>>1170178The road infrastructure in Winnipeg has two major issues: it’s mostly garbage thanks to freeze-thaw cycles and old age, and it was planned with all the foresight of a 12 year old with ADHD.
You basically have the Perimeter Highway, which is fucking useless for getting anywhere because it’s way out in the middle of nowhere. Fast and relatively well maintained though, you can get from extreme edges of the city to other extreme edges in 45 minutes to an hour depending on traffic.
Then you have this inner ring road consisting of 4 major arteries: Chief Peguis on the north side, Lagimodiere on the east, Bishop Grandin on the south, and Route 90 on the west (which, in a hilariously cruel twist, doesn’t even link up with Peguis so most people take Inkster to Main to Peguis). These roads are 80 km/h two to three lane divided roads which are ratfucked by traffic from 7:00-9:00 and 16:00-18:30.
Then you have the major surface streets which serve as arteries to and from the city centre, and there are really too many to list. But the infuriating part is when a three-lane artery gets choked out by twisting through a poorly thought out interchange or minor surface street that was never designed to handle the volume of cars that it now does.
So in short, yes, I think the city could potentially benefit from LRT due to the distance and segmentation of its neighbourhoods. This will now never happen due to the planned construction of several bus rapid transit corridors, intended to fill exactly that function.
We currently have one 3.6 km stretch of rapid transit corridor completed. It cost almost $140 million. We have a second extension of that stretch planned which will lengthen it to 10 km for an additional $467m. There is almost no chance that they complete it in the suggested 2-year timeframe, especially with a fiscally conservative jackass of a provincial premier who is slashing budgets all over hell’s half acre, screwing the city over big time.
