The Call of the Open Sidewalk

According to a local Winnipeg newspaper the Omand Park footbridge proposal is effectively dead. I found some of the background and subsequent discussion interesting.

Apparently the federal government is keen to spend money because of the economic crisis or something. They needed to spend it fast so they went around and asked various other levels of government if they could manage to spend some money relatively quickly on infrastructure. One of the things the city of Winnipeg asked for was money for a new footbridge in Omand's Park.

You can see the Google Maps satellite view of the disputed area here. The existing footbridge crosses the creek that goes from north to south to the river. The proposed footbridge is shown on this drawing.

The existing bridge has become part of a sort of bicycle green-way for that part of town. Bicycle commuter traffic comes from the west and a nearby footbridge over the river on the way to downtown to the east. The problems with it are:

• It floods every spring (recently for an extended period). It is flooded as I write this. Bicycle traffic has to detour 0.8km when the bridge is out. The detour is not that great. Part of the detour involves a steep hill to a blind T intersection. Another part of the detour involves illegally riding on the sidewalk. Not that people seem to mind the illegality...
• The approach to the bridge on the east side with the switchback up the hill is not done very well. People often walk their bicycles to avoid dealing with it. Those that can will sometimes just go cross country to avoid it. It somehow manages to be bad both going up and coming down the hill (Pic).
• Physics. Bicycles basically work by conserving energy. They speed up going down hills which provides kinetic energy to help get up the next hill. The approaches to the bridge are reasonably steep. As a result bicycles are going at maximum speed going over the bridge. It is a mixed use path. Pedestrians do not conserve energy going down the hill and as a result are moving relatively slowly. The speed difference causes problems. A past attempt was made to improve things by installing barriers in the middle of the ends of the bridge (Pic). The barriers work the first few times but the bike rider eventually learns how to avoid injury and manages to retain some precious speed going on to the bridge. At this point the rider has dealt with a hill, a turn, and the barrier in quick succession. They sometimes have nothing left to deal with any semi-stationary people and/or animals and/or things on the bridge.

In cities there is a natural tension between people in local neighbourhoods and people who are simply interested in getting to the other side of those neighbourhoods. The neighbourhood in question has some interesting history with respect to transportation policy in the story of the Wolseley Elm. These sorts of things normally do not end in the wildly irresponsible use of high explosives, but, well Winnipeg is special that way. People can stay really wound up about things that people in other parts of the world might perhaps eventually let go of. At any rate the Wolseley residents lost the tree but won the battle. The street in question now has four-way stops every few blocks. In the summer cars are not even allowed on it Sundays.

Which brings us to politics. The Wolseley area is famous for a high level of community consciousness and activism. When some of the local residents found out there was to be a bridge they had the city hold another meeting to talk about the bridge. I attended that meeting.

At the "community meeting" there were four alternative proposals to look at (most of which really didn't make a lot of sense). There were places to write comments on the proposals. There was a sign in sheet. There were forms you could fill out with your comments and a ranking of the five options. Some people talked for a while. The people who made the proposals mentioned that they did not think two of them were actually practical. There were people from the local community. There was a person who talked about the bicycle issues. After a while a line formed and then a whole lot of people talked.

The most compelling argument against the bridge was made by the the "too young to vote" crowd. Some of the neighbourhood children stood up and more or less said "Don't build the bridge. It would ruin our toboggan hill.". In other words, building the bridge would destroy a rare resource: an inclined surface on the prairies. Their directness was refreshing as many of the adults triggered a pet peeve of mine. When addressing an issue like the bridge it is really nice if at some point you tell the audience:

• What you think should be done.
• Why.

Those two points make the rest of what you might say much easier to understand. Particularly for members of the audience that do not know you.

What I think should be done

I was actually part of the 4% who voted for the bridge as originally proposed in the drawing. So build the bridge.

Why

I really think the engineering types got it right this time. All the other proposals seem worse in some way. Using the existing bridge in any reasonable way does not solve the physics issue. Improving the approaches makes the speed issue worse. The proposed road level bridge solves all the mixed use traffic problems permanently.

Raising/moving the existing bridge would tend to block the flow of the creek due to the required earthworks. That would be at a time when culverts upstream on the very same creek are being replaced with bridges. A watercourse is a classic example of how local changes can have non-local effects. The proposed bridge almost entirely avoids unanticipated changes to the creek environment. For what it is worth I think that a long narrow bridge as proposed would look pretty good.

As for the toboggan hill issue. There are other places to slide in the park. A few minutes with a front end loader would produce an even better hill.

Unless a grassroots "Save Our Bridge!" movement emerges in the next few weeks arguments for and against the bridge are moot. The bigger question is how much control should a local community have over things of value to the larger community. I tend to the progressive side, I really hate to see things left broken. Obviously a local community can not have complete control of all aspects of their area. As an semi-absurd example, I could get together with my neighbours and insist that the street on our block be converted to a playground and parking for the residents. It would remove the risk that the local kids have to face from the large high speed traffic our street tends to get. When ignored we could then complain we were not being consulted on the parking/playground issue. I think most people would consider us to be quite unreasonable in our desire.

So, yeah, in the case of the Omand's Park bridge I think the residents were being a bit unreasonable. For a very small local cost we could of had something of great general value. The process was quite bad. The people from outside of the area who would of gotten the most benefit from the bridge would not of seen the postings for the meeting because it took place in the winter. Even if a whole bunch of bicycle types had shown up and won the vote for the bridge would it really of mattered? I don't see how these sorts of issues can be resolved by majority rules. Someone has to decide at a level of government beyond the community in the end.

Just a comment on the local media coverage. The Free Press is the more respectable looking print newspaper in Winnipeg. They were being deliberately misleading when covering this issue. In this article they state "Only four per cent approved of the hilltop-spanning bridge.". The actual results are here. There is no "hilltop-spanning" bridge mentioned here. Which kind of makes sense as there are no actual hills in the area. A better way to put it might of been to say that 27% wanted a bridge as their first choice and 68% wanted an option that did not involve a bridge. It still sounds negative toward the bridge but it at least is sort of correct. In defence of the Free Press they were reporting on something that kind of sounded odd. The survey report said that people were asked to rank preference (I was) but then they decided to just count the first choice. It might be good at this point to ask for the raw ballots and do the ranking as the people at the meeting expected.

I would be amiss if I did not reference a local blog that normally covers this sort of thing, and did. Here.

posted at: 18:56 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry