a day ago
New transit system promises faster, more reliable service. It's now up to Winnipeggers to decide if they like the new ride
Forget Hamlet, today's great existential dilemma might be, 'Do I wait for the next bus or start walking?'
At least according to behavioural economists, who use the wait-walk dilemma to explore trade-offs between waiting for better opportunities or taking immediate action amid uncertainty.
Winnipeg Transit gives the dilemma, in its literal form, an especially cruel edge.
Winter lasts for months. Buses in many areas are infrequent. Routes can be as winding and indirect as the streets themselves. Miss a transfer and — walk or wait — you could be stuck in Mars-level cold for the next 45 minutes.
With choices like these, it's little wonder that more than 90 per cent of Winnipeggers say 'not to be' when it comes to commuting via bus, preferring to drive, bike or walk.
Bjorn Radstrom, manager of Transit Service Development at the City of Winnipeg, is the lead behind a new experiment he hopes will nudge ambivalent commuters in the right direction: stand tall and wait for Winnipeg's public chariot.
'I'm an absolute transit nerd… (and) this is a once-in-a-lifetime project,' he says of the Primary Transit Network, the city's new system of bus 'spine' lines, which debuts Sunday. It was designed and planned in collaboration with Stantec, a global design and consulting firm.
'Not many cities have done a wholesale overhaul of their entire network like this. It's probably the biggest ever in Canada or in the United States, and it's one of the biggest ever in the world.'
The new transit network's backbone is a series of high-frequency 'spine' routes, with buses every 10-15 minutes, along major corridors – including St Mary's, Grant, Portage, Donald, Osborne, Provencher, Pembina and Abinojii Mikanah. Commuters squinting at the display on approaching buses on these lines will spot an 'F' or 'FX' prefix, standing for frequent and frequent express.
CITY OF WINNIPEG
The system map for Winnipeg's new transit network launching June 29.
The system map for Winnipeg's new transit network launching June 29.
'(For a lot of routes), you won't have to even consult a schedule. You can just walk out because the bus is going to be coming,' Radstrom says.
The F lines join the network's BLUE Line, Winnipeg's first rapid transit service (arriving every 4-10 minutes during peak hours) connecting the downtown to the University of Manitoba and St. Norbert through the bus-only Southwest Transitway corridor.
There's also the new D (direct), R (regular) and E (Express) lines, which differ somewhat in terms of bus-stop spacing and service speed but, like F and FX, run along thoroughfares.
As well as reducing wait times, the new network allows Winnipeg Transit to wring a de facto 'grid' out of the city's sometimes jumbled topology, a shape generally considered a marker of transit efficiency.
All this means scrapping the buses' oddly cherished naming system, where most were labeled with a number that often stuck for decades. Numbers like the '68', '20' and '11' that for many evoke years of commuting and colourful, sometimes surreal, encounters with fellow riders.
It also means tossing the city's complex branching patterns — express-only and peak-only services and certain downtown corridors, like Graham Avenue's transit mall. Those many overlapping routes and their multiple variants are now considered redundant.
To ensure commuters don't have to walk too far before hopping on a main line, the new system has three categories of feeder routes — connector routes (two-digit numbers), community routes (three-digit numbers), and on-request service.
These offer lower-frequency buses connecting neighbourhoods to the spine network; little streams flowing into a big river.
We want to hear about your experiences with the new Winnipeg transit network. Share your thoughts online.
Winnipeg's transit system is changing. Here's an online survival guide.
All the same, it's easy to find commuters on Reddit and social media eulogizing the loss of a familiar, trusty line or venting about now having to walk longer or transfer more often.
'I really value complaints, and I want people to complain if it's not working for them. My only request is be specific and be constructive,' Radstrom says. '(But) with a change of this magnitude … there's no way around it. Things are going to get more challenging for some people.'
It's also notable the new system requires more transfers on many routes — changes that may make some Winnipeggers bristle. That's natural when they associate transferring with standing in the cold and checking their phones for a connecting bus that never seems to come.
The redesigned network aims to address that with more reliable, regular service. You may have to catch an extra transfer, but the buses should come more quickly.
Radstrom — fond of quoting transit pundit and consultant Jarrett Walker's motto, 'Freedom is frequency' — estimates transit will significantly improve for about 60 per cent of current riders and remain functionally the same for 20 to 30 per cent.
On the other hand, he predicts things will become more difficult for the remaining 10 to 20 per cent.
For the city, it's a make-or-break moment. With years of stagnant ridership and revenue shortfalls, the status quo would no longer do.
'For those that may be concerned about the changes, I can appreciate that, but I think the general principle I would ask everyone to please remember is that we would not be making these changes to make things worse,' Mayor Scott Gillingham says.
'(It's) the biggest modernization of Winnipeg transit service in 60 years.'
RUTH BONNEVILLE / FREE PRESS
Bjorn Radstrom, Manager of Transit Service Development, with one of the signs for the new transit system.
RUTH BONNEVILLE / FREE PRESS
Bjorn Radstrom, Manager of Transit Service Development, with one of the signs for the new transit system.
City modernization initiatives almost always have trade-offs and discontentment, and it's no different with public transit.
Among transit wonks, one of the hotter debates is whether cities are better off with the hub-and-spoke model Winnipeg is ditching, or the spine-and-feeder approach behind the new system.
The hub-and-spoke system is a radial one. It gets its name from its wheel-like shape: a central hub — typically downtown — with spokes stretching outward.
Downtown has been the heart of Winnipeg's transit system since 1891, when electric streetcars began running along River Avenue, radiating in and out from the city's core.
The story of Winnipeg's modern transit system begins about a half century ago.
FREE PRESS FILES
TThe era of the streetcar as Winnipeg's chief means of mass transportation ended in 1955.
The era of the streetcar as Winnipeg's chief means of mass transportation ended in 1955.
In 1955, the city scrapped its streetcars – marked by a symbolic 'funeral' with hundreds gathering at Portage and Main to watch a ceremonial streetcar parade and to flatten coins on the rails one last time.
Over the next 15 years, Winnipeg's transit switched gears, as rubber-tired trolleys — still powered by overhead wires — gradually gave way to diesel buses.
In 1963, the city launched the Winnipeg Area Transportation Study. It reflected the post-war modernist ethos — promoting radial expressways, geared towards drivers in their big Meteors, Impalas and Fairlines.
It also recommended that the system be radial and downtown-centric.
After all, the country was enjoying its post-war boom. The suburbs were young and multiplying, the middle-class now had cars and commercial life was centred around Portage and Main. A gloom had yet to envelope the downtown.
There was still hope it might serve as a civic hub for residents of new suburbs like St. Vital and Tuxedo, with a slew of downtown cultural attractions like Centennial Concert Hall (built 1967) and the Manitoba Theatre Centre (1970) all soon on the way.
In the 1970s, the city went all-in with diesel, rolling out Winnipeg's classic buses, like the 66, the 75 and the 11 – funnelling riders to and from the downtown.
'The (old) network doesn't work because it's built for the city of the 1950s, maybe 1960s, when everybody's commuting into downtown in the morning, out of downtown in the afternoon,' Radstrom says.
'But it didn't serve people for all the other trips they want to do, for work, first of all, but also just for daily life — if they want to go shopping, visit their friends, all that kind of stuff.'
It's rare to see a city's transit switch suddenly from a hub-and-spoke to a spine-and-feeder model.
In this shift, Winnipeg joins cities like Madison, Wis. — which launched a new grid-like transit system in 2023 — and Dublin, Ireland, where similar changes began to take root in 2021.
Winnipeg's shift, while reflecting an ongoing downtown malaise, also evokes broader debates about how cities should grow.
Urbanists tend to champion grid-like systems for transit and streets, viewing them as a more rational and efficient way to guide people and vehicles. This makes spine-and-feeder inherently attractive.
However, large-scale efforts to reform transit with watchwords like 'rationality' and 'efficiency' are often criticized as too top-down.
Conservatives and grassroots progressives alike share these concerns, wary of centralized overhauls that disrupt daily routines with new abstract frameworks — especially if they're rolled out without public input.
Others argue this view underestimates our ability to plan effective transit and that even large-scale systems like spine-and-feeder models can promote a different kind of decentralization.
These models push back on the downtown-centrism of planning and reflect that over time cities tend to see jobs, schools and shopping services dispersed across neighbourhoods. They can do this by enabling transit users to travel across town rather than always through the core.
When done well, spine-and-feeder systems promote transit frequency and directness – and, as many argue, help knit a city's diverse neighbourhoods more closely together.
While major city projects still evoke a technocratic image, today's planners are expected to engage in deeper, more inclusive public consultation than in the past.
'The new routes are built on extensive consultation with transit users and a deep analysis of anonymous data from cellphones, really looking at where people are coming from and going to,' Gillingham says.
'What this is ultimately about is the people of Winnipeg and customer service to Winnipeg,'
The mayor is referring to public consultation going back to 2018, unfolding over three phases through late 2020. It included surveys, open houses, pop-up events, workshops and virtual sessions.
Starting in 2019, the city partnered with Stantec on public consultancy and released several summaries highlighting residents' calls for more frequent service, better cross-town connections, and shorter walks to stops. These reports also detailed how public feedback shaped the new system's planning.
'If we heard from people that the current network mostly works, but it needs a few tweaks and changes and things like that, we would be willing to go in that direction,' Radstrom says.
'But if we heard from everybody that, no, it absolutely doesn't meet the needs of people today and where they want to travel, how they want to travel — we were going to do something completely different.'
The city also used anonymous cellphone location data to map travel patterns — showing, among other things, that many trips bypassed downtown. Radstrom says this gave planners added confidence to push ahead with a bold redesign.
Winnipeg Transit also says they plan to gather data for the next year, including by collecting feedback from users through 311, before making any significant changes to the new system. And gathering this data, to continue improving the system, means getting more butts on bus seats.
'I would encourage all Winnipeggers this summer to get on a transit bus if you haven't been on one for years – and just enjoy the new transit experience,' Gillingham says.
Though some worry about the scope of change, others worry they're not dramatic enough.
'To get people to use transit, generally transit service has to be comparable to car use,' says Orly Linovski, Associate Professor at the Department of City Planning at the University of Manitoba.
'Transit nerds (take buses) because we love transit, but even with me, if it's going to take an hour and 20 minutes instead of seven or 15 minutes – that's a big ask.'
Linovski points out that Winnipeg's relatively low traffic congestion makes driving easy and convenient for most vehicle owners, giving little incentive to switch to public transit.
At the same time, it's not surprising that political leaders hesitate to explore policies discouraging car use — and unleash a commuter rage fiercer than a Winnipeg deep freeze.
The more popular option for commuters is to make busing more inherently appealing through upgrades and smart reforms.
It remains to be seen how commuters will respond to the new network in the long term and the extent to which it will shorten average trip lengths, though Radstrom predicts significant improvements for more than half of riders.
And there are other significant upgrades on the horizon for Winnipeg Transit, thanks to significant capital investments coming from all levels of government.
This includes a rapid transit corridor design for downtown, rolling out 90 zero-emission buses, installing accessible bus stop platforms and implementing 'intelligent transportation systems', which are supposed to make transit smarter and faster through GPS, sensors, wireless networks and real-time data analytics.
For Linovski a key factor is still missing.
'The evidence is pretty clear that the way to increase ridership is to increase service vehicle hours and increase them substantially,' she says, noting the total number of hours buses are in service remains unchanged with the new system.
Substantially boosting service hours, however, would increase costs for fuel, maintenance, drivers, administration and other expenses, further straining Winnipeg Transit's operational budget, which is already subsidized at record numbers by the city.
RUTH BONNEVILLE / FREE PRESS
Bjorn Radstrom with one of the new maps that will be given out to riders next week.
RUTH BONNEVILLE / FREE PRESS
Bjorn Radstrom with one of the new maps that will be given out to riders next week.
Despite those constraints on the new system, few people are arguing that the old one was working well enough as it was.
With only one in 10 Winnipeggers choosing bus as their primary mode of commuting – and public consultations showing a strong demand for reforms – this isn't surprising.
As Linovski emphasizes, the impact of the upgrades on ridership, users' experiences and transit's overall efficiency deserves close study, with challenges inevitable.
For Winnipeggers, it may initially feel like the new system walks before it runs. But after decades of unreliable and underused transit — the city couldn't wait any longer.
Winnipeg Jets Game Days
On Winnipeg Jets game days, hockey writers Mike McIntyre and Ken Wiebe send news, notes and quotes from the morning skate, as well as injury updates and lineup decisions. Arrives a few hours prior to puck drop.
Conrad SweatmanReporter
Conrad Sweatman is an arts reporter and feature writer. Before joining the Free Press full-time in 2024, he worked in the U.K. and Canadian cultural sectors, freelanced for outlets including The Walrus, VICE and Prairie Fire. Read more about Conrad.
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
