In June of 2024, a man was just riding his bike to work. Early in the morning when traffic should be low to nonexistent. Wearing a helmet and a reflective vest.
A racing driver lost control and plowed him over.
Anyone who bikes in this city was grieved and outraged.
This stretch of roadway is designated as a bike route. There's a little green sign with a bicycle icon to tell you that. The wide road that invites speeding certainly doesn't. How does a person even drive 159 km/hr on a sleepy residential street within city limits? (Because the street is too damn wide.)
For about as long as it has existed, the cycling advocacy organization has identified this stretch of roadway as a route in critical need of remediation to make it safer.
So, within a week, temporary safety measures had been rolled out. Reduced speed limit signs were erected, poly posts narrowed the roadway and speed cameras made sure folks took it seriously.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
No.
20, 40, 60 people took holiday days from work to spend the day at city hall to take their 10 – erm 5 (they reduced it after we took up too much of their day) – minutes to make an impassioned plea to councillors. "I've been hit by a car; I'm afraid to bike now." "My loved one was hit" "My loved one was killed" "I fear for my loved ones." OR "Research says...." "Studies have shown...." "Other cities have done and it's worked great."
100s of written submissions poured in every time as proposals went from Public Works to Executive Policy Committee to Council and then back all over again because they only had the guts to approve a study to begin with.
Fast forward to March 2026: there's finally a plan to actually put in some temporary infrastructure once the snow melts. Cyclists are thrilled. Even area residents from the most unexpected demographic – comfortably middle class and up Baby Boomers and Silent Generation folks – are pleased.
Then, days before the Standing Policy Committee on Public Works is set to approve the pilot project, the chair comes out with a new plan: let's scrap the temporary measures and go straight to permanent.
[Screeching record sound]
What?! What should have taken 2 weeks has taken 2 years and now you want to add further delay? In an election year when everything planned for the future is subject to being canned by a future council?
What dastardly game are these politicians playing?
There's so many additional layers of wastefulness and idiocy to all this, but let's go to what I told the Committee.
Greetings, Councillors. Thank you for your attention to the delegations today.
My comments relate to Items 4 and 5
Wellington Crescent (Academy Road to Stradbrook Avenue) - Bike Lane Pilot Project
Reduced-Speed Neighbourhood Pilot and the City’s Default Speed Limit
My remarks will be short but I’ll start with a slight meander.
I’m currently taking a theology course on peacemaking. In a lecture on epistemic violence, the question was asked “whose death matters?” “Who has the privilege of being mourned?”
This makes me think of MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls). In Canada, for a long time, Indigenous people weren’t seen; their deaths didn’t matter.
That’s changing but slowly.
The City of Winnipeg has made commitments to reconciliation. That’s good.
But we have a long way to go. There are still too many people whose deaths don’t matter.
By using this analogy, I don’t in any way wish to make light of the tragedy marginalized communities face. However people who get around outside of a car in this city – that is, pedestrians and cyclists – also too often fall into the category of the unseen. Those whose deaths don’t matter.
A wealth of evidence both anecdotal and research-based says that speeds and infrastructure make a difference.
Slow down the cars: 30 km/hr is evidence-based; 40 km/hr just isn’t good enough.
Put in the temporary infrastructure now.
We’ve waited too long for safety.
- I support the implementation of the Wellington pilot project as soon as possible.
- I support the speed reduction on Winnipeg’s residential streets to 30 km/hr.
We’re telling you: our deaths matter. The convenience of drivers is not worth our lives.
Rob Jenner. Kerry Bonner. Egor Popov. John Kopchuck. Rosalie Tennison. And more.
Stop playing political games with implementation timelines: no lives are expendable.
The chair did not appreciate this and gave me a sharp “did you know”: I am not playing political games with people's lives.
(Fact check: see my script: that's not what I said.)
My first (undelivered) draft of my delegation was equally spicy but in a different way:
I’m a person. (Most people start by saying "I'm a cyclist" or "I'm a resident of the area" or "I drive but I care about people who cycle" so I wanted to push all that aside and say listen is it not enough that we simply exist? Should we not have the right to continued existence without needless threat?) I leave my house sometimes. I think I should be entitled to get her around the city without fearing for my life. Particularly because the greatest danger to my life is other people's perception of their convenience. Their desire not to slow down for three seconds could kill me. Those are the stakes we're talking here. Momentary convenience against death or lifetime disability.
It has been amply shown that no amount of librarian-voice haranguing to "just slow down" is going to change that.
Infrastructure that protects me and gives them reason to slow down is what it will take.
The fact that you have dragged your feet for two years to just implement some basic protective infrastructure is unacceptable.
But it was all for naught.
After the councillors grilled the public service (who had to explain and re-explain the pilot project as though it were the first time anyone had heard of it, and as though all the basic precepts of traffic flow – which many civilian delegations had already explained), they went ahead and vote on a motion to dismiss it all and jump ahead to this pie in the sky permanent infrastructure ... in .... "the future".
Relief! The docile councillor – who never says anything unless it's to make a point of order (who despite such a meek showing was acclaimed due to *no challengers* in the last election) voted against it, as did, surprisingly, the hyper-suburban pro-police councillor.
But this could not do! We MUST ignore the vehement advice of the usually very noncommittal public service that the pilot project makes sense, saves lives, is evidence-based, and is ready to go.
So they went off in to a back room, removed a few points from the motion, made it worse, brought it back and passed it. The docile councillor -- who I always gave some credit for her devotion to procedure and the evidence from the extremely rare time she speaks that she actually reads the reports -- flipped her vote.
[smashing glass sound]
That was the sound of hearts breaking. Every one who doesn't want to die at the hands of vehicular violence.
There's so much more that could be said about the ludicrous assertions that this will "fundamentally change traffic flow" and the bizarre and completely unprecedented obsession with public consultation, but let's leave it with this: several of the hostile lines of questioning against the pilot project invoked other areas of the city that are as dangerous or worse.
They don't get it. We aren't fighting so hard for Wellington. There's a bunch of specific reason why this has been the stretch of roadway we've coalesced around. But we're fighting for cycling safety for all of Winnipeg. Give us a chance and we'll fight for those other areas too. Except we probably won't have to, because the public service said many months back, early in this process, that if this lane on Wellington goes through, it will be like tipping over the first domino that sets off a cascade of new safer/protected infrastructure.
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