WINNIPEG'S dilapidated inner city, an awkward subject for those of us who live here, has recently again been discussed in a national context. Julius's Strauss's now-infamous exposé in the Globe and Mail last Saturday has shown Canada's Gateway to the West for what it truly is: a national embarrassment.
Sure, as Free Press editor Bob Cox himself pointed out on Tuesday's front page, Toronto, too, is rife with panhandlers and squeegee men. But what Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver have that Winnipeg doesn't are lively urban shopping streets lined with continuous storefronts. Bloor Street, St. Lawrence Boulevard, and Commercial Drive are fine examples of the proverbial glue that holds city districts together. Teeming with great varieties of unique and independent stores and services, what they offer is sufficiently attractive not only to keep neighbourhood residents shopping locally but also to attract consumers from other city neighbourhoods, indeed even distant suburbs. When pedestrians outnumber vehicles, storefront commerce flourishes.
There is a reason Winnipeg has no true example of such a vibrant strip. Simply put, almost everyone who visits Bloor, St. Lawrence, or Commercial arrives by foot or by public transit. Few opt to drive because the streets are congested and parking is scarce. Parking is scarce because the only place to park is on the street. If more accommodations for parking were made — surface-level pay lots, for example — it would be at the expense of the existing built-up environment, disrupting the continuity of the storefront strip, leaving the now-fragmented strip dysfunctional for retail commerce, for in the case of such continuous strips, the whole is indeed much greater than the sum of its parts.
Norman D. Wilson, a Toronto traffic engineer, stated this flatly in a 1959 report titled Future Development of the Greater Winnipeg Transit System:
The dead storage of motor vehicles within the downtown area adds nothing to the attractiveness of its appearance, and detracts from its overall business utility.
Contrary to most arguments, the problems in downtown Winnipeg are not primarily socioeconomic, but pragmatic and physical. With 70,000 people working downtown, and no acceptable alternative to driving, parking has become a primary use of land. So long as so many of us drive downtown, it is physically impossible for the number of persons living and entering the downtown area to multiply.
It is physically impossible for the downtown to be built up to the level it was in the mid-1940s � when transit use peaked, and when continuous, bustling storefront strips lined, among others, Portage, Main, Selkirk, Sargent, Notre Dame, and Osborne — if a majority of those entering the central business district do so by automobile. And in the absence of an acceptable alternative, who will opt not to drive?
Accompanying the online edition of the Globe's article was an audio slide show. When an impoverished family of five was shown in their South Point Douglas home, the mother, Joanne Phillips, stated in the voice-over that her most pressing economic goal was to own a vehicle and move closer to Polo Park. Lack of a car is considered such a stigma for Winnipeg families that driving something — anything — is seen as a ticket out of the underclass. This is so even as the expenses of fuel, insurance, and maintenance comprise costs that remove food from the pantry, clothes from the wardrobe, and higher education from the minds of the young.
Winnipeg's acceleration toward car culture started full throttle with the 1955 removal of the streetcars. Daily, tens of thousands of people travel Portage Avenue and Main Street, but few of them are on foot. With ruthless parking restrictions along major routes through the inner city — need we have eight lanes of moving traffic? — storefront businesses are disadvantaged compared to those buildings set back from the sidewalks with vibrancy-killing parking lots out front. Portage Avenue and Main Street have lost their historical direction. Are they streets, or are they highways? In trying to be both they end up being neither.
Remnants of the old, walkable, streetcar-based, storefront-lined city still exist on major urban thoroughfares: two-, three-, four-, even five-storey storefront-apartment buildings standing solitary next to the empty lots, strip malls, and gas stations that serve the motorist majority. Next time you're downtown, do keep in mind that wherever you see an empty lot, or surface parking lot, once stood a building.
Given the sad state of Winnipeg's inner city, with a growing global reputation acting as an albatross on our country's character, I believe our core area ought to be considered a federal emergency disaster zone. Mega projects such as the MTS Centre and the new Manitoba Hydro Building are micro in comparison to what's needed. A so-called "bus rapid transit" system is still being hailed as the answer by those who either despise or don't understand urban life. Light rail advocates would have us resurrect our lost tramway, but in this automobile age something more potent, something irresistible and absolute, is needed.
The aforementioned Mr. Wilson, author of Winnipeg's first rapid transit study, knew that rapid transit meant more than getting people from the suburbs to downtown and back. On Tuesday, I travelled from the West End to Point Douglas, through the central business district, a single bus ride (15 Mountain) that took 45 minutes. Under Mr. Wilson's plan, that trip would've been 11 minutes — several minutes quicker than even the most recklessly driven automobile — on one underground subway train.
At the risk of immodesty, I find it strange that, in researching his piece, Mr. Strauss didn't call me. Half a year ago, I founded TRU Winnipeg, a group devoted to restoring Winnipeg's inner city to its historic greatness. Instead he talked to Eduard Epp, a University of Manitoba prof who years ago told my fellow TRU Winnipegger Jeff Lowe that Winnipeg's increasingly anti-urbanist civic psyche was the result of an influx of former Manitoba farmers who feel more like exiles from the country than newly arrived urbanites. Contrast this with our city's pre-1920 population, who wandered here from such places as London, Glasgow, Belfast, Kiev, etc. to build a city that resembled the one they had left.
While I could easily migrate to Montreal, New York, or San Francisco for the urban lifestyle I seek, my great-grandfather, a longtime employee of the T. Eaton Co., was able to enjoy such a life here. Because I love my hometown, I must insist that we all are able to do the same.