Something’s got to give.
This year has been — in my humble, anecdote-based opinion — one of the most challenging for driving in and around Winnipeg. Rush hour is more intense, starts earlier and lasts longer. Construction seems to be everywhere, choking off entire parts of the city during our overly short construction season.
All the trend lines point to a near-term future where, despite our status as a medium-sized city, we will have traffic congestion worthy of much larger places.
Once we accept that this is our future, we’ll have to accept the need to start doing things differently to avoid or at least mitigate the impending traffic apocalypse that’s headed our way.
A good place to start would be to radically change the way we dedicate portions of annual property taxes to make a final, determined effort to de-emphasize roads and expand transit.
Currently, Winnipeg property owners are facing a 3.5 per cent general rate increase this year. Of that total increase, two per cent will be dedicated to road repairs and only 0.33 per cent to public transit operations. None of the annual increase in property taxes is dedicated to expanding Winnipeg’s stunted rapid-transit system.
The current approach to allotting property taxes is — literally and figuratively — a road to disaster.
Ignoring transit to invest heavily in roads — whether it’s to repair, expand or lengthen — does nothing to encourage people to get out of their vehicles and use other modes of transport to get where they are going. This is particularly true when it comes to commuting to work.
This creates a vicious cycle for the city: increasing investments are made in roads while transit is starved of needed money; transit continues to attract few new riders because of limited service; people continue driving, one person to a car in traffic that continues getting worse; as traffic volumes increase so, too, is the wear and tear on roads, which then require more frequent repair and reconstruction.
Have you ever asked yourself why one of the major streets you use each day to drive back and forth to work is being repaired again, just a year or two after the last time it was torn up? It’s because traffic volumes have continued to escalate, causing more damage to road surfaces.
It’s not hard to see how, eventually, we are going to have the worst of all worlds: crappy streets, crappy transit and worsening traffic jams.
Think that’s an exaggeration? Consider that Winnipeg is already hitting way above its weight in traffic congestion.
I recently wrote a newsletter on this topic, highlighting traffic data that showed we have the third-worst traffic of all Canadian cities. In short, the data showed that our average commuting times are going up, and the distances we can travel in a 30-minute window are going down.
And if you’re not depressed enough by that current snapshot, consider that increasing traffic volumes also translates into increasing carbon emissions that — in case you hadn’t noticed — are helping to warm the planet and trigger increasingly extreme weather events.
There is a way to avoid this future, but many of us are not going to like it.
We have to start now to make it increasingly unattractive to commute by car while, at the same time, making transit much more attractive. Next year’s reimagining of Winnipeg Transit — with new routes and schedules — may help in that regard.
But we also need to dedicate more lanes of existing roadways to buses (both downtown and on major routes to and from the downtown) while expanding rapid-transit busways.
In the short term, this will put a lot of pressure on traffic by compressing it into fewer lanes on feeder routes, and making it harder for drivers to get into, out of and around downtown. And all this requires a new approach to property taxes.
It can be done.
Halifax, for example, dedicates roughly two-thirds of annual property tax increases to a “climate fund” that pays for improvements in things such as electric vehicle charging stations, the purchase of more electric buses and installation of solar panels on city buildings.
Small gestures such as those can add up to significant changes, but it’s never going to be enough. Even if Winnipeg were to flip the way it divides up property tax increases, or push employers to subsidize transit passes, it would never generate enough money to build the transit system necessary to supplant vehicular traffic.
The provincial and federal governments have largely focused their support on building or expanding rapid transit. However, just about every major city in this country is suffering from massive transit system operating deficits.
Transit needs to be the No. 1 infrastructure funding priority for governments of all levels, to ensure that we have sensible and climate-friendly alternatives to hopping in the car and driving to and from work.
Even so, the city could send a strong message to citizens by starting with the way it divides up property tax increases. It won’t be enough to solve the problem, but it will represent one small step away from the traffic and climate apocalypse.
dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com
Dan Lett
Columnist
Dan Lett is a columnist for the Free Press, providing opinion and commentary on politics in Winnipeg and beyond. Born and raised in Toronto, Dan joined the Free Press in 1986. Read more about Dan.
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