Mr. Speaker: Thank you Nick. Our next delegation is Jim Jaworski on behalf of Citizens for Better Public Transit in Winnipeg.
Mr. Jim Jaworski: Good afternoon everybody. I have a letter of endorsement that was agreed from our last Citizens for Better Public Transit in Winnipeg meeting. I'd like copies of this to be distributed to all the Councillors and the Mayor.
For the record for Hansard, I would like also to, it's just a two paragraph letter, I'd like to enter this into Hansard. It says:
At the last CBPTW meeting on April 20, 1999, our Group unanimously endorsed in principle, the construction of a heritage rail system serving The Forks, downtown Winnipeg, area and Exchange District. This endorsement includes supporting the use of electric rail with overhead wire for propulsion rather than a diesel bus "tarted up to look like a streetcar". We feel that using electric rail technology which has a more spectacular impact on its ridership and on the City's image. However, this endorsement is not specific to routing at this time as there are competing visions for right-of-ways such a streetcar could travel and how extensive the route should be. This issue can be resolved as part of the feasibility study that we hope to see initiated in the near future.
And it says, yours truly the participants of CBPTW.
I didn't have too much time to put together a fully written, well prepared presentation, so I just have some notes here that were written in draft form.
We have agreed to endorse the idea for a streetcar for connecting the downtown and The Forks and the Exchange District area, but to expand on the other parts of this, there are differences between where the streetcar could go in the downtown area, specifically some people would like to see it travel along Broadway which is where it used to go. Some other people would like to see it travel along Assiniboine Avenue because of the higher residential component population in there. However, along Assiniboine Avenue there would be extra costs involved because there's not enough clearance between the Midtown Bridge and the road. Also on Broadway you could have it going in the median in the boulevard because it would be not as affected by other traffic and vice versa.
The day after CentreVenture and CentrePlan's development framework were released on April 26, there was a really nice photo published in the Free Press and it really shows really well how The Forks has developed up to this date. There is many many rows of parking here very close to the, devoted just to parking, of course there's a lot of parking right close to the Forks Market. As Mayor Murray has stated on numerous occasions in the past two or three years, if we had a better Forks access plan or Forks site plan, which would include alternative forms of transportation such as streetcar, such as the water bus system, you could reallocate the space to greenspace or one thing that I would like to see there in The Forks parking lot area that is currently a parking lot, would be like an English Garden, something similar to what we have in the Assiniboine Park so that it would be an added attraction for people to enjoy.
There's also another article written by Ernie Mittermayr and this was published in the current edition of the MSOS Journal. Ernie has said that he has travelled to Australia and they still have their tram system and he has written up...one of the things that would be nice to have here is streetcar number 798 which was one of the largest in all of Canada. I guess that's all I have to say. So I'd ask your support for that proposal.