The Highway Expansion Project Is Dead, Long Live the Highway Expansion Project!
This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on Strong Towns member Michel Durand-Wood’s blog, Dear Winnipeg. It is shared here with permission. In-line images were provided by the writer.
(Proposed widening of Kenaston Boulevard. Source: City of Winnipeg.)
I’ve been prepping my A game ever since the mayor campaigned on a pledge to widen Kenaston Boulevard (also known as Route 90, in Winnipeg, Canada) as long as a business case supported it. “This is not roadbuilding for roadbuilding’s sake,” he said in 2022. Since then, I’ve been looking forward to tearing apart all of the assumptions and arguments that would be used to justify such an unnecessary and, quite frankly, financially reckless project.
But now that the benefit-cost analysis for the widening of Kenaston is finally here, it turns out they’ve thrown me a real softball. And it’s not even my birthday!
The report calculates that widening Kenaston to three lanes in each direction would provide a net present value of $20.5 million in benefits over the next 30 years, for a benefit-cost ratio of 1.17.
But, as the report indicates, that’s excluding admin and contingency costs. When you include those, the widening has a net present value of negative $1.9 million and a benefit-cost ratio of less than 1.
So that’s it. This expansion project is an unqualified loser and we shouldn’t proceed with it. The End. ...Right?
If only it were so easy. For some reason, road expansion projects are notoriously hard to kill. Like the Energizer Bunny, they just keep going and going and going, long after they’ve proven to be complete failures.
So, even though yet another city report shows that, when all the costs are included, the cost of widening Kenaston outweighs the benefits, you can expect that this will not be the end of it. Get ready for the gaslighting and the moving of the goalposts to begin!
In anticipation of that, I thought to highlight some of the more interesting (and often hilarious) parts of this benefit-cost analysis, to help inspire you in case you want to register to speak at a committee, send a written submission or write to your city councillor. Here are my top five!
1. Temporary Savings, Permanent Costs
Mitigated construction delays account for $57.8 million (or 41%) of the total benefits of the widening. What this means in English is if we widen to three lanes, then traffic can be maintained in two lanes per direction during construction, instead of going to one lane per direction, saving some time for drivers during two construction seasons, in 2028 and 2029.
So, for a cost of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars (when including interest), drivers can temporarily save a bit of time for two seasons. And then, the city will be on the hook for maintenance and replacement of that infrastructure. Forever.
If trading short-term benefits for long-term liabilities sounds like a recipe for financial ruin, that's because it is.
Even the report acknowledges as much:
“It should be cautioned that a substantial portion (41%) of this project’s benefits is driven by mitigated construction delays in 2028 and 2029. This is only a temporary benefit and if excluded, the benefit-cost ratio falls to 0.69, indicating the long-term benefits are below total costs.”
— Route 90 Improvements Benefit-Cost Analysis, Technical Report, March 2024 (Executive Summary)
So, as per report recommendations, I guess we should subtract those $57.8 million in benefits from our already negative net present value of -$1.9 million.
RUNNING TALLY: negative $59.7 million
2. Safety for Everyone! Well, Almost
The safety benefits of the widening are valued at $4.4 million, since the “proposed design includes several interventions expected to impact safety performance” (page 16). Sounds great, until you consider that the analysis was “performed on collision rate estimates for the existing two-lane facility and the proposed three-lane facility” (page 15, emphasis is mine).
So the benefits are in comparison to the current two-lane layout. But since we’re doing a street renewal anyway, we could implement safety interventions into a new two-lane design too (which, by the way, should be standard practice). That means the safety benefits aren’t due to the widening, they’re just due to street renewal, so they really shouldn’t be counted as a benefit of the widening.
And (this is a bit of an aside), the claim of added safety itself is pretty dubious. Also from page 16: “Some of these interventions are expected to improve safety performance while others may see certain collision types increase. For example, installing cycling infrastructure could result in an increase in cycling collisions” (emphasis mine).
Can you really claim that the new design is safer when you outright admit that it’s actually making it more dangerous for certain types of vulnerable road users?
Also, it should go without saying that if adding cycling infrastructure makes it more dangerous for cyclists, you’re doing it wrong.
RUNNING TALLY: negative $64.1 million
3. The Environmental Benefits of More People Driving
The report claims environmental benefits of $12.6 million over the next 25 years due to reduced fuel consumption by drivers. Although “it should be noted that the electrification of Manitoba’s automobile fleet is not considered in this analysis” (page 19). Hilarious, yes, but never mind that. Even if we take this number at face value, the report reminds us that “physically constructing the improved transportation facility will have an impact on the environment” and that this analysis “does not include the effects of emissions caused by construction of the proposed improvements” (both from page 21). Those uncounted emissions, again according to this report, work out to 28,067 tons of greenhouse gas emissions (page 21, again). Yikes!
Calculating the cost of those front-end emissions (which we’re able to do since they provided their sources on pages 28 and 29) gives us a total discounted cost of about $11.4 million (in 2021 dollars). Converting to 2023 dollars to match the report means the environmental benefits of the fuel savings are completely wiped out by the environmental costs of constructing the widening. Net environmental benefit: zero (at best, but probably less).
RUNNING TALLY: negative $76.7 million
4. Won’t Someone Please Think of the Congestion?!
Here’s where we get into the real reason we’re all here: time savings for drivers! According to page eight of the report, widening Kenaston will reduce average travel times by 0.22 minutes (13 seconds) in 2030, decreasing to 0.18 minutes (11 seconds) by 2050.
It took you longer than that just to read the last paragraph.
Since the report values the average driver’s time at $14.01/hour, that works out to a time savings value of about 4 cents per trip.
Based on these numbers, we could save a lot of money if we didn’t do the widening and just compensated drivers for their lost time. Instead of saving them four cents of time per trip by spending $243.7 million of public money on a widening (including interest), we could just give each of the 79,000 daily weekday drivers over the St. James Bridge a nickel every time they cross for the next 30 years. That would only cost $30.8 million, leaving $212.9 million to spend on other things. And drivers would be 25% better off financially.
But wait, wouldn’t paying people to drive here just incentivize them to drive more? Yes, yes it would. That’s induced demand.
And by that same logic, wouldn’t charging people to drive here incentivize them to drive less? Also yes. That’s demand management.
Since we have no issues charging user fees for city services like pools and riding the bus, surely a bridge toll shouldn’t be controversial. Here’s how it could work.
Congestion pricing in other cities has been shown to reduce traffic, often by as much as half. This would translate to time savings on Kenaston measured in minutes instead of seconds. Using the report’s figures, a five-minute time savings would be worth $1.17, so charging a $1 toll to drivers so they can save $1.17 would be a good financial deal for them. An additional bonus: the 39,500 vehicles per day that remain would generate over $10 million of revenue per year for the city, which could be used to help fund better alternative transportation options on Kenaston, like transit.
RUNNING TALLY: does it even matter anymore? This widening project clearly sucks.
5. Everything Else!
Oh man, this report has so many other things in it worth highlighting. It is so, so juicy, and I just love every part of it. But I only have a limited amount of space to write before you get bored and leave, and I fear we’re nearing that point already. So I’ll just leave you with this:
To maintain existing levels of service … bridge and road renewal along with the sewer upgrade components of the Route 90 improvements project will need to be completed in the future. These project components are not considered to be optional investments for the purposes of this study. To do so would be equivalent to considering the abandonment and decommissioning of this segment of Route 90 as a public route entirely, an alternative which is untenable. Thus, the benefits of the existing Route 90 configuration do not need to be quantified, it is only the incremental benefits offered by the proposed improvements that are estimated.
— Page 7, emphasis mine
That this report would put forward, without irony, that considering the abandonment of infrastructure is untenable, all while proposing a negative-returning expansion of infrastructure on the heels of a rapidly growing list of abandoned infrastructure, is just too funny for words.
Like, can they hear themselves?
Given the contents of the report, it’s really hard to believe that anyone would try to use this as a justification for widening Kenaston when, clearly, it is saying the opposite. But you know they will.
More cynically, as St. Vital Councillor Brian Mayes said in a recent news article, “the cost-benefit [analysis] just seemed to be an exercise in coming up with a positive number.”
That’s why it’s important that residents make their voices heard, so we can put this financially irresponsible idea to rest once and for all.
You can register to speak at a public meeting, submit written comments, or email your councillor and/or mayor directly. Or write an op-ed. Or call in to a radio show. Or share this post. Or talk to your friends. Or all of the above and more. You can do it!
While this article is talking about a specific highway expansion project, the actionable advice still rings true. Making your voice heard is an essential part of fighting highway expansion. To see how other people are doing it, and to keep up with all of our highway-expansion-related stories, join our email list today.
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Michel Durand-Wood lives in the Winnipeg neighborhood of Elmwood with his wife and three children. He writes at DearWinnipeg.com, a really fun blog about infrastructure and municipal finance. He has no formal training or education in city planning, municipal finance, infrastructure maintenance, or anything else he talks about. He's just a guy, in love with a city, asking it to make better use of his tax dollars.