Like the inveterate mountaineer — who, when asked to explain his lust to scale the forbidding peak which confronted him, replied: "Because it is there!" — Mayor Bill Norrie and city transit experts seem determined to place the long-touted Southwest Rapid Transit Corridor alongside the CN Rail right-of-way through Fort Rouge and Fort Garry simply because it is there. They are insisting on fobbing off on the commuting public a plan which, in its choice of modal technology, is both misguided and outdated.

Up until 1973, discussion of the feasibility and desirability of implementing rapid transit in Winnipeg had always centred on the Portage Avenue-St. James corridor. These discussions invariably faltered on the question of cost. In that year, then-Councillor Bernie Wolfe (long a subway proponent) realized that shifting the focus to the Pembina Highway-Fort Garry corridor held the better promise of breaking the ice. The potential availability of an existing rail reservation adjacent to Pembina dispensed with the necessity for extensive, costly tunneling.

Two years later, the DeLeuw-Dillon engineering firm was commissioned to specify the type of rapid transit facility best suited to conditions in the Southwest Winnipeg traffic corridor. When their study was released in 1977, it advised that an "exclusive bus roadway" would suffice to handle passenger volumes then being experienced.

However, it cautioned that, if population and vehicular traffic volumes within the corridor continued to grow at the rate then being recorded, "the installation of a light-rail (i.e., streetcar) or fixed-guideway (i.e. subway) system . . . would be warranted after 1991." Yet, despite the fact that population growth has kept pace with — and traffic volumes, outstripped — the consultants' predictions for the "horizon year" 1991, city hall still advocates a busway concept which will prove outmoded virtually upon its opening.

Utilizing buses, furthermore, blithely ignores the fact that they are the prime source of resistance on the part of Winnipeggers to making greater use of Winnipeg Transit as it is currently constituted. Buses are justly regarded as diesel-fume-spewing, uncomfortable to ride, and nearly as liable as any private auto to be bogged down by a serious snowfall. Shifting a number of bus routes off Pembina Highway and onto a parallel roadway or structure will be seen not as any substantive innovation but rather, as a mere operational nicety. Replacing these bus routes instead with rapid-transit trains would allow the same buses to be used for what they do well — as feeders to the rail network.

Bus-dominated networks by their nature are puzzling to use, even for the experienced patron, because they are so diffuse and elaborate. The workings of rail-centred networks, by contrast, are easy to sort out. Usually, one need only board the first train to come along in the desired direction; and it is rarely necessary to transfer to more than one surface route to complete your trip. On a busway such as the Southwest Rapid Transit Corridor, however, the rider will still have to know which bus (out of many that come along) to take — and wait for it to come.

The route chosen for the Southwest Corridor deviates some considerable distance from Pembina Highway and its various attractions at several points along its length. Between the Pembina/Osborne/Corydon intersection and Jubilee Avenue, it is slated to occupy the eastern flank of the CNR mainline (with only one local station stop — near Morley Avenue — punctuating this stretch).

Whereas this trajectory may serve to enhance the development prospects of large tracts of vacant, surplus railway land held by CN Real Estate abutting the proposed busway, it will deprive residents of the main body of Fort Rouge from enjoying any benefit whatever from the installation of rapid-transit capacity through their neighborhoods.

Further detracting from its ultimate usefulness in the alignment presently envisioned, Portage Place and Osborne Village shopping and entertainment districts — both major trip-attractors — are completely bypassed. Not far to the west, the stadium/arena complex at Polo Park — a thriving "mini-downtown" — is also left high and dry. Winnipeggers in essence will be offered a modified shuttle service between Union Station and the University of Manitoba campus.

Winnipeg Transit's latest update on the cost comparisons debate, in its report to city council dated June 27, 1987, dealt with infrastructural expenditures only. Since rail-based modes — once "up and running" — offer substantially lower operating and depreciation costs, the omission of these factors from the calculations would appear to have been done deliberately to bias the outcome in favor of bus-based options.

While Mayor Norrie continues to plead in vain for 75 per cent senior-government funding participation as a prerequisite to enable the Southwest Rapid Transit Corridor (budgeted at $45 million) to proceed, he and the council over which he presides have not been similarly reluctant to unequivocally commit the kingly sum of $793 million over the period 1986-1992 toward the construction of new river crossings and arterial highway extension projects (all deficit financed through bond issue borrowings, without any caveat concerning senior-government contributions attached). While one doesn't deride the urgency or validity of demands for a concerted program of federal assistance to mass transit, nonetheless the contrast in approach rather calls into question the durability of Mayor Norrie's late dedication to the rapid-transit cause.

Thus the corridor plan may be termed a bush league solution for a major league predicament. They are inspired more by tactical than by technical considerations. At best, they will garner only negligible returns in heightened transit patronage and fall far short of stimulating the desired payoff in combating traffic congestion and more efficiently transporting people about Winnipeg.

In order for the project to be salvaged, a more accessible alignment within the corridor should be chosen; rail-based vehicles should be used; financing should be adequate to build the facility to a high enough standard that it will be equal to the task at hand (both at present and in future); and the potential of the facility to attract ridership must be interpreted in the context of it forming one leg within an integrated, city-wide rapid-transit network.

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