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January 21st 2011 | 19

Population density: Montreal and Winnipeg

When I arrived at the Winnipeg airport after four days in beautiful Montreal for the Canadian University Press National Conference, I was overcome with embarrassment and regret.

Among the first things you see as you leave the tarmac is a giant ad for the Casinos of Winnipeg looming over the luggage pick-up area.

As you depart from the airport, you are confronted with a massive billboard for the South Beach Casino. The landscape subsequently devolves into a sprawling expanse of big-box stores, fast food restaurants and empty parking lots. Couple this with the chronic neglect and disrepair of our city’s core, and it becomes undeniably clear that you are entering a much poorer city, both economically and culturally, from the one you just left.

After scaling the narrow, lively and incredibly dense streets of downtown Montreal, driving down the eight-lane Portage Avenue into a flat, crumbling city core caused me to shudder.

As per 2006 Statistics Canada data, the Island of Montreal has a land area of 365.13 sq. kilometres and a population density of 4,438 people per sq. kilometre.

Winnipeg has a land area of 464.01 sq. kilometres and a population density of 1,365.2 people per sq. kilometre.

If Winnipeg was as dense as Montreal, its entire population of 633,451 people could fit into 142.73 sq. kilometres.

Maybe that’s why Winnipeg looks like this:

And Montreal looks like this:

When I got home, I immediately searched the name Bartley Kives on the Winnipeg Free Press website to find local news from the past week.

Kives reported that just 415 out Winnipeg’s 12,660 Chinese-Canadians live in Chinatown while 3,375 Chinese people have congregated in the suburban, south Fort Garry area.

He also slammed Winnipeg’s embrace of Target stores, writing that “it certainly doesn’t make sense in low-density Winnipeg, where the last thing the over-extended infrastructure needs is another enormous big-box store surrounded by a sprawling parking lot.”

On the financial front, the city announced that it will likely use one-time revenue from city reserves to balance the 2010 budget after Winnipeg failed to resolve a $10 million legal dispute with Manitoba Hydro. This practice has been widely criticized.

To top it off, Gord Steeves apparently wants to run in the provincial election but doesn’t want to risk losing his council seat to do it.

Welcome home!

Discussion

Population definitely plays a part and acts as a constraint that causes compact development, but I still think mentality is still a factor. As well as lack of attention to detail, and lack of strict planning policy. What is frightening on the mentality side of things is there is a demand for the supply of banal communities and wide roads. A shift in thinking is definitely needed and I always thought that Winnipeg’s current state doesn’t do its historical tales any justice.

– Sophia in Winnipeg | January 22nd 2011 at 10:39am | Link
I love Montreal, the excitement, the artistry, history and flavour of that city but comparing it to Winnipeg is pointless. It is a few hundred years older and as you said there is a lot more money in it than Winnipeg. There is also a level of organized crime that we cannot imagine here.
Having said that I note that people complain about the wide streets. Those narrow streets are great as a walker but not as someone wanting to get home in rush hour traffic as a driver. The problem isn’t the width of the streets it is the lack of artistry. So many things could be hung high above the streets to connect them and bring the ceiling down so to speak ie highly hung Japanese Lanterns or at Hallowe’en JackO Lanterns in the winter large snowflakes. Some pieces of Portage having patios under large colourful awnings.
The Forks had a great start as a green space for people to meet and hang out. Now they have jammed so many things in that space that it has become just a commercial venture.
The Provencheur Bridge is beautiful and people cannot see that because they are use to mediocre ones such as the Chief Peguis.We need to encourage more creativity when we are up-grading things.

– wonderdog in winnipeg | January 30th 2011 at 2:34am | Link
“Having said that I note that people complain about the wide streets. Those narrow streets are great as a walker but not as someone wanting to get home in rush hour traffic as a driver.”

That might be less of a problem if we had a freeway; then we could get from place to place without hitting 37 traffic lights in a row. Even Saskatoon and Regina got that right.

– Jess C. in Winnipeg, MB | January 30th 2011 at 8:13am | Link
Instead of changing our streets, we should first change the way we think about transport, and our city, or any city as a whole.
What is one feature the world’s greatest cities have?
Accessible, quick public transportation.
Not vast highways.

– C | January 30th 2011 at 10:52am | Link
If we did have a vast highway, it would clear a good amount of cars out of the city core and make public transportation more accessible and quick. No sense in the latter coming before the former.

– Jess C. in Winnipeg, MB | January 30th 2011 at 12:18pm | Link
If we had vast highways more people would be using the highways, creating less demand for public transportation, making public transportation less accessible as without demand, the city would be forced to cut down on the number of buses and frequency of stops.

All the while, the traffic on the highways increase. As cars cannot stay confined to highways the traffic would increase on the streets and the already handicapped public transportation system gets put at further risk.

In addition, you’ll see our infrastructure budget rise as more cars and more highways equals more maintenance to the roads. I haven’t even touched on the social and environmental implications of a worse public transit system, though it’s not hard imagine what some of those would be.

Building highways and streets at best perpetuates our problems, it does not solve them.

– C | January 30th 2011 at 5:12pm | Link
I don’t think that’s the case at all. The people on the highways would already have their own vehicles. It certainly wouldn’t be the impetus for everyone who currently uses public transportation to rush out and get a car. Cars may not stay on the highway at all times, but an extra place for them to go would result in less crowding. As for our infrastructure budget, I expect it would rise, at least in the first few years. But more public transportation without improvement to traffic flow would yield about the same result.

– Jess C. in Winnipeg, MB | January 30th 2011 at 7:48pm | Link
More roads never lead to less crowding. And they certainly don’t help public transportation. In fact, I would argue it undermines popular support for public transit by contributing further to our already out-of-control “car culture”, which is the last thing we need in an era of scarce, polluting fossil fuels. And you’re dead wrong about the costs of running an efficient public transportation system versus expanding the road system so people in Linden Woods can get to IKEA a few minutes faster. The city is spreading its limited funds far too thinly and where they are least effective. It’s true: public transit projects cost a lot of money. But the only way we can hope to tackle our huge infrastructure deficit is to seriously think about what kinds of infrastructure investments are likely to pay dividends over the long term and lead to the kinds of dense, well-connected, diverse, and healthy urban growth necessary to provide a good quality of life for ALL its citizens, not just those with two cars and a home in the suburbs.

– Steve C in Winnipeg | January 31st 2011 at 10:10pm | Link
“In fact, I would argue it undermines popular support for public transit by contributing further to our already out-of-control ‘car culture . . .’”

I still fail to see how it would undermine support for public transportation. Even people who own cars and hate traffic congestion won’t get out of them, and even people who take buses and hate traffic congestion won’t buy cars. Who cares about the “cultural” implications? It all boils back down to behaviour, and especially around here, that’s nearly impossible to alter.

You seem to think only one faction, the car people or the public transport people, deserves our attention. To think this way is to fail. The purpose is to improve the city’s traffic flow for everyone who uses it, no matter how they use it. Other cities have done it with bus rapid transit, light rail transit, denser downtowns, pedestrian walkways, bike lanes AND freeways, all at once. It never has to be a zero-sum game. We just seem to like it better that way in Winnipeg, and that’s why nothing in this area gets done.

– Jess C. in Winnipeg, MB | February 1st 2011 at 7:19am | Link
Given what we know about automobile usage and its contribution to climate change, other environmental damage, and unsustainable urban growth patterns, I start with the idea that it’s better to encourage use of public transportation over individual automobiles. Can you not see how pumping more money into building up our road system makes people less likely to use transit?

Sure on paper it looks like there is more space for all the cars and therefore there will be less traffic. But this is only a traffic engineer’s fantasy: this NEVER happens in real life! What happens is that, in the short term traffic does decrease, but over the long term the additional road capacity attracts MORE drivers (“Hey, there’s never any traffic…I’m gonna start taking the car to work!”). Of course, many people come to the same conclusion. The net result: more traffic. Case in point: Highway 401 in the GTA. They kept adding more lanes and, surprise surprise, more traffic.

And I disagree with your assertion that there’s no changing people’s behaviour. Traffic is a collective action problem which can only be solved by there being a disincentive to driving. I think it’s a mischaracterization of the problem to say “It never has to be a zero-sum game. We just seem to like it better that way in Winnipeg, and that’s why nothing in this area gets done.” This would make sense if transit improvements were given even remotely the same consideration, in terms of money, as road expansion projects. They aren’t. At some point, we need to figure out, as a city, what our priorities are. More roads should not be at the top of the list.

– Steve C in Winnipeg | February 1st 2011 at 8:53am | Link
I’d like to expand on what “C” said with regards to long-term transit viability: First of all, Winnipeg Transit is mandated to provide service to the whole city. This means that even when new greenfield developments such as Sage Creek and Waverley West are built, they too must be served by public transit. The problem is that these communities (if they can be called that, given the lack of most amenities one usually associates with functioning communities) lack the population density necessary to make transit viable over the long run. So in order to provide the bare minimum of service to these areas, those routes are effectively being subsidized by the riders on more popular routes.

It’s easy to see how, if this development pattern continues, the costs of maintaining the transit infrastructure become higher and higher, and the only way Winnipeg Transit can afford to maintain the same level of service is to pass on the costs to riders, in the form of fare increases (i.e. wealthier areas of the city are having their transit service subsidized by all transit riders, many of whom are from lower-income brackets). Higher fares cause hardship for those with low income, as well as discouraging some riders who own cars and might decide it’s not worth it to pay more and more for less and less.

“What does this have to do with roads?”, you might say. Road expansions are the thin edge of the wedge in terms of encouraging the kind of suburban sprawl I mentioned earlier by allowing easier access to greenfield (undeveloped) areas as opposed to infill development in already built-up areas.

Traffic is just one facet of the transportation issues cities face. Instead of looking at it in isolation, and implementing “solutions” which only exacerbate the problem in the long run, we need to look at the issues from a holistic perspective. Developing a regional transportation strategy which integrates all these concerns would be a good first step.

(I recommend checking out research from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute if you want to learn more about all of this.)

– Steve C in Winnipeg | February 1st 2011 at 9:26am | Link
I cannot see how encouraging use of public transportation outweighs the need to reduce core traffic congestion, especially since buses and cars use the exact same roads. If you think there’s any chance of reducing car use to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub before that happens, you’re dreaming. No one will be attracted to use public transportation until they can see that the roads involved in it will get them somewhere faster. Environmental considerations by themselves don’t sway the majority of people.

Your last sentence sums up what I’ve been trying to get across: “Developing a regional transportation strategy which integrates all these concerns would be a good first step.” Making roads more efficient, which would indeed entail creating more of them (preferably with on- and off-ramps), is only one step in that process. No regional transportation strategy would hold water without addressing very real concerns about flow.

– Jess C. in Winnipeg, MB | February 1st 2011 at 10:59am | Link
Winnipeg is definately behind the times when it comes to proper infrastructure and city layout. I have been all over Canada, the States, and Israel twice and Winnipeg is still behind most places I have been to.

– Paul Meyerson in Winnipeg, MB | February 1st 2011 at 4:35pm | Link
“More roads never lead to less crowding.”
Exactly.
“If you built it, they will come.” is the misquote that jumps to mind.

– C | February 1st 2011 at 11:42pm | Link
Jess:
“I cannot see how encouraging use of public transportation outweighs the need to reduce core traffic congestion, especially since buses and cars use the exact same roads.”

The more the residents of this city use public transportation the less vehicles are on the road, in turn reducing the traffic and congestion in all areas of the city. It is much more economical and beneficial in every sense to have 30 people on a bus than 30 cars on the road.

– C | February 1st 2011 at 11:53pm | Link
Be that as it may, how many people will be driven to use a public transit system that uses the exact same inefficient, poorly synchronized roads as cars? Especially when Winnipeg Transit has such a bad reputation? (I use it regularly myself, so that reputation is justified.) Your solution comes down to repeatedly saying “Don’t use your car, use the bus” and expecting people to go for it until something makes them feel like it. That’s not even halfway to enough.

And even when individuals opt for public transportation over their own cars, what will we do for the trucks that transport our goods, the cabs that take us somewhere in a hurry, and every emergency vehicle in our arsenal? A stop light every block and a lack of a road connecting each neighborhood to the next can’t possibly be good for them.

– Jess C. in Winnipeg, MB | February 2nd 2011 at 8:09am | Link
Both a change of the transit system and a change of the public’s mind and behaviours are key to having this work. There is no better way to bring about change than participating and showing the government your commitment to a socially responsible method of transportation. If the people demand it, it will change as is currently evidenced in the world right now.
Though I do think the government could be doing much more to promote transit ridership.

I’m not sure what you mean by what will we do for those cabs and trucks. They drive on the roads now, they will drive on the same roads if and hopefully when public transportation becomes a more popular choice. I think both Steve and I have demonstrated that traffic would decrease with an increase in use of public transportation, therefore this obviously will give those emergency vehicles a faster route to their much needed destinations.
If anything in your last paragraph you have described our current situation which would only be improved when ridership increases.

Both you and I clearly agree that what we have currently isn’t working, but why keep trying the same ineffectual method to change a growing problem?

– C | February 2nd 2011 at 10:06am | Link
I keep coming back to the idea that public transportation isn’t enough. Cars and buses face the exact same problems and they need to be corrected FIRST. You can’t count on a majority of people to demand better bus service and get it; that, if anything, is the “If you build it they will come” idea you opposed earlier.

– Jess C. in Winnipeg, MB | February 2nd 2011 at 10:51am | Link
I am a former Montrealer. The photo above is from Old Montreal which are 18th century buildings located between the Port of Montreal and the main downtown core. The main downtown core has wide streets and boulevards but is still at a human scale as compared to downtown Toronto. It is also a mix of business, stores, restaurants and clubs. That is the reaon whydowntown Montreal streets are very busy with activity throughout the day and night. Most western Canadian cities have a business core and all the entertainment and shopping is in the suburbs.There has to be a reason to go downtown at night.

– Doug Marshall in Edmonton | October 28th 2011 at 10:26pm | Link