ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Route 90 Safety

    Route 90 Safety

    in

    Mayor Gillingham wants to spend $1,000,000,000 “improving” Winnipeg’s Route 90 (aka Kenaston Blvd) between Taylor and Ness avenues.

    The proposal can be read here (PDF, it’s large).

    “Improvement” seems to be defined as: a reduction of projected 2041 travel times (by car) by 90 seconds (page 7).

    It should also be noted that the goal travel time is of 9.2 minutes is actually 72 seconds slower than the current travel time of 8 minutes. Travel times increase regardless of the capital expended on adding one more lane because induced demand is in fact real. And the proposal does seem to implicitly acknowledge this.

    Or…

    To put it another way, the Mayor is proposing to spend

    $11,111,111 per second

    …of travel time reduction. I have to question whether this is a good use of money.

    But nevermind that, let’s talk about safety.

    Safety

    The City of Winnipeg has adopted a Strategic Road Safety Action Plan with the (very feeble but very achievable) goal of “…of a 20 percent reduction in fatal and serious injury collisions.” So I was wondering how the Route 90 expansion might fit into this.

    The fine people over at MPI provided me with 10 years of collision data for Kenaston Boulevard for the proposed “improvement” area. Keep in mind that these are only incidents that generated a report to MPI, it’s safe to assume that this are all “serious.”

    Over the past 10 years, 10 pedestrians have been injured in this “improvement” zone. Or roughly 1 in every 108 vehicle collision involves a pedestrian injury.

    I cannot see how adding two lanes (a 50% increase) and increasing the speed limit from 50km/h to 60km/h is going to help bring those 10 pedestrian injuries closer to zero!

    A computer rendering showing the proposed intersection at academy and route 90.
    An at-grade crossing at what is effectively a freeway entrance!

    The pedestrians crossings at grade throughout this proposal simply are not going to be good enough! If we’re spending $11M dollars per second of car quality of life, surely we can spend a few million dollars to allow pedestrians to cross this pseudo-freeway safely!

    Let’s save some money and turn Route 90 into a park!

    Public Engagement

    At the time writing the city is requesting public engagement. Please take some time to complete the survey available here.

    The Data

    For those interested, the raw data from MPI can be found here:

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Tt9lXOVuAJzqpqzU9CsZZOgFZCwpXdOr/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=103778096903117310642&rtpof=true&sd=true

    Correction

    Brent Bellamy suggests that the cost for this project is only a mere $715,000,000. Which brings the per second improvement cost to $7,944,444 🤷‍♂️

  • Winnipeg Budget Day 2023

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    Today was budget day for Winnipeg City Council. Perhaps the most important day of the year. And I watched it so you don’t have to!

    Spoiler: it passed 14 – 2 and it’s a huge step in the wrong direction.

    There’s plenty of discourse on Twitter (I’d suggest starting with Millennium for All’s feed).

    You can watch the entire meeting below.

    Winnipeg City Council Special Meeting – 22nd March, 2023

    But it’s over four hours long so I’ve gone ahead and created a table of contents, bookmarking the important moments.

    If you’re extremely short on and you only have 10 minute to spare, watch Councillor Allard’s Introduction to his amendment and imagine what a great city we’d have if we had more than one urbanist on council. Or maybe the impassioned speeches by the delegates in opposition to the budget.

    Delegations

    Think about what kind of amazing city we would be living in if their positions were flipped!

    In Support

    • Loren Remillard, The Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce (5:42)
    • Chris Lorenc, Manitoba Heavy Construction Association (12:13)

    In Opposition

    • Michael Redhead Champagne & Mary Burton – Fearless R2W (43:04)
    • Kate Kehler – The Social Planning Council of Winnipeg (49:51)
    • Ryan Beardy – Gang Action Interagency Network (55:26)

    Police Budget

    Note: this was presented “as information” only.

    • Chambers – St. Norbert, Introduction (1:21:33)
    • Wyatt – Transcona, a plea for more council oversight of police board, etc (1:26:08)

    Budget

    • Mayor Gillingham, Intro. Summary of high level items (1:38:58)
    • Browaty – North Kildonan, his highlights (1:43:36)

    Amendment

    Arguments in Support of Budget

    • Rollins – Fort Rouge-Easy Fort Garry (2:18:13)
    • Gilroy – Danielle McIntrye (2:27:00)
    • Wyatt – Transcona (2:38:07)
    • Chambers – St. Norbert (2:48:04)
    • Schreyer – Elmwood-East Kildonan (2:53:04)
    • Orlikow – River Heights-Fort Garry (3:03:49)
    • Mayes – St. Vital (3:11:58)
    • Eadie – Mynarski (3:20:42)

    Closing

    • Allard. Amendment (3:31:36)
    • Mayor Gillingham. The budget itself (3:41:59)

    The Vote (3:46:51)

    Notably Silent

    If you live in the following wards, your representative was totally silent during the most important council meeting of the year.

    Please think about this when they’re up for re-election in 4 years.

    Update: I should note that Councillor Sharma was on leave for most of the day and attended remotely for the vote. She may have had more to say if she was able to be present during the meeting.

  • New Content Incoming, Site Privacy Downgrade

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    A small programming note as they might say on TV or whatever.

    I’ve been doing a terrible job sticking to my New Years Resolution to write a blog post every week. Not the biggest deal, resolutions are aspirational.

    Anyways, I’ve come up with a new type of content I want to try writing in the coming weeks.

    I intend to start posting a roundup of my Twitter bookmarks, focusing on Winnipeg/YIMBYism/urbanism. I find that I come across quite a lot of great content on Twitter, original research and other cool stuff. But due to the ephemeral nature of Twitter it just kind of gets lost.

    I’m hoping that by logging these in a property categorized, SEO optimized blog post they’ll be more searchable and easier to find in the future. For example, say I want to find a post about value per ha of a given area of the city, we’ll it’ll be here in my blog, instead of a complicated advanced Twitter search.

    Also the results of my car coop experiment will ready next week.

    Privacy Downgrade

    In 2021, I took steps to improve your privacy when viewing my site (read all about it).

    Unfortunately, in order to start featuring Tweets on this blog I’m going to want to take advantage of Twitter’s embed feature. The embedded tweets are just so much easier to read.

    This means that – on any page featuring an embed – you may be subject to any (undisclosed) tracking that these embeds might include. The rest of the site should still be tracker free and you’re always welcome to use browser extensions to improve your privacy. I’m not tracking anything and I don’t want to know who you are if you don’t want me to know about you.

    Sorry. I wish there was something I could do about it without degrading the reading experience.