A Web Developer in Winnipeg
A couple of months ago I wrote a post promoting the use of Twitter’s Circles. It was one of my coping mechanisms for using current Twitter in its semi-broken state.
Then people started reporting that their private circle posts had were appearing in public timelines.
They were right.
Twitter sent out an email last week acknowledging what they call an “incident.” So that something…
I feel bad if somebody followed my advice to use circles and then Twitter leaked something sensitive.
Sorry.
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.
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!
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!
At the time writing the city is requesting public engagement. Please take some time to complete the survey available here.
For those interested, the raw data from MPI can be found here:
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 🤷♂️
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.
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.
Think about what kind of amazing city we would be living in if their positions were flipped!
Note: this was presented “as information” only.
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.