This letter is in response to Gerald Flood's article The new mayor of Winnipeg, which appeared on Jan. 14.

It was yet another article on the lack of vision for our city's future. You know, there really should be a joke about rapid transit in Winnipeg: Everyone is for it, but no one wants do do something about it.

Winnipeggers really do need to bid a final adieu to Steve Juba's monorail plan. In my casual conversations with Winnipeg Transit riders over the past 16 years, I am surprised to find that whenever I mention the phrase rapid transit, senior citizens will usually respond with "I (still) remember Juba's monorail plan." Let it go Winnipeggers. It won't work here.

How many other metropolitan areas, besides Seattle, Wash., have monorail systems? Leave the monorails for Disney. Let's try to be more realistic, consider what has worked successfully in other cities our size, like Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver and implement it here.

I personally support Jeff Lowe's great streetcar idea. I feel it would go a very long way toward revitalizing downtown Winnipeg by creating a better image for our city, bring tourists here just to ride the streetcar line, and would be a source of pride for all Winnipeggers to behold for several generations. But most importantly, it would also serve to function as a circulator system that would, if properly implemented, encourage downtown commuters to ride it to events in the area instead of driving their cars.

But where is the leadership of the mayor on transit issues when we have a mayor who, upon arriving at the Winnipeg International Airport during last year's blizzard, requested that she ride by fire truck instead of showing Winnipeggers a good example by using Winnipeg Transit? It shows us, at a most basic level, what she really thinks of public transit.

Winnipeg needs to look at what Portland did. They tore up an expressway near their waterfront and put in the MAX light rail transit line. They created the green zone that defines what will remain urban and what will remain rural, and saved the rural land from suburban sprawl. Winnipeg had the green belt surrounding the metropolitan area until the province decided to do away with it, and in the process encouraged the surburban sprawl situation that we have today.

Portland gave a higher priority to transit and is reaping the fruits of that wise decision. Here it is the other way around; it is the private automobile that rules the roost. But change is on the horizon.

I, along with a few others, are in the process of creating our region's first transit rider's group. There are other such "consumer advocacy" groups that operated throughout the world, but until now no one has taken the initiative. One of the things that the participants in the group have said is that we should advocate for a rapid transit network in the Winnipeg region.

Having a formal group like ours will serve to focus the issue of rapid transit in the minds of Winnipeggers, open up the dialogue between our group, the bureaucrats, the government and the media, and encourage the government to construct and maintain a rapid transit network that the people who ride the system will actually use.

Our group looks forward to reviewing and providing feedback on the TransPlan2010 Final Report. Hopefully by that time, Winnipeggers will have left the wacky ideas, like monorail, behind them.