IT IS with keen frustration that I comment on views expressed in your editorial Deja vu downtown, (Free Press, June 28). Nowhere is passing reference made to the single trait most essential in restoring downtown to the pre-eminence it once naturally assumed: the betterment of public transit.

Instead your readers were subjected to, among other things, the perennial pleading of the automobile-addicted for more parking for shoppers. If our downtown (as it presently exists) has a singular flaw, that would be precisely the fact that the bulk of it comes off as little more than a giant, open air parking lot, a circumstance especially true of that intended jewel in downtown's crown — The Forks.

Over the span of decades that downtown was truly Winnipeg's business and cultural heart, the many streetcar lines that emanated from it afforded people wishing to set foot there (for whatever purpose) a means of access to it that was unsurpassable in convenience, quickness, comfort, reliability and affordability. Winnipeg has no exception in the latter respect: All North American cities of any consequence had highly developed streetcar networks. Those cities that have experienced the greatest degree of success in recent years in re-invigorating their downtowns similarly have instituted rapid transit in some proportion.

High quality transit, like nothing else, literally and figuratively puts downtown at the city's centre. The top priority Plan Winnipeg places on transit overall is an acknowledgement of the timelessness of that lesson, one whose relevance to the topic at issue appears to have been, unfortunately, lost on your writer.

That newspaper editorialists — passing themselves off as paragons of knowledgeably opinionated observation — could succumb to such an ethically and intellectually bankrupt mentality is quite a bit more difficult to stomach. But that perhaps is to be expected of a publication whose czars of late have come to treat even the utterance of the phrase "public transit" as taboo.