Anatomy of a Pothole
The Conceit
Potholes are the bane of the existence of every Winnipeg driver. Each year, as predictable as our freeze-thaw cycle, they open their yawning chasms on streets across the city. Just as predictably, the complaints flow into 311 and City Hall about the state of the roads and that Something Must Be Done.
The lowly pothole dominates so much of the discussion, interest, and ire of Winnipeggers every year, year over year. And each year, City Hall pledges to address the plethora of potholes, putting more and more money into maintenance, pointing proudly to its record road spending … but, poor 'peggers, the story never changes.
It is worth exploring why the bane of our city’s existence, those shattering potholes, will never
go away, no matter the money spent on road renewal. That despised pothole on your street is emblematic of the larger issues concerning where the City of Winnipeg’s priorities lie: our patterns of urban & suburban growth, investment in transit, and addressing environmental and climate challenges.
This series of essays will dissect that pothole to expose the underlying malady at the City of Winnipeg that, unless treated and corrected, means we will be forever putting bandaids on a symptom, while ignoring the real solutions.
Welcome to the anatomy of a pothole.
My childhood street in the Inkster-Faraday neighbourhood has a particular layout. Most of the homes on my street were built between the 1910s and 1940s, resting on lots of 25 to 35 feet wide relatively close together. These were fair sized, 1 ½ storey homes with modest yards. I lived across the street from a school, a few blocks down from a grocery store and convenience store, and near a frequent transit stop.
I currently live in a one-bedroom unit in a four storey apartment in West Broadway. Probably built in the early 20th century, the building is likely home to at least two dozen households. The apartment includes a ferny courtyard where I will lock up my bike, instead of keeping it inside, when I’m feeling particularly bold. There are many small apartments, duplexes, and single family houses on narrow lots nearby. In-between leafy boulevards there is a school, a community centre, corner stores, restaurants, and a grocery store within a five block radius. As well, there is a very frequent transit route three blocks from me.
The foundations of mature communities like these were developed before the 1950s. They tend to be built on a grid and, while most have been retrofitted and redesigned to be car centric, are less overwhelmingly auto-dependent than newer developments. At least historically, many mature communities featured a mix of uses: commercial shops near homes. Homes tended to be close together.
However, by the later 20th century a different way of making communities had taken hold. Virtually everything was centred around driving. Shops, parks, libraries, and schools were placed far away from homes. Houses occupied big lots with large driveways on curvy streets. Zoning and land-use rules, like parking mandates, meant building in the classic style was prohibited, even in mature communities. This trend of car-mandatory design in suburbs was scaled back somewhat in the early 21st century, with newer suburbs trying to mix uses a bit more than those of the 1980s and 1990s. But vehicle use is still required for almost all trips in most of these Winnipeg neighbourhoods.
Car-mandatory design results in more spread out development and a need to build and maintain more infrastructure. Between 1971 and 2019, the City’s developed land area (associated with more infrastructure needs) grew 96 per cent while the number of people living here only increased 37 per cent. Over essentially the same time frame, mature communities lost about 82,000 people. More kilometres of road to maintain per resident means overstretched city budgets and more potholes. Compactly built neighbourhoods where cars aren’t as mandatory are also cheaper to maintain. An analysis for a metro area in Australia bore this out, showing that infill projects had one-third the infrastructure costs of newer greenfield developments. A shift to car-mandatory design away from community amenities like shops makes our infrastructure problem harder to solve.
A low hanging fruit when it comes to addressing this is to remove “single family only” zoning. This would allow different types of homes to be built to meet the needs of Winnipeggers, and allow these homes to be closer to the businesses, services and recreation facilities in the neighbourhood. Recent moves by Winnipeg City Council, however, go in the opposite direction. New setback, lot coverage, and height rules will prohibit the types of homes in mature communities many families and individuals would live in.
The City needs a new approach to land-use so more people are free to choose to live in the types of communities I grew up in and live in.
Dylon Martin
Founder, YIMBY Winnipeg
I hate taxes as much as the next person.
Now, I recognize that taxes are what pay for the public services we all depend on for transportation, clean drinking water, waste disposal, recreation and public safety. So it’s probably more accurate to say that it’s not taxes themselves that I hate, it’s that I hate when my tax dollars are mismanaged.
And nothing puts that on display like budget season. Every year, we’re faced with a new round of tax increases, services cuts and deferred maintenance, leaving us paying more yet getting less.
Looking all around us, we see the results of this budgetary decline: a dying tree canopy, raw sewage dumped into the river, reductions in library hours, aging recreation facilities, homelessness, crime, and roads so potholed that they resemble the surface of the moon.
Fixing all of that is a tall order for sure. But even focusing only on road maintenance, what would it take to finally address what some consider to be one of the most basic functions of a city?
Well, in 2021, the City spent $152.2 million on road repair and replacement, a record amount after many consecutive years of record amounts. An annual road-spend that is more than 5 times what it was a decade ago.
But is that enough?
According to City reports, we own about 8,300 lane-km of roads in total. All of which need periodic maintenance and eventually, full replacement.
The money spent last year allowed us to maintain 113.8 lane-km of roads, and to replace 32.8 lane-km of them. That puts us on track to do maintenance on each stretch of road once every 73 years, and to do a full replacement once every 253 years. No wonder the potholes are winning.
To bring that into alignment with the actual lifespan of pavement would mean spending about $600 million more per year than we did in 2022.
So just get the money and do it, right?
If you find yourself on one side of the political spectrum, you may think we have a spending problem. So we should just be able to cut our way to $600 million/year.
How many cuts? Well, it would take the complete elimination of the Police department, as well as the Fire and Paramedic department. Then we’d only have $100 million to go! Cutting the entire Community Services department, the one in charge of libraries, pools and rec centres, would close that gap.
If you’re on the other side of the political spectrum, you might think that we instead have a revenue problem. We just need to raise taxes, especially after all those years of tax freezes.
But to fund an extra $600 million per year, we’d need to increase property taxes by about 100%. That’s right, double our taxes.
Think instead that the Province should help us out? That we just need “a better deal” from the folks on Broadway? Well, no matter which level of government funds it, that money is ultimately going to come from us. So if the Province is paying for it, we would need somewhere around a 3.5% increase to the PST to have enough for Winnipeg’s per capita share to equal $600 million.
What we have here is not a spending problem, and it’s not a revenue problem. It’s a good, old-fashioned insolvency problem: we own way more pavement than we can afford to maintain.
Once we accept that, the way to beat the potholes becomes crystal clear: we need more people using fewer roads. What will get us there are things like active transportation, transit, street trees, slowing traffic wherever people are walking, and putting more people and destinations closer together with mixed-use infill.
That’s why come budget-time, I advocate for all those things. And if you care about your tax dollars as much as I do, then you should too.
Potholes are a great metaphor. There are so many things about them that are useful when you’re trying to find an example for something terrible. They’re an eyesore, they’re seemingly simple to patch but difficult to truly repair, and recurring constantly every year. They both are damage and cause damage, and a threat to vehicles small and large alike. They grow in size if unattended, seem to spread outward, and become truly hazardous when the depth is obscured. The emotions they cause are so acute, the frustration and annoyance so universal and the poetic potential so palpable that it’s almost irresistible not to use those feelings! Use them to make a larger point about anything from community building to brushing your teeth.
As chair of Functional Transit Winnipeg, I often find I have the same problem when writing about Transit. Transit is a network, a connected system of systems to bring people to where they want to go. They are temporary shared space, shared purpose, shared destination. I find it almost impossible to discuss the benefits and importance of investing in Transit without lapsing into a series of high-minded metaphors and wandering idioms.
Metaphor can only take you so far, however. So I take it as a personal challenge to describe the literal connection between these two topics.
The City of Winnipeg expects to spend $879.2 Million over the next six years on road renewals and repairs. They are proud of the size of that number. They should not be. In exchange for that money, do you know what we’ll have to show for it? Nothing. We get the same roads we have now, in the same state they are now. It’s almost a billion dollars to buy the status quo. And the cost for the next six years after that will be higher. No one can afford that.
We need drastic and immediate action to vastly reduce the wear and tear on our roads. We need cars and trucks to stay in the driveway.
The solution is not through punishment or warnings, but incentive. Transit can and should be easier than driving for a significant portion, if not majority, of Winnipeg commuters and travellers. Offering easy, accessible and affordable transportation choice is not only possible but a daily fact already in large cities across Canada. Getting cars off the road is not only an issue of convenience but one of simple fiscal practicality. No city can afford to have most of its people drive every day. It’s too expensive.
No one chooses to drive through a pothole and get stuck with a huge bill, but avoiding one is as easy as getting on a bus. The City of Winnipeg can do the same thing.
And if it sounds like I hit a metaphor, I guess I drove right into that one.
Kyle Owens
President - Functional Transit Winnipeg
Climate Change is one of the contributing factors for an increasing number of potholes in the City of Winnipeg. This year’s pothole situation has been exacerbated by an enormous amount of precipitation and a long freeze-thaw cycle. Winnipeg can expect more periods of intense rain and snow, more extreme temperatures and longer freeze-thaw cycles. This will put significant pressure on our current infrastructure and road conditions. Most of Winnipeg’s roads were built 40 to 50 years ago and were not designed to function in these increasingly extreme weather conditions.
The transportation sector is the largest greenhouse gas emitter in Manitoba. In 2018, 42% or 9,280,000 tons of CO2 emissions of Manitoba’s climate pollution came from transportation (https://climateactionmb.ca/road2resilience/). This is 31% more than the amount emitted in 1990 by the transportation sector. And the worst is yet to come if we choose not to take climate actions immediately.
The question is - how can we reduce our carbon footprint as an individual and as a community? The answer is not simple. We need to move people and goods without burning fossil fuels, we need to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads, all fleets and cars need to be EV and most importantly we need to bike and walk more.
Are our roads and infrastructure ready and safe to support more walking and biking? I would like to share my personal experience to highlight the challenges I face on the roads while walking and/or biking. I am confident that I am not alone in my experiences.
We try to use active transportation as a family to live a sustainable lifestyle. After a heavy rainfall this spring, the conditions of the potholes were worse than before. I recall a time when my son was biking and there was a car coming at a high speed in a 30 km zone. He had to move very fast to get out of the way and hurt himself badly when he fell into a deep pothole. Since then, and until we feel safe sharing the roads with automobiles, we have decided not to bike in our neighbourhood.
On a different occasion, I was walking to my kids’ school for a parent-teacher conference. I was walking on the side of the street as there are no proper sidewalks. A car came rushing and a gush of muddy water from a pothole made my entire outfit dirty. Was I angry at the driver or the pothole? Perhaps both. I had to return home for a change of clothes.
This made me realize that despite my commitment to use active transportation and reduce my carbon footprint, the infrastructure in Winnipeg does not allow me to actively commute. Roads in poor condition, speeding cars and a lack of separated active transportation infrastructure make it difficult to leave our car at home.
Every year the City of Winnipeg spends millions of dollars of taxpayer’s money on road maintenance which includes fixing potholes. The process adds continuous layers of asphalt, covering up the problem. At present, under the current leadership, we are lagging behind in prioritizing climate action policies and this includes addressing the need to urgently implement active transportation facilities. Until then, no amount of asphalt layers will get ahead of the potholes
Dr. Durdana Islam
Program Manager, Climate Action Team
It’s a warm, breezy morning and I’m running late for work. I always intend to be on my way at an earlier hour, but inevitably the cat needs feeding, the plants need watering, and my departure gets pushed back to the last second. Luckily for me, I’ve got a quick commute to the office - a brief 10 minute bike ride, zipping straight down Ellice into the heart of Downtown Winnipeg. Notice that I didn’t say ‘brief and pleasant’ - despite years of advocating for better connections from the West End to Downtown, we’ve still got a ways to go to make it a comfortable area to get around by foot or by bike.
Today, like nearly every other day when I leave for work in the warmer months, my neighbour is out watering her garden. As per usual, she tells me to ‘watch out for drivers’, as if drivers are a separate species that are out to get me and my best course of action is to avoid angering them and stay out of the way. I’m an optimistic person and I like to see the best in people, but at times I start to wonder if she’s right. With no bike infrastructure of any kind on Ellice, I’m left dodging potholes, parked cars, and whatever other debris is left in the curb lane, with drivers who are in just as much of a rush as I am either honking at me or pretending I don’t exist and squeezing by. The sharp lines cut straight across the road by city workers doing road renewal are the worst. When I can’t dodge them I have to come to a near stop and gingerly bump over the cracks, or risk an instant flat tire. It doesn’t escape me that the drivers I’m competing for space with can easily roll over these with barely a touch of the brake pedal, and yet they are the ones that have caused the wear and tear that required road work in the first place. The combined weight of my body, my steel frame bicycle, and all the random stuff in my panniers is pebbles compared to a 5000 lb SUV, yet I’m the one expending energy to avoid all the potholes caused by the cars.
And I get it, having to keep an eye out for me and my bike dancing around the cracks in the street can be a nuisance. After all, I’m slower than most other vehicles and I’m interrupting the relatively free flowing traffic. I say ‘relatively’ because it’s summer in Winnipeg, and one can only go so fast surrounded by road construction that’s desperately trying to keep up to the wear and tear from all the cars. It’s a vicious cycle.
Despite all this, I arrive at work feeling refreshed or, at the very least, awake. It’s what keeps me coming back to choosing this as my commute. In my opinion, there’s no better way to experience a city.
Coming to those potholes, throwing more money at them isn’t going to make them go away. Like most issues in this city, it’s going to take a bigger change to address the problem. The more people we get out of personal vehicles and onto the sidewalks, on bicycles, in carpools, and on transit, the fewer potholes we will see on the roads. It’s a simple solution to a simple problem, at least in concept. The fewer potholes on the roads, the smoother the ride - for everyone.
Katheryn Loewen
Bike Winnipeg (Board); Green Action Centre (staff)
The Conclusion:
Where do we go from here?
The worn adage that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results could find a no better example than Winnipeg’s potholes. Year over year, the City of Winnipeg dumps more and more money into road maintenance, to no avail. Year over year, political leaders crow about a “record investment” into road maintenance. And year over year, potholes remain the bane of Winnipeg’s existence.
Our little dive into the perennial issue of potholes shows they are not the disease - they are the symptom - of a broken system. Spending more and more on trying to cover the symptoms without addressing the root causes of the problem will continue to get us nowhere.
A city's values are rooted in its budget. If Winnipeg is truly committed to combating the potholes, we expect the four-year budget to:
- increase transit funding and service
- seriously address the climate crisis by prioritizing its climate strategy
- make active transportation a real and viable choice for more Winnipeggers, for more trips
- implement sustainable land use decisions and policies
- make decisions with true financial understanding of how a city operates
Most of all, we expect a City Council that will stop throwing good money after bad.