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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Rapid buses rattling homes
Residents seek relief from incessant shaking
Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press Tom Haines and Jim Spellman have been shaken and stirred by the new rapid-transit buses that pass by their homes.
TOM Haines is all in favour of the new bus rapid-transit route -- except for how the service has left him feeling a little shaky.
No, literally. Ever since the bus service kicked off on Easter weekend, dozens of Winnipeg Transit buses every hour zoom past Haines's Jubilee Avenue home on their way to the rapid-transit busway. Each one, Haines said, rattles his 90-year-old house right down to its stone foundation.
The shaking got so bad, Haines had to take picture frames off his walls. "Right away, it was 'holy smokes.' This was buses like I've never seen before," he said of the dawn-to-dusk parade of buses. "Upstairs is where you feel it most, the house just waving."
In an 18-day period, Haines calculated a total of 7,290 rattling impacts from buses passing by the house. He's not the only one affected: Next door, Haines's neighbours, Jim and Betty Spellman, watched as items tumbled from office shelves as one loaded bus drove by.
"The mornings are the worst, with all these people going downtown," Jim Spellman said. "It's just annoying."
The shaking won't last forever: Future construction of the Jubilee underpass means in five to six years, the entrance to the busway will permanently land on the other side of Pembina Highway. But in the meantime, Haines and Spellman are worried about what impact the regular rattling may have on their houses.
They approached the city and the premier's office with their concerns. Last week, city engineers came out to shave down part of the road around a manhole cover on Jubilee, hypothesizing the buses hitting it was causing the shaking. But Haines said he hasn't seen a difference.
For tax purposes, the homes are classified as part of a "light-traffic" neighbourhood -- and it's certainly not that anymore, the duo said. But Haines stressed a possible change to his property-tax category was not why he's taking the fight to the city. One possible solution, he suggested, would be instituting a speed reduction at the right turn from Pembina onto Jubilee, to slow down buses as they drive by.
Mostly, Haines and Spellman would like the city to acknowledge the effect of the busway on their cluster of houses.
"There's a real concern that when the city does this type of planning, they don't examine the impact on the residents," he said. "In the future, if we have major structural issues from this, will we be able to go to the city? Or will they just say, 'sorry?' "
melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 18, 2012 B1
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