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A new chapter for Portage and Main

https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/2025/06/30/a-new-chapter-...

REMEMBER that time the entire city of Winnipeg voted on whether people should be allowed to cross the street? That was wild. The whole country looked on in curious amusement as a modern city tied itself into knots over what appeared to be an incredibly mundane issue.

As a member of the Vote Open campaign, I can remember spending my evenings going door-to-door, or manning booths and handing out pamphlets at festivals and farmers’ markets. We organized a concert, started a website and argued tirelessly on social media.

We had all the data and all the engineering studies. We could rebut any point. In the end, as we know, Portage and Main was a mythical beast too powerful to slay and the vote was a resounding NO.

A few years later, we found out that it would be cheaper to take down the barricades than to repair the underground, so one day, Mayor Scott Gillingham announced in a reassuring tone, “It’s just an intersection,” and that was that. On Friday, almost 17,000 days after the last person legally did it, we walked across the street.

We shouldn’t expect that rainbows will cascade down from the heavens and all that ails downtown will be instantly swept away. But in time, people on the sidewalks will bring life back to the centre of our city. More people work within 100 metres of Portage and Main than live in Steinbach, the province’s third largest city. Enticing even a fraction of these people back to the sidewalks might be the incentive needed to begin filling the many empty storefronts nearby, developing the 50-year-old gravel parking lot on Main Street and bringing life to the plazas and public spaces.

An open Portage and Main will reconnect the different neighbourhoods of downtown so they can build on each other’s successes. It will re-establish the intersection’s traditional role as the centre of an urban pinwheel, a place of connection but also, in its own right, a place to be.

Before long, people crossing the street will be the new normal and we will wonder what all the fuss was about. It’s then that we might challenge ourselves to dream bigger. Mayor Gillingham is right — it is just an intersection. But it’s also an opportunity.

The windy corner, the gateway to the West, Canada’s coldest and most famous intersection has been celebrated in song and story. It began as a First Nations meeting place, later becoming a Métis trading route, then the birthplace of a frontier city and the economic centre of modern metropolis.

It is a place we come to celebrate, a place we come to mourn and to protest. Portage and Main is a special place filled with lore and history, not just in Winnipeg but across the country.

As you enter the 'Cities of the Twentieth Century’ exhibit at the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa, you are greeted with a giant mural of Portage and Main from a century ago. The image represents the very best of what a city can be, the intersection, the beating heart of a city filled with optimism and energy.

Imagine if Portage and Main became a place where this spirit and history were woven together and celebrated through art, sculpture, lighting, landscape, interpretive design and storytelling. A place where we can come to learn about ourselves and to have others learn about us. Telling the story of Portage and Main through placemaking is to tell the story of Canada.

The ultimate opportunity for Portage and Main is to be a remarkable place that tells a remarkable story. To achieve this, we might at some point reconsider the physical form of the intersection itself, giving more space to people and less to cars. New York City presents a strong precedent for this, closing Broadway through Times Square in 2009 and creating pedestrian plazas that have transformed it into one of the great public spaces in the world.

Considering that it took Winnipeg half a century to accept people crossing the street, removing car space would certainly not be an easy sell, but our experience during the last nine months of construction has demonstrated that it can be done.

When construction started on removing the barricades last year, two full lanes of traffic were closed on each side of Portage Avenue and Main Street. This effectively cut vehicle capacity in half. The result was a real-world experiment in traffic engineering. For a few weeks after the closures, maybe a month, traffic slowed during rush hour and it would take a couple minutes longer to drive through the intersection.

As people got used to the changes, however, traffic found its way. Congestion decreased and for several months the intersection operated normally despite having far less space devoted to cars.

Many cities across North America have used a strategy called “road diets” to permanently reduce the number of lanes on wide streets and create more pedestrian space.

When road diets are implemented, drivers will frequently find alternative routes, travel at different times or even use different modes of transportation, often resulting in traffic eventually finding equilibrium.

Road diets are always controversial, but the experience during construction at Portage and Main demonstrated that it is possible without significant impact to traffic congestion — knowledge that we shouldn’t forget as we contemplate the future of the intersection.

Removing the barricades isn’t the end of the Portage and Main story. It’s the closing of one chapter and the beginning of a new one. What we write in that chapter is now up to all of us.

The opportunity for Canada’s most famous intersection is to be a place worthy of its fame — Hollywood and Vine, Shibuya Crossing, Times Square and Portage and Main.

Why not?

Brent Bellamy is creative director at Number Ten Architectural Group.