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Righting Portage and Main wrong first step on way to a better downtown
OPINION
WINNIPEG is poised for one of the most important do-overs in its long and storied history. If all goes to schedule, Portage Avenue and Main Street will — finally, thankfully — be open to pedestrians this week. The intensive work to remove the brutalist concrete barriers is, rather remarkably, approaching completion.
After having debated it for so long, Winnipeggers can now stop talking about if it’s going to happen and start asking themselves what it means.
That is an incredibly different question to answer, given there is still likely a deep divide between those who think this is a good idea and those who consider it to be a colossal waste of money.
Regardless of which camp you’re in, let’s consider what it could mean.
The closure of the intersection to pedestrians was an enormous error. However, it was an error that was very much in lockstep with urban-design thinking in the late 1970s, when the barriers were erected.
At that time, cities all over North America bent over backwards to make it easier for cars to move in, about and back out of downtown areas. The Portage and Main barriers, along with the Winnipeg Square underground mall, were considered best practices for helping vehicular traffic and giving pedestrians a safe and warm place to go.
Today, we can see rather easily that this kind of approach to downtown design was deeply flawed.
Making it easier for cars and trucks to move around is not conducive to a livable neighbourhood. Nor are measures that take people off the streets, even in a city such as Winnipeg, where harsh weather makes going outside a somewhat challenging concept.
Cities of all sizes are undertaking do-overs for this kind of design thinking.
Boston, San Francisco and Milwaukee have completed projects to remove downtown freeways built as monuments to the automobile. Even Halifax recently replaced its infamous Cogswell Interchange — a multi-level highway that bisected the downtown — with a more traditional street grid design that sought to restore pedestrian traffic and improve active-transportation links.
That makes the decision to remove the Portage and Main barriers, which was undertaken rather courageously by Mayor Scott Gillingham and council last year, very much in keeping with current thinking.
However, before anyone questions whether this contemporary mindset is, like its predecessors, doomed to be abandoned within a few more decades, consider that we’re quickly moving to a model of downtown pedestrian and vehicular traffic that has proven to be both successful and enduring in other countries.
When you don’t spend money on building bigger, longer, wider roads, you have a lot of additional money to spend on other things, including walkability, active and public transportation and promoting densification of residential development. These are the building blocks of sustainable, livable downtowns.
In fact, if we should hope for any single consequence from the reopening of our famous intersection, it should be that it’s just the start of more courageous decisions to make downtown more welcoming for foot traffic.
The city is already inching closer to this idea in other areas of downtown. Graham Avenue, for example, will undergo an initial conversion, losing its designation as a dedicated bus route and allowing car traffic, albeit with a much lower speed limit. Longer term, Gillingham has talked about the possibility of turning it into a pedestrian mall and cycling route.
The same conversation needs to unfold on the future of the west Exchange District.
Bannatyne and McDermot avenues, along with Albert and Arthur streets, are ripe for a pedestrian mall. As it stands now, parts of all of those routes are closed periodically during the summer to accommodate music and theatre festivals. Those closures provide valuable insight into how a permanent pedestrian mall would impact that area.
Just about everyone who lives or works in the Exchange knows that in the first few days after the barriers are put up for a festival, traffic is a hot mess as drivers get trapped on the area’s network of one-way streets. After the initial shock and awe, however, they choose different routes to avoid the most-affected streets and intersections.
It’s proof that like rainwater, traffic that is stopped from going in one direction will eventually leak out and find another way to get where it wants to go.
Our aversion to permanent pedestrian malls is one of the mindsets that prevents Canadian cities from taking downtown revitalization to the next level.
In the United Kingdom, for example, it is rarer to find a town or city that has not closed its core to vehicles. Sometimes, vehicular traffic is allowed in these areas during business hours but is blocked during the evening and on weekends.
Combine pedestrian malls with robust and accessible transit hubs — as is almost always the case in the U.K. — and you’ve got a tried and true way of pulling people into the core.
On its own, reopening one intersection isn’t going to transform the downtown, but as an incentive for local government to continue pressing for similar innovations, it could be transformative.