ON her walks through downtown, Suzanne Beaubien (The Gauntlet, May 4) seems to experience daily the fruition of Norman Wilson's grim warning for a downtown Winnipeg without rapid transit: A place where "the dead storage of motor vehicles... adds nothing to the attractiveness of its appearance, and detracts from its overall business utility."
Parking lots and rapid transit are not just a matters of transportation or commuter habits, but matters of quality urban life, safety, and the city's ability to keep young people here. Why is Beaubien, a downtown pedestrian, such an anomaly among young men and women? Why do most of them give up on urban life in Winnipeg, either to buy a car, or to move to other, less car-bound cities such as Toronto or Vancouver?
The answer is largely found among the 40 blocks between Portage, Main, Broadway and Memorial that Beaubien walks through every day: The dreary, desolate and seemingly dangerous neighborhood called South Portage.
With a slight exception to a couple of blocks of Graham near The Bay, South Portage suffers from a classic example of what the late, prolific urban thinker Jane Jacobs called the "curse of the border vacuums." Jacobs identified these as large sections of city land devoted to a single use, such as a rail yard, campus, or, in this case, surface parking lots. The force of this vacuum in South Portage is so strong, that it has sucked the life out of its streets and filtered away the abundance of meaningful, non-car-oriented space. What is left is unwelcoming. Beaubien says the "seedy bar or hotel" on every street between Graham and Portage keeps her away, but like on North Main Street, the problem is not so much the presence of these places, but the absence of everything else: a coffee shop, a grocery store, a laundromat, residential units above them all, and the scores of less umbrageous sidewalk users that result.
This vacuum south of Portage is a vast gulf between the islands of urbanism that remain in Western Canada's oldest city. Between the three-block-long wall that is Portage Place and the barricades at Portage and Main, the neighbourhoods of Broadway-Assiniboine, Osborne Village, West Broadway, Spence, Central Park, the Exchange District and The Forks are effectively severed from each other. The possibility of a healthy pedestrian culture (and the resulting safety, growth, and downtown renewal so earnestly talked about) in central Winnipeg is limited. All of those surrounding neighborhoods are great places unto themselves, but suffer — as the entire city does — from the absence of a central connection between them, which would complete the urban pattern, and would make walking from River and Osborne to Portage and Main something you would actually want to do.
The young people who live in the central parts of this city are tired of not only having to drive a car to their jobs, but drive a car to travel from one pedestrian-friendly island to the next on evenings and weekends. To them, it's a waste of effort and money, and most importantly, it's boring. Why live in a city where you have to drive through vast border vacuums, to get from one two-block strip of interesting human activity to another, when there are cities of pedestrian opportunity elsewhere?
But for every problem, there are solutions. Those surface parking lots in South Portage exist for a reason. Tens of thousands of people — over 25 per cent of the city's entire workforce — come downtown to work, and most come by car. Their cars have to go somewhere while they're sitting at their desks. The solution is found in what Norman Wilson recommended in 1959: a true rapid transit system that would feed into downtown from all sides. To downtown workers, such a system would be an irresistible alternative to commuting by car, and even to owning one altogether. Rapid transit raises land values to levels that would make surface parking lots no longer an economical use of property. They would largely vanish. To developers, constructing underground parking facilities for those that did travel downtown by car, would be worth the money.
With the need and viability of so many gaping surface parking lots out of the way, a welcoming built environment, a residential population, and a commercial fauna not seen in South Portage since the 1940s, would spring up on Garry, York, Smith, St. Mary, Carlton, etc. The entire length of Beaubien's daily commute would become more of a promenade and less of an obstacle course.