Winnipeg Transit puts wheels in motion to replace most of its bus routes this summer
New routes coming to most of the city on June 29, when spine-and-feeder system replaces hub-and-spoke model
Winnipeg Transit is five months away from replacing its decades-old system of bus routes with a new "spine-and-feeder" model that will change the way people ride transit across three-quarters of the Manitoba capital.
On June 29, the majority of Winnipeg's bus routes will disappear. The existing "hub-and-spoke" transit system, which largely ferries passengers between downtown and outlying neighbourhoods, will be replaced with a more grid-like pattern of high-frequency bus routes that will travel along major arteries as well as smaller feeder routes that will traverse residential and industrial neighbourhoods.
The new system is intended to make Winnipeg Transit faster and more reliable. But it will also require many if not most transit users to transfer between buses more often and become acquainted with new routes.
"This is the biggest change, ever, to transit," said Waverley West Coun. Janice Lukes, the chair of city council's public works committee, who has spent the past few months trying to raise awareness of the coming overhaul.
"What's going to happen to transit at the end of June is going to be fundamentally earth-shattering."
For people who ride the bus solely in southwest Winnipeg, not much will change at the end of June. Bus routes in the city's southwest quadrant received their spine-and-feeder overhaul in 2020, when the Southwest Transitway was completed.
Bus routes in the city's remaining three quadrants will receive the same treatment at the end of June. Transit planners chose to make the change during the summer in an effort to familiarize Winnipeggers with the new system while traffic and transit volumes are lower.
"People hopefully can kind of get into the groove," Lukes said. "I'm expecting the real impact to happen in September, when people go back to work, back to school and back to university."
Kevin Sturgeon, the city's senior transit planner, said he doesn't expect to work out all the kinks in the new system in two months alone.
"This is a very massive transformation. I'm not going to pretend that we'll get everything right the first time," he said.
Sturgeon said ridership and passenger satisfaction in southwest Winnipeg increased since transit implemented the spine-and-feeder model in that quadrant of the city in 2020.
While the expansion of the system to all of Winnipeg has spawned criticism — some Wolseley residents expressed dismay with the impending disappearance of the No. 10 route — the planner said the new network will serve riders more effectively.
"The primary transit network are routes that are frequent. They're straight lines. They don't meander around neighbourhoods. They don't have a lot of turns and so they're very efficient," he said.
"None of the feeder routes will go downtown. They stay out of congested areas, but they go to community destinations, to shopping, to schools, and they go pick people up at their houses when those people don't happen to live near a primary transit line."
Primary routes that will continue to run downtown will cross through the inner city without meandering through it, Sturgeon emphasized. For example, five routes will cross Portage and Main but only one of them will turn at the city's most famous intersection, which could reopen to pedestrians this summer.
Buses will be removed entirely from Graham Avenue and there will be less east-west bus traffic through downtown overall, Sturgeon added.
Winnipeg Transit plans to launch an awareness campaign about the new network this spring. The city also plans to make physical changes to transit infrastructure to ensure even media-averse passengers become aware changes are afoot.
"Every bus stop will have a brand new sign, with brand new routes. It looks different than anything we've seen before and that, we hope, will be the biggest cue to people who don't see the news anywhere else," Sturgeon said.
Lukes said she expects to hear complaints about the new system from Winnipeg residents who do not want to see buses stop running along their streets or start running on them.
She also said she anticipates complaints about the increased need to transfer from one route to another, which is a key feature of the new system.
More transfers will also require more transit shelters. Winnipeg Transit plans to use ridership data after June 29 to determine where new shelters should go.
"They've got people studying now where all these shelters and platforms and other supporting infrastructure will go in. We're going to probably have a year where a bus shelter should be but doesn't land there till next year," she said.
This won't be a simple task, as the city has spent several years trying to repair transit damaged shelters, including some left in disrepair as they were being used as housing. This phenomenon appeared to intensify during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lukes said the city is banking on a new provincial homelessness strategy to find housing for people who live in transit shelters.
"Bus shelters are for sheltering transit users. They're not houses, so we will be relocating people into housing," she said.
The pandemic also led to a steep drop in transit ridership in Winnipeg. Sturgeon said passenger numbers have since rebounded to the point where the capacity problems that plagued Winnipeg Transit prior to the pandemic are also returning.
"We're back up to 98 per cent of our 2019 ridership, so some of those types of issues are starting to resurface," he said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
