When cities keep doing the wrong thing

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At the Crossroads of Canada, people can once again cross the road. Barriers that stopped pedestrians in Winnipeg from walking across the intersection at Portage and Main for nearly half a century were recently removed. It was an overdue decision, and a reminder that cities shouldn’t wait to be forced into doing the right thing.

In plenty of places, the right and obvious decision that will build a better city is put off as politicians avoid hard choices. Paraphrasing a sentiment apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill, cities often do the right thing only after exhausting all other possibilities.

The small-town mayor in the movie Jaws stands out, even 50 years after the movie’s release, as a fictional epitome of this civic myopia. He is determined to keep the beaches open in spite of a marauding shark. Viewers will recall that a young child gets eaten as a result. Only then were swimmers kept out of the water.

In less gruesome ways, that mayor’s instinct to try everything but the obvious is equally common in the real world.

The benefits of opening Portage and Main have long been clear. It will knit together a city centre now divided by eight- and nine-lane roads, encourage more walking and ultimately make the area safer and more prosperous.

But suburban worries about traffic delays took precedence over improving the downtown. So pedestrians needing to get across Portage and Main kept getting shunted down urine-tinged stairways into a bleak underground concourse.

To City Hall, this was fine. Only when faced with a $73-million bill to fix the waterproofing of the subterranean passage did it decide it was too expensive to keep doing the wrong thing.

The change won’t turn downtown Winnipeg overnight into a pedestrian mecca. People navigating on foot the Crossroads of Canada, named for its proximity to the country’s longitudinal middle, must still cross many lanes, including multiple turn lanes, but it’s a step in the right direction.

A nation's crossroads: Winnipeg’s famed Portage and Main intersection, shut to pedestrians for nearly half a century, has been reborn

Unfortunately, civic foot-dragging is not unique to the City of Winnipeg.

Consider the economics of sprawl. Cities that exploded in size in the latter half of the 20th century were able to do so cheaply because of constant expansion. Fees charged on new development helped keep taxes down for existing residents. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a sort of Ponzi scheme.

Such an approach works – if one is willing to set aside the loss of green space and increasingly awful commutes that an expanding city requires – as long as there was more land to be developed. When the land within city boundaries runs out, the party stops. And typically that means substantial property tax increases, because it’s expensive to provide city services to homes that are spread out.

Moderately increased density can both help postpone the day the land runs out and soften the tax blow, because such housing is cheaper to service. Politicians know this, but they pretend otherwise in order to avoid angering residents who don’t like change.

Or consider how road space is divvied up in a crowded metropolis. It’s self-evident in dense cities, where the roads are essentially full, that future residents will not all be able to drive. As a result, the proportion of people who get around by car will gradually decline in Canadian cities.

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That will require a sea change in how politicians view transportation. Making life better for non-drivers, especially people who take transit, will help cities attract the residents they need. This is why ideas such as bus-only lanes should no longer be controversial. Rejecting them is saying that drivers matter more than transit riders, that existing residents matter more than newcomers.

Making it easier to get around by transit, bicycle and on foot is not an ideological stance, it’s an acknowledgement that space on the road has to be shared among many users. However, instead of accepting this reality, too many city politicians fight rearguard actions to preserve the status quo.

Winnipeg, refreshingly, is turning a downtown street roughly parallel to Portage into a pedestrian zone. It is also refurbishing a park near the arena where the Jets play. Doing all that without improving Portage and Main, which local councillor Vivian Santos called “the heartbeat of Winnipeg,” would have been foolishly short-sighted.

Luckily, after resisting as long as possible, city council eventually did the right thing.