In 1990, Free Press reporter Nick Martin filed a story headlined Build rapid transit or face lynch mob, city told. In 2005, the mob is gathering.

With urban thinker and blogger extraordinaire Robert Galston and Unofficial Winnipeg Transit Online webmaster Jim Jaworski, I've launched Transit Riders' Union of Winnipeg.

Our threefold aim: encouraging downtown surface parking lot development into multi-storey, mixed-use buildings; offering information and support for those pondering moving to or visiting Winnipeg's inner city; and promotion of the Norman D. Wilson subway plan.

Mr. Wilson was the Toronto engineer who designed his city's subway; decades later, he designed Winnipeg's. Even in 1959 — four years after Winnipeg dismantled an extensive light rail (streetcar) network to make room for more private automobiles — Wilson's then $500-million plan wasn't universally denounced as preposterously extravagant. And his prediction — that failure to build the subway would turn downtown into a giant parking lot — proved true.

For decades, Winnipeg has experienced the doughnut effect, the Detroit phenomenon — sprawl without growth. In a healthy city, property values rise nearer the downtown. Not so here. Immediately west o the Exchange District, the area known as Centennial was once an attractive working-class neighbourhood. Today, it offers dilapidated, century-old wood-frame houses, placarded brick rowhouses, empty lots, stuccoed modernism, and widespread abandonment.

But its proximity to downtown and the Health Sciences Centre ought to put it among Winnipeg's most desireable locations. Weston, another old working-class neighbourhood, has since '71, seen its population decline by 23 per cent and a two-storey, 1893 home can be had for $54,000.

What these neighbourhoods — indeed all Winnipeg neighbourhoods — lack is a commercial street offering a continuous set of storefronts. For every old mixed-use storefront-apartment building along Notre Dame, Sargent, Ellice, Keewatin, Selkirk, or Main is sidewalk architecture inviting to automobile: a gas station, strip mall, empty lot, or parking lot. Devoid of all such continuity, the district thus lacks cohesion; without people living above stores on every block, also lacking in a sense of safety.

Wilson's subway plan would create economic hot spots around each station. Weston's Keewatin street — end of the red line — would be transformed from a drab commercial strip into a lively town centre lined with mixed-use, storefront-apartment buildings two to five storeys.

Better still than insisting distant new suburbs adhere to the neotraditional standards of new urbanism — front porches, back lanes, gridded streets, small lots — we would be wiser to transform our vast pre-1920 built-up areas into trendy old neighbourhoods. With its superior housing stock, Wolseley has become desirable, and now West Broadway is taking off. Wilson's subway would accelerate this process. Main Street, from Broadway to Mountain, would emerge from its coma stronger than it was in its heyday.

Those who doubt the liklihood of middle-class willingness to live in new developments on Winnipeg's skid road need only look to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where owners of million-dollar condominiums co-exist with renters of $350-a-month hotel rooms.

The first criticism of the Wilson plan is its expense — how would it be paid for? Tax increment financing, bond issues, federal-provincial funding have worked in other cities, where underground rail has proved to be an economic bonanza.

Others claim that Bus Rapid Transit would move people around far more cheaply. Yet subway stations bolster adjacent property values while spurring transit-oriented development. BRT doesn't. A subway offers indoor platforms; BRT doesn't. People of all classes will ride a subway; the rich, even the well-off, will sooner drive than ride a bus.

Other critics and naysayers would label the 46-year-old Wilson plan outdated, that light rail would be a better choice. Yet Winnipeg had an electric light rail system in 1892, and by 1930 lines had been extended to the University of Manitoba, St. Norbert, St. Vital, Headlingley — even Middlechurch, Stonewall, and Selkirk.

The Wilson subway, bolstered with feeder buses, is the clearest choice to bring our winter metropolis into the 21st century, post-petroleum economy. Mayor Sam Katz, rather than absurdly claiming that "roads are our rapid transit," out to be wrangling a proper share of Ottawa's munificent surplus to bring Winnipeggers the economic benefits of true rapid transit.