Winnipeg should have rapid transit; it just should

As days grow longer and, ostensibly, warmer, Winnipeg is still reeling from the coldest winter the Heart of the Continent has seen since 1898.

The winter that never ends has broken the spirits of many, leaving crushed, smelly husks where once there were proud citizens. From frozen pipes to broken water mains, Winnipeggers have been bent over a barrel by Old Man Winter this year. Currently, some 2,359 properties in Winnipeg are without running water, and the wait for city workers to thaw those pipes is stretching from weeks to months. Somewhere in the vicinity of 7,000 homes have been told by city officials to keep their water running 24/7 until notified that the threat of frozen lines is over.

And as if that joke wasn’t cruel enough, officials say that the risk of pipes freezing due to the frozen-ass nature of the ground could last into June. That’s a lot of (generally) perfectly potable water going down the drains. Oh yeah, and the Jets missed the playoffs… AGAIN.

As ice and snow clear from the city’s sprawling thoroughfares, Manitoba Public Insurance is warning that Winnipeg streets will face their worst year for potholes ever.

“We’ve got roads now that are downright dangerous,” MPI president Mike Mager told the CBC, thanks to the brutal cold and the deep frost line.

Like the Canada Goose’s honking call heralds the return of spring, so to the bleating of motorists outraged by the disrepair of our city’s streets.

One of our fiercest pothole-haters is Winnipeg Sun columnist Tom Broadbeck. Old Tom has become so incensed with the current infrastructural crisis that he is advocating that a long-planned expansion of the rapid transit system be put to a referendum along with October’s municipal election, so that “the people actually paying the bills and driving on the roads make [the] decision.”

City councillor Scott Fielding, who has put his name in the upcoming mayoral race, has taken the same stance, more or less, in calling for funds earmarked for rapid transit’s expansion to be used to mop up the current mess.

Broadbeck loves sticking up for the good taxpayers of Manitoba, and apparently considers expansion of effective public transit to be a “boutique project” that should take a backseat to filling potholes. Fielding, for his part, seems to oppose rapid transit from a far more selfish position, using his opposition to the project as a way of sticking out from an altogether bland and almost indistinguishable field of candidates.

While it’s hard (if not impossible) to argue that our streets and other basic infrastructure are in need of a major upgrade, our city has stalled for far too long on undertaking forward-thinking initiatives like rapid transit. Essentially, the city has had one plan or another on the books since the 1970s for the rapid-transit system currently being developed. But these plans were always shelved, pushed back, or rewritten (on the taxpayers’ dime, of course) while more pressing city issues like filling potholes and fixing broken water mains were undertaken.

At the same time, the city has had no qualms extending those roads and water systems far into farmers’ fields at the behest of the developers and home builders cabal that seems to dictate city planning in Winnipeg. Roads, of course, that need clearing in the winter and will inevitably sprout potholes every spring.

I’m not surprised that Broadbeck is taking the city to task on its infrastructure issues. Someone’s got to, and Tom makes regular use of his pulpit at the Sun to do so.

But I am surprised that he doesn’t favour an expansion of public transit. Maybe if there had been more options for public transit available back in October out in St. James, Tom wouldn’t have gotten himself into so much trouble, eh?

Sure, we need to fix our streets and infrastructure. But the situation we have now is the result of years of administrations sitting on their hands, and taxpayers unwilling to schill out the cost of maintaining a sprawling urban centre in an area prone to extreme weather swings that wreak havoc on that same infrastructure. We need to fix this shit, but not without looking to the future. Rapid transit won’t solve this year’s infrastructure SNAFU, but it will help us move into the 21st century.

[image via Jeremy Shields/Flickr]