‘Use it or lose it’ money rule hurts city

By: Bartley Kives http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/33841564.html http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/Use-it-or-lose-it-money-...

To opponents of new downtown bike lanes, any expansion of Winnipeg’s cycling and pedestrian infrastructure will push cars off the road, force toddlers to work in salt mines and hasten the coming of the Apocalypse to the point where it’d be unwise to purchase T-bills that mature in more than 90 days.

OK, so maybe no one’s actually talking about child slavery or the end of the world, but the hyperbolic chatter about the supposed evils of bike lanes is getting tough to tolerate.

This is not just because most North American cities are becoming more like their European counterparts in trying to make movement easier for commuter cyclists. It’s also not just because of the positive economic results of improving pedestrian streetscapes in built-up urban areas.

Rather, anti-bike baloney is tough to take because the creation of new bicycle lanes does little to hinder motorists, at least where parking-protected bike lanes are concerned.

When the City of Winnipeg moved over a lane of parking on Sherbrook Street in West Broadway, there was initial skepticism. The resulting improvement to the streetscape, however, turned out to be dramatic, as pedestrians now wait for buses on the new transit islands and business has thrived on both side of the road.

This demonstrates how people can be drawn to streets designed for human beings as well as cars. The motor-vehicle capacity of Sherbrook Street was barely affected.

Now, the city has drawn up plans to create more parking-protected lanes on inner-city streets. These are cheaper and easier to create than building bike lanes that are completely separate from roads.

So where, you may ask, is the opposition coming from? The answer lies with previous city mistakes when it comes to creating cycling infrastructure.

Opponents of commuter cycling are justified in criticizing the way the city rolled out a $21-million infrastructure upgrade in 2010, when there wasn’t enough time or city staff to properly plan, tender and build an unprecedented package of new lanes for cyclists and pedestrians.

The problem at the time, however, had nothing to do with the imagined evils of cycling infrastructure. Rather, it had everything to do with the flawed federal pot of infrastructure money known as the Building Canada Fund.

In theory, money from this kitty flows when three levels of government — Ottawa, the province and the city — all agree on the importance of a project. In reality, Ottawa shows up with a pile of money and tells the city and the province they can use it or lose it.

As a result, projects go ahead before they’re ready, as panicky municipal politicians hastily sign on the dotted line in fear of losing out on the latest morsel of federal money.

The 2010 upgrade turned out to be a mess because the city didn’t have the capacity to implement it. There were no qualified staff on hand because of a previous decision to eliminate dozens of middle managers for the ironic sake of finding efficiencies.

But hey, when Ottawa offers money, you take it, right?

As a recent scathing audit demonstrated, a similar stupidity was at work with Waverley West arterial roads, which had an original price tag of $55 million. After the project ballooned to $70 million, council demanded to know why. Auditors said the original estimate was so rough, there was no way the city could have predicted the final cost and got lucky it only rose to $70 million.

Why would the city proceed with a project without knowing what it would cost? The answer, again, is the Building Canada Fund.

Ottawa came to the city looking for a "shovel-ready" project. The Waverley West plan, nowhere near shovel-ready, was identified in vote-rich southwest Winnipeg. So ahead it went, in a format where the city wound up paying for all of the additional costs because the deal locked in the federal and provincial contributions at the outset.

Following the Waverley West cost overrun, few Winnipeggers are demanding an end to the expansion of the city’s regional road network. It’s telling that a small but vocal anti-bike contingent wants to put the brakes on new bike lanes and that’s about it.

What all Winnipeggers should demand is more freedom for the city to build whatever it needs to build, free of provincial and federal interference.

Roads aren’t evil and bike lanes aren’t evil. Politicians who try to use infrastructure money to buy votes are the villains here.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca