Transcona a model for the future

Opinion

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This article was published 13/05/2019 (2318 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last week, Re/Max released its 2019 Livability Report, which examines a range of quality-of-life factors to determine which Canadian neighbourhoods are felt to be most “livable.” A surprise finding was that Transcona, often considered to be Winnipeg’s Newfoundland, was identified as a hidden gem. Despite often being the punchline of bad jokes, old Transcona stands as a very good example of what modern suburb design should strive to be.

As cities have sprawled over the past several decades, lower densities have resulted in reduced services and crumbling roads as tax revenue is spread more thinly over a greater proportion of civic services and infrastructure.

Our lifestyles have been transformed by modern suburban design, with almost every activity beginning with a drive in a car. Vehicle use and ownership have increased dramatically, while traffic congestion and commuting times have grown. Children no longer walk to the corner store, and while nearly 60 per cent of their parents walked to school as kids, today 75 per cent of children are driven.

Vehicles are responsible for half of Winnipeg’s total greenhouse gas emissions, by far the largest contributor. According to the city’s climate action plan, the people of Winnipeg drive a combined 5.5 billion kilometres per year, equal to every person over the age of 16 driving alone in a car 26 kilometres every day.

The solution to these issues is not to force everyone to live in a downtown tower. Suburbs are a permanent reality in our urban landscape, but successful cities will be able to design suburbs that emphasize walkable, transit-efficient, mixed-use neighbourhoods with a range of densities, housing choices, demographics and employment.

So, how can Transcona help?

Despite being 10 kilometres from Winnipeg’s city centre, Transcona is a self-contained, diverse, urban community. It began as an industrial town, built to support a new rail yard in 1909. While few new suburbs would want to be adjacent to a rail yard, the idea of lighter industry being embedded in a community can provide access to employment without long commutes out of the neighbourhood.

Further enhancing the local economy, Transcona is designed around a commercial high street, which runs through the centre of the neighbourhood, creating convenient access to local goods, services and employment. The retail street provides opportunity for small business and promotes a commercial diversity and entrepreneurship that can become a resilient backbone to the neighbourhood economy.

Walking is encouraged through physical design, as human-scale, low-rise buildings allow sunlight to reach the sidewalks and small, diverse storefronts built to the sidewalk edge create a feeling of intimacy and offer a visual texture that enriches the pedestrian experience. With commercial space spread along a street, there is no need for large surface parking lots that degrade the pedestrian experience and promote vehicle use. Modern subdivisions are becoming more mixed-use than in the past, but they are often designed to segregate functions and densities into zones that discourage walking.

A key to success for Regent Avenue, Transcona’s high street, is the grid-pattern residential streets that feed onto it. The shortest walking distance between A and B is a straight line and the easiest connection between streets is a grid. Gridded neighbourhoods allow a street design with connected sidewalks set back from the curb, with a boulevard and trees that provide shade and wind protection for a pedestrian zone that separates cars and people.

By providing the shortest distance to commercial amenities, the grid encourages residents to walk to the convenience store, coffee shop or pub that is around the corner from their home. Schools, churches, community clubs and small parks can be embedded in the neighbourhood grid, providing easy walking or biking access for a larger proportion of residents.

Grid-street neighbourhoods can also be more adaptable than traditional suburbs. The street hierarchy and configuration of intersections provides natural locations for changes of use or higher-density development. This allows neighbourhoods to evolve more easily than cul-de-sac communities with segregated uses and densities.

Seniors homes or rental apartments can be developed at intersections in the grid or along the higher-density centre streets, providing housing options for all demographics and allowing people to remain in their neighbourhood as they age. This kind of evolution can be seen in Transcona, where several intersections are being intensified with higher-density buildings that are diversifying housing options in the community.

Grid streets were popular in the early 20th century because people wanted easy access from their home to the streetcar line along their main road. This principle works today, providing convenient access to transit, which can travel in efficient straight lines, connecting stops at the top of each street.

This has resulted in drastically different commuting habits in Transcona compared with other distant suburbs with curving streets and cul-de-sacs that increase walking distances, reduce connectivity and make transit inefficient. According to the latest census, 15 per cent of people living in the grid streets of old Transcona take transit to work, higher than the city average.

Compare that to Sage Creek, Whyte Ridge, Island Lakes, Bridgwater and Linden Woods, where between five and seven per cent of residents commute using transit. With adjacent industry and diverse local business, more than five per cent of the people in Transcona walk to work every day. That number is near zero in most of the other suburbs.

Transcona is a 110-year-old model for the future. It is a special place, demonstrating that, through design, even distant suburbs can provide effective mobility options, promote walkable lifestyles and inspire a diverse local economy — the keys to building a prosperous, healthy and sustainable city in the future.

Brent Bellamy is senior design architect for Number Ten Architectural Group.