For safety’s sake, leave Portage and Main alone

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/10/2017 (2940 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let’s start in the usual, if not always welcome, way.

With my opinion.

It concerns the ongoing Winnipeg city council debate on Portage and Main: should the signature corner — that was so callously closed to pedestrian crossings nearly 40 years ago — be reopened or remain barricaded and essentially buried?

I don’t get a vote — most of us don’t until the next civic election — but I’m for leaving it closed.

My mind is still open, though.

Not so for a Free Press reader — small-businessman and taxpayer Bret Dobbin — who is “appalled” at the idea and copied me on a letter he sent to Mayor Brian Bowman after the long-delayed consultant’s report on the issue was finally made public.

Dobbin’s letter touched on some of the themes I suspect most Winnipeggers agree on: essentially, the cost to taxpayers, drivers and bus schedules doesn’t merit whatever benefits the backers see. And then there’s public safety, which Dobbin addressed with an invitation for Bowman to “join me in attending the funeral of the first pedestrian to lose their life at this intersection.”

My thoughts precisely.

Since Bowman hasn’t been able to make a compelling case for the potential reopening of the intersection, I thought maybe a former mayor, who fought for it and lost in the 1990s, might help me cross over to her and Bowman’s side.

So I emailed Susan Thompson.

She answered my request, using categories to make her points, starting with its “identity” as the city’s “heart and soul.”

“What are the sayings? ‘Where East meets West.’ Where, if you stood on that corner, within 10 minutes, you would bump into someone you knew. It is the intersection that new Canadians crossed when going from the CN station to the CPR station to settle our country. It is where people go to in times of celebration or challenges — the red Canadian human ‘Maple Leaf’ for Canada’s 150 this year; it is where people gathered to ‘Save the Jets’ (in 1995).”

She referred to the internationally recognized intersection as “our centre.”

“All cites need a ‘natural’ centre. Few have it. We, Winnipeg, have one. It is one of the reasons I put up the flag standards at Portage and Main for the (1999) Pan American Games. Cities need markers to help enhance what is going on in their city. These flag standards were meant to fly the flags of the United Way when it is in campaign; of the Canada Summer Games when in Winnipeg,” Thompson wrote.

“Portage and Main is more than just an intersection,” she argued, underscoring her first point. “It is a ‘beacon’ to our identity. I have always maintained that we can do a whole marketing/tourism/events planning initiatives… just on Portage and Main… to brand our city and province.”

Thompson was appealing to residents’ emotions — our love of, and pride in, Winnipeg.

There was more where that came from. She was dismissive of the potential disruption to traffic.

“Really? I think the traffic studies say maybe by two, four minutes. Good… Take a deep breath… and lower your blood pressure.”

She also expressed confidence in Winnipeg Transit to make any needed adjustments and make it work.

The former mayor then addressed the concerns Dobbin expressed so pointedly.

“The current naysayers talk about accidents that will be caused, etc… Bunk… Put a good traffic cop there (with personality). Traffic will work just fine.”

Thompson suggested visiting the archives and pulling out a photo of the officer who used to stand in the centre of Portage and Main directing traffic.

“It was a summertime photo and he was wearing a helmet, white gloves, shirt and shorts,” she recalled of the photo taken “circa 1918.”

“In the winter time, this person can wear one of the buffalo coats. There are some still around. Take the attitude of making it work.”

I responded to her email with a thank you and a single word: wow.

The former mayor, unlike the current one, had blown me away with her passionate take on the reputed windiest corner in the world.

Coincidentally, in the middle of composing this column, another email popped up in the form of a blog called Policing, Politics and Public Safety, written by retired Winnipeg police deputy chief Menno Zacharias. The topic was Portage and Main and whether it should be reopened to pedestrian traffic. Zacharias is expertly qualified to answer the question.

He directed traffic at Portage and Main a few years before it was barricaded and has a somewhat less romantic take on that experience than Thompson.

He recalled trying to control three lanes of merging traffic — cars running ambers and reds because of the congestion — and pedestrians doing the same on foot because it was too cold to wait for the walk light in the winter.

For Zacharias, it wasn’t an internationally known “heart-and-soul” corner. It was “the intersection from hell.”

“The closing of Portage and Main to pedestrians in 1978,” he wrote, “was a major step forward in terms of public safety and traffic flow in downtown Winnipeg.”

Yet, Bowman and Winnipeg city council appears poised to reopen Portage and Main anyway.

“Have at it,” Zacharias wrote.

“Oh, and by the way,” he added, “how about a few hitching posts — they used to have those along Main Street as well.”

Remember how I said my mind is still open?

Consider it closed.

The way Portage and Main should stay.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca