Councillor renews effort for safety measures at collision-prone West End corner

A city councillor is again asking for traffic calming measures to be installed at a collision-prone intersection in the West End.

Coun. Cindy Gilroy has submitted a motion for next week’s city centre community committee that requests the public service and public works committee look at red-light and speed cameras, larger one-way signage and a boulevard or barrier to protect the corner of Erin Street and Ellice Avenue.

The intersection has been plagued by collisions, drivers heading the wrong way on Erin Street and speeding. Gilroy submitted the same motion in April 2025, but it went nowhere.

”There’s still lots of concerns regarding that intersection,” Gilroy (Daniel McIntyre) said Wednesday. “We need to keep pushing it forward until the city looks at finding some solutions.

Goodies Bake Shop, which is at the southwest corner of the intersection, has been damaged multiple times by drivers. In January 2025, a pickup truck and sedan collided at the intersection, causing the car to jump the curb and slam into a light standard beside the business.

Linda Peters, a part owner of Goodies and its operations manager, said there was a minor crash outside the shop last week. She said, on average, there’s a crash at the intersection once a month.

“It’s so common we’re almost getting used to it, which is sad,” she said.

Since 2020, there have been 224 collision at or around the intersection, Manitoba Public Insurance data show. MPI has recorded 20 crashes at the site so far this year.

Gilroy continues to field complaints from business owners and residents about the problematic intersection.

Increased traffic has made the problem worse, Gilroy said.

“We’re in the middle of a high-dense neighbourhood that gets a lot of outer traffic moving through it,” she said.

The city’s 2023 traffic flow map shows 8,500 drivers pass on Erin Street through the intersection daily. In terms of westbound traffic on Ellice Avenue, upwards of 15,700 drivers travel through the intersection daily.

Peters has been calling for safety improvements to the intersection since 2018. She said when the building is damaged by vehicles, she no longer makes an insurance claim, to prevent her premiums from going up.

In one incident a few years ago, a car came barrelling through the intersection and slid into the side of the building that houses the bakery office. No one was there at the time.

Peters has asked the city if she can install her own infrastructure to protect the building, but has been told any barriers would interfere with pedestrians and sidewalk cleaning during the winter.

“I’ll keep fighting, and I won’t stop,” she said.

The city reviewed the Erin and Ellice intersection in 2021, resulting in several safety improvements, including lowered traffic signals to improve visibility, reduced lane widths (a design feature shown to reduce vehicle speeds) and increased boulevard space surrounding Goodies to improve pedestrian safety.

The city is working on a citywide speed limit study, spokesperson Julie Dooley said Wednesday. As part of it, the study will look at reducing the speed limit at the intersection to 50 kilometres per hour from 60 km/h.

In Gilroy’s 2025 motion, she also asked the city to consider installing traffic signals near Ethelbert Street and Westminster Avenue to enhance pedestrian safety, to address increased traffic in the Wolseley neighbourhood. Gilroy said a pedestrian crossing should be functional at that intersection later this summer.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca