The city and ‘extremists’

In Winnipeg, asking for safer streets can get you a label. Some councillors have begun describing residents who support lower speeds or protected bike routes as “extremists” or members of a “radical bike lobby.”

It is a strange way to talk about people who simply want to get home safely.

The rhetoric suggests an adversarial relationship between city hall and the public it serves.

Instead of treating residents as partners in solving a public safety problem, some elected officials frame them as political opponents.

That attitude was on display at the March 4 public works committee meeting, where 56 Winnipeggers registered in advance, followed the rules, took time off work, and waited hours for their five minutes at the microphone. They were there to ask the city to honour its Vision Zero commitment. The principle is simple: no loss of life on our roads is acceptable.

For their trouble, they were told they were the problem.

The hypocrisy was hard to miss.

While the public was framed as a “lobby” trying to pressure council, Councillors Russ Wyatt and Jeff Browaty, neither of whom had registered to delegate, were ushered to the front of the line ahead of citizens who had followed the proper process.

The councillors most vocal about outside groups trying to bully the city couldn’t be bothered to follow the same rules they were demanding of the public.

This pattern runs deeper than one meeting. Rather than treating road safety as a citywide responsibility, councillors frequently reduce it to a competition between wards, arguing about which neighbourhood gets improvements first rather than whether those improvements happen at all.

Delegate Robyn Dyck spoke directly to this: “We don’t want this to be a competition between neighbourhoods. We want to finish networks so that this can save lives in your neighbourhood.” A member of the public had to explain to elected officials how safety infrastructure works.

That mindset was put into plain words when Councillor Jeff Browaty warned that if Winnipeg were granted the authority to lower default speed limits, “we will fold to the radical bike lobby and lower speed limits. Let’s be clear, this change would not make our city safer.”

To call a proven safety measure a political surrender is to admit that winning the argument matters more than keeping people alive. It is also simply false.

A pedestrian struck at 50 km/h faces roughly an 85 per cent chance of death or serious injury. At 30 km/h, that risk drops below 10 per cent. Hoboken, New Jersey adopted Vision Zero policies, including lower speed limits and redesigned streets, and has not recorded a single traffic death in over seven years. The evidence is not a lobby. It is physics.

Browaty also acknowledged that many of Winnipeg’s roads are designed in ways that encourage speeds above the posted limit.

If the city builds infrastructure that kills people, it is the city’s responsibility to fix it, not the public’s responsibility to take on the risk. Most drivers want the same thing everyone else does: to get where they are going safely. Designing streets that reduce speeds protects drivers as much as it protects pedestrians and cyclists. It removes the design traps that lead to human error and tragedy.

Rob Jenner was killed on June 6, 2024, while biking to work on Wellington Crescent by a speeding driver.

His death has become a rallying point for safety advocates, and Councillor Wyatt’s response was to accuse them of using a “coffin as a political battering ram.” The response from some councillors and their supporters has been to point out that a bike lane might not have saved Jenner in that specific instance, as though the only valid reason to build safer streets is to have prevented one particular death.

That is not the argument. People raising Jenner’s story are not asking for a single infrastructure fix. They are asking the city to confront a pattern of neglect that makes tragedies like his inevitable, and to ensure his death becomes the catalyst for long-overdue change.

If Winnipeg truly wants to reach Vision Zero, the culture at city hall must change.

Contempt will not save lives. Leadership will.

Adam Carroll is a resident of St. James.