The Garden City Refugee

Deck Chairs on the Titanic

March 22, 2025

Not that I have any intention of ever again setting foot in that part of the world, but I couldn’t help but notice that Winnipeg Transit is in the midst of embarking on its biggest transformation since their ill-fated decision to get rid of the trolley buses.

Scheduled for implementation at the end of June, the plan involves giving the entire system a complete makeover. No route will be left untouched. Gone will be the traditional route numbers as well. They’ll be replaced with Rapid Transit, Frequent Express, Frequent and Direct route categories along with a feeder network consisting of connector, community, on-request and limited span routes. They’re even changing the location of bus stops.

The new network will be more frequent, direct, connected and simplified, they say. I’ve taken a look at the maps, but not being there any longer, I can’t comment on whether this is all a good thing or a bad thing. I can’t imagine how much money they spent on it, though. The number of man-hours that Winnipeg taxpayers got billed for must be staggering. And it’s not as though Transit could recover the money through fares since so few actually pay.

But even if this new network ends up being as wonderful as they claim, these changes do absolutely nothing to address the two most glaring problems facing the transit system in Winnipeg.

• Safety: Even when I lived there, waiting for or being on a bus was increasingly unsafe. Nowadays, sightings of junkies smoking crack or meth or passed out in the back of the bus are regular occurrences. Reports of bus drivers and passengers being violently attacked are becoming commonplace. A bus driver was killed years ago. Just recently, some wacko went berserk and started hitting on passengers during the afternoon rush hour in an area I would often pass by on the way home from work.
• Reliability: This has been an issue dating back decades. You simply cannot count on a Transit bus showing up. Not just being late, but not showing up at all. Sure, there are traffic and weather-related issues. But far too often, it boiled down to nothing more than driver indifference. They just don’t give a shit. So often, I wondered why they even bothered to print schedules. At best, they were just rough guidelines.

I had more than my share of issues with Winnipeg Transit over the years. Those issues, in fact, became the impetus for using my bike as an alternative, even through the frigid Winnipeg winters. I had been physically threatened twice on a bus. Time and again, I fumed as a bus was late or didn’t show up. I can’t say I ever got home and started grumbling about how I wished some route would change.

Maybe this new route system will be good. Maybe it won’t. Time will tell. But few Winnipeggers will know or care. That’s because they’ve long since given up on using public transit because they know they can’t count on it and they don’t want to take their lives in their hands.

In the end, without addressing those core issues, all these efforts are akin to arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.