It will be six years in March since the Norman Wilson report was first published. Mr. Wilson is a consulting engineer from Toronto, and he was asked to make suggestions about the development of the Winnipeg transit system. He suggested a subway with three lines (Portage-Main; Fort Garry-St.Boniface-Nortre Dame; Osborne-Chalmers), but nothing has been done in these long years even to begin to implement this proposal.
It does not require an expert to realize that developing Winnipeg will need a subway sooner rather than later. Anybody who crawls morning and evening in a car through the many bottlenecks that beset the path to and from the business sector of the city; anybody who battles every day with the unwieldy parking problem and the hazards of starting a car that has sat all day on the parking lot in below-zero temperatures; anybody who has shivered in Winnipeg's winter temperatures at a bus stop waiting in vain for a bus delayed by rush-hour traffic jams; in short, anybody who has lived in Winnipeg for one winter, will realize that the answer to the metropolitan traffic problem lies not in more trees felled and more lanes of traffic added to the present asphalt jungle, but in an early start on the subway.
As Mr. Wilson argued, a subway has the capacity to provide for the increasing traffic of many years to come, necessitates no permanent disturbance to areas traversed, and, in addition, tends to stabilize assessable values in its vicinity.
Of course, the longer the delay, the more expensive will it be to build the subway. Much of the area which the subway should traverse is being rapidly rebuilt, and the rehabilitation of Point Douglas will undoubtedly cause a considerable increase in land values along Main Street.
Surely, now is the time to begin acquiring land and underground rights of way along the planned subway routes, even if construction of the subway is still some years ahead. Every year wasted will render more expensive this sole solution to Winnipeg's traffic problems.