Friday, 27 April 2012

What to do with the Master Plan?

About the only surprise is how soon it happened, though the fact that it happened was all but inevitable. On Wednesday, Winnipeg City Council rendered yet another planning document obsolete by approving a proposal to disregard the recommendations of the Transportation Master Plan and fast track road expansions on the periphery of the city:

Amid hubbub, $300 million in freeways approved

Said Dan Vandal, who is emerging as one of the few voices of reason on Main Street:
"I think it sends the wrong message to administration and to the province, who I'm sure paid for half of the master plan. The fact that we can make these $300 million in changes without any administrative comment on whether they're worthwhile is bizarre."
Yes, well bizarre is the name of the game at City Hall.

This change, while fast tracking new roads, no doubt also delays the rapid transit portion of the master plan until some time after the Great Apocalypse. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have wasted my time writing about it or going to the open house, although they do have good cookies at these open houses.

Nevertheless, we spent $1.25 million on this document, so we should try to make some use of it.

My first thought was to use it to line bird cages, but nobody keeps birds anymore. (Why is that? They're small and colourful. What more could you want in a pet?) 

My second thought was that we could use the pages of the Transportation Master Plan to teach kids origami. They could start by doing very simple projects like paper airplanes. This is ideal because it's tangentially related to transportation.

But then it occurred to me that the plan is in PDF format. It is very difficult to make a paper airplane out of a PDF file. I tried once and it was incredibly frustrating. In the end, perhaps the best use we can make of this document, as flawed as it is, is to lock it away in a time vault to be opened in 20 years so that the next generation of community leaders can compare what was supposed to be with what actually happened, and hopefully get cracking on that second leg of rapid transit to the U of M.

7 comments:

  1. Riverman28 April 2012 at 15:20

    I have a bird.

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  2. cherenkov28 April 2012 at 19:28

    You should call 311 and get a copy of the plan.

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  3. Anonymous28 April 2012 at 22:06

    They may as well throw in Our Winnipeg ( all 1000 pages ) to the origamists, they'll especially like the page that for some reason , is one paragraph and there is a Dairy cow on it.

    A dairy Cow ? like do they exist in Winnipeg and if so, why haven't I seen one, or better yet, what the f***K does it have to do with a Master plan for a City.

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  4. cherenkov29 April 2012 at 19:47

    The cow probably represents all the farm animals that will be displaced by our new road construction.

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  5. John Dobbin30 April 2012 at 09:15

    I am baffled where they think they are going to get the money with various competing claims for projects in the city already in need such as Kenaston and the St. James bridge.

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  6. Anonymous1 May 2012 at 15:53

    Frankly I am extremely excited about this. I will never use rapid transit to the U of M and neither will anyone who commutes down these new "freeways".

    Now if we can just build a few overpasses (not cloverleafs) along Kenaston/Bishop/Lag this city might not be such a bad place to drive.

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  7. cherenkov1 May 2012 at 17:28

    We don't improve existing roads. Only build new ones. And add traffic lights to existing ones.

    ReplyDelete