The traffic disaster that failed to arrive

For pedestrians and motorists who have traversed Winnipeg’s most iconic intersection during the past six months, a quick upward glance would have confirmed what proponents of reopening the windy interchange to foot traffic have predicted all along:

The sky has not fallen at Portage and Main.

After years — perhaps decades — of doomsaying by those opposed to reintroducing above-ground pedestrian activity to the intersection, data collected since the June 27 reopening show the controversial change has actually had negligible impact on vehicular traffic flow.

Adherents to the keep-it-closed school of thought had long argued that allowing foot traffic across Portage and Main would create varying degrees of gridlock-induced chaos and regrettable vehicle/pedestrian carnage. Instead, the transition back to a pedestrian-accessible intersection has been seamless and without any incidents of note.

The study, undertaken by the City of Winnipeg, involved data collected from GPS-enabled vehicles travelling on four specified routes leading in and out of the Portage and Main interchange during peak traffic times in November. That information was then compared to data collected in November 2024, before pedestrian traffic was reintroduced.

Morning travel on two of the routes was unchanged, while traffic on the other two experienced a delay of less than one minute. Afternoon travel time on three of the routes increased by less than two minutes, while the fourth actually experienced a one-minute decrease.

The analysis did not account for nearby construction or other factors that might have affected traffic flow during the data-collection periods. Meanwhile, the analysis also showed that an average of 3,750 pedestrians have crossed Portage and Main daily since Sept. 1.

Mayor Scott Gillingham summed it up this way: “Everybody heard the doomsday predictions about gridlock and accidents that would happen, and the data proves that those predictions were wrong. Ultimately, I don’t have a good answer as to why this was debated for so long.”

He doesn’t have a good answer because there isn’t — and wasn’t — one. The recent wrangling over Portage and Main dates back more than a decade, to when then-mayoral candidate Brian Bowman made reopening the intersection one of his key campaign promises. After encountering resistance to his pledge, Bowman relented and said he would abide by the result of a plebiscite on the issue — which in 2018 ultimately showed a majority of Winnipeggers opposed reopening Portage and Main to pedestrians.

A breakdown of that vote, however, showed the strongest opposition came from outlying suburban areas of the city, meaning most of the people who voted on the “no” side had likely never actually travelled through the intersection in question.

But the politicization of the Portage and Main question by a few naysaying councillors kept the intersection closed, and it likely would have remained inaccessible to pedestrians had not the looming failure of the waterproof membrane protecting the underground concourse — the repair of which would have cost almost $60 million and created four to five years of traffic disruption — forced city council to reconsider the issue as a practical matter, rather than a political one.

The newly reported numbers speak for themselves. The return of pedestrians has not affected traffic in any meaningful way. And the simple fact of the matter is that nothing catastrophic was going to happen at this intersection simply because pedestrians crossed the street there. Despite its local-icon stature, Portage and Main is no more complicated than thousands of other intersections in hundreds of other major cities that are traversed safely by millions of pedestrians every day.

The wind will always blow at Portage and Main, but the sky was never going to fall.