buses at peak times ... In poor weather it is estimated that buses would do no more than (3.2 km/h) in the downtown area..." The great promise of the 1959 Norman D. Wilson subway plan to revive a formerly robust sidewalk culture failed to manifest in the form of heavy machinery digging tunnels beneath our most traversed city streets. Subsequent schemes, based on abstract theory and denial of reality, to restore the city's centre have utterly backfired, their detrimental effects leaving behind brutal trauma that will remain so long as do their physical manifestations.
 
Of this trauma there are several identifiable perpetrators: traffic engineers, single-use zoning, Winnipeg Square and the barriers, the Civic Centre and its bomb-bunker brutalism, and Portage Place -- a dated embodiment of the arrogant exorbitance of the 1980s.
 
Portage Place deserves especial mention for it was the site, this week, of a brazen, unprovoked daylight robbery attempt upon an 18-year-old male University of Winnipeg student. The three-block-long superblock along the north side of Portage from Vaughan to Carlton makes for a long, imposing wall that comprises downtown Winnipeg's greatest planning mistake. Planners today are well aware of the foreboding effects of superblocks. Earlier this year, at a University of Manitoba conference on sustainable transportation, one prominent local academic, a graduate of the prestigious London School of Economics, even said, in response to a student query about why Portage Place is so troublesome, "First of all, you have Kennedy and Edmonton streets blocked off -- that's just stupid. Why would you do that?" Yet academic freedom must be a thing overrated, for later that evening, over drinks after the conference, the instructor instructed me never to quote her on what she said about Portage Place before admitting that, despite her academic opinion that Waverley West would be another mistake, she was writing a report "for the provincial government" favourable of the proposed new subdivision because "it paid the rent." 

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