Our City, Our Podcast

Narrator: 00:02

We know where services and programs impact you, so let's talk about them. Together, we'll learn from the people behind the scenes and get to know our city a little better. From the city of Winnipeg, this is our city, our podcast.

Natalie: 00:15

This podcast is recorded in Treaty 1 territory, the home and traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Ininew, and Dakota peoples, and the national homeland of the Red River Metis. We acknowledge that our drinking water comes from Shoal Lake forty first nation in Treaty 3 territory.

Tamara: 00:30

Hi. I'm Natalie. And I'm Tamara.

Natalie: 00:32

The last year marked the largest change in Winnipeg's transit history. People went to sleep on 06/28/2025, and when they woke up the next day, it was a completely different bus network. Now since then, it's what a lot of people in this city have been talking about. And that's

Tamara: 00:48

why we wanted to chat today with Adam Bedowski. He is a senior transit planner with Winnipeg Transit. So we're gonna find out why the network was built, how it's adapting thanks to your feedback, and what goals there are for its future.

Natalie: 01:07

Adam, thanks for joining us today. Maybe maybe start in a a personal but kinda sweet space. Do you have a a memory of the first time you ever took a city bus?

Adam: 01:19

Yeah. Th well, first of all, thanks for having me, Natalie. So I think my first first memory from a city bus would be back when I was in grade nine starting high school, just taking the bus to high school and and back home, dealing with a whole crowd of high school students all trying to be jam packed on the same bus at the same time every day and then taking that home.

Natalie: 01:39

And, you know, years pass, you find yourself in in engineering, spend some time, you know, looking at the way things work. And and you end up at Winnipeg Transit and and the position where you are a year before a wholesale change.

Adam: 01:58

Yeah. So I actually I started at Winnipeg Transit back when we were launching Southwest Transitway and the Blue Line and then all of the associated feeder routes for that. So I was able to start working there in about 2018. I've been there for eight years now. And in using some of the lessons from that change in the Southwest, able to take that right to our network launch for the primary transit network and learn some lessons, take into account what we kind of need to be doing for opening day, and really focus on how to deliver this in the best way.

Tamara: 02:26

So let's get into that with the question a lot of people have been asking. Why did our bus network need to change?

Adam: 02:33

That's a great question. We've gotten that from a lot of people from since we've launched. And so the main thing that I always point out is that our bus network hadn't changed for so long. Or it had changed, but just in some very, very small incremental ways. So if you look at some of the routes out there, we just kept on adding on as time went on.

Adam: 02:50

And you went on and had these routes that were, you know, maybe fifty or 60 years old that might not have made the most sense in terms of the paths they were taking.

Natalie: 02:59

And why the full network redesign? Like, why not just, you know, change a few routes here, change a couple schedules there?

Adam: 03:05

Yeah. Great question. So when you look at Winnipeg and our transit routes, or our old transit routes, a lot of them went all the way across the city, touching multiple areas. So when we started looking at, you know, splicing off different quadrants of the city, for instance, to just make changes there, it became incredibly hard to just do those without impacting other areas of of the city. So there was a lot of domino effect, a lot of stuff like that.

Adam: 03:28

When we changed over the routes for the Southwest Transitway opening and the implementation of the Blue Line, that was a little bit different where we saw, you know, all the routes within a a quarter of the city, the Southwest area, were able to be changed without touching too much that was happening elsewhere. But when we look towards this redesign using the lessons learned from BlueLine launch, we kinda we understood the network a little bit better and knew, you know, this wasn't gonna work for something this large scale.

Tamara: 03:54

So as a transit planner, how do you approach a wholesale change of a network like this?

Adam: 04:01

Yeah. So there's a lot of different things that we look at, a lot of different pieces of data that come in, a lot of customer feedback that we look for when we're going out and doing some of our engagement. I like to always point at some of the lesser known methods that people might think of, so just simple things like talking to the bus drivers or engaging with the bus operators themselves. They always have a lot of great feedback to bring in. They're the ones that operate the routes.

Adam: 04:23

They're the ones that meet with the passengers face to face every day. So we want to make sure that we're talking with them on stuff like this.

Tamara: 04:30

From a personal side, though, this is a huge project. What did it mean for you to be involved with it?

Adam: 04:34

Yeah. So I'm a Winnipegger through and through. I was born and raised here, and I I love the city. This, to me, is a very, very critical change that we needed to go through with our transit network. When you look at any modern day city, transit is an important integral part of how the city functions, and it's great it's a great way for people to get around, and we need it for people to get around.

Adam: 04:56

If we had everyone driving cars everywhere, that wouldn't work. We'd have more congestion, and even those who do choose to drive cars or want to drive cars, they'd have increasing levels of delay. So we got to make sure that we're always providing a good choice for people. And when I look at what I want to do for the city, what I want to do in terms of economic benefits for the city, and then just helping people get around, that's something that I find really cool.

Natalie: 05:18

You've talked about the human perspective when updating the network, which is, you know, a bit critical. But we also talk a lot on this show about the importance of using data. How do the numbers, how do the kind of the facts factor into developing the network we have today?

Adam: 05:35

Yeah. So we looked at a lot of different pieces of data. And so part of that was stacking our old system up against, you know, newer ideas or newer pieces of data that we were getting. So one thing we purchased was cell phone data from all people in Winnipeg. So not just focusing on the current transit riders that we had, but looking at how all Winnipeggers get around the city and then factoring that into our current network and coming up with a plan for the future so we can look towards getting as many people on the bus as possible.

Natalie: 06:03

Just for someone who's listening, that's disaggregated. Like, it's not connected to anyone's personal information. No, definitely what it not. Tells you

Adam: 06:10

It just tells us where people are going, you know, origin, destination type areas of the city, not exact addresses.

Tamara: 06:16

All this anticipation and development, and then the network launches in June 2025. Thoughts, opinions, criticisms all came right out of the gate. What are some of the biggest pieces of feedback that you heard from riders over the past year?

Adam: 06:29

Yeah. So I think the biggest piece of feedback that comes to my mind is something that really jumps out people at as soon as they go to their bus stop after the change, and that's the overall stop spacing of some of our new stops. So we went through the overall network, and there was about 5,300 bus stops in the old network. We now have about 3,900 because we wanted to make sure that some of those routes that are more frequent, more express style, can go and travel and take large amounts of people and move them very quickly. So get them downtown if they need to or get them to a major destination if they need to really quickly.

Adam: 07:01

The result of this is people being faced with not having their stop that they're used to every day. There's a change that they might need to go to or use a different stop on a different street. And that's something that we heard right out of the gate very loud and clear that people were upset about those stops being removed. That's definitely a balancing act. We need to make sure that we're allowing the buses to travel quick, while still allowing to pick a lot of people up.

Adam: 07:25

And so that's one of the biggest changes we're making come this fall is we're adding some stops back to our network. So we're adding stops back along Main Street to Main And Court and Cathedral, as well as on Portage Avenue for the Blue Line, just where those stops are a little bit more spaced out, and we'd wanna just allow more opportunities for boarding the bus.

Natalie: 07:43

That's really interesting on some kind of the high level themes of what you were hearing right away. In addition to that, were there any reactions that surprised you?

Adam: 07:52

Yeah. I think one of the reactions that surprised me the most was the amount of feedback that we had from people saying, you know, you launched this new network, and now you're not changing anything for a year. And I think this is one area where, you know, myself as an engineer, I know a lot of technical experts often say things, and we often mean something that may not come across in that right or the correct way.

Natalie: 08:14

Sorry, so the no changing anything for a year came from Transit in the initial

Adam: 08:19

Yeah, so originally, when we were saying no changes for a year, what we meant was no large scale route changes for a year. We don't want to go changing a bunch of the network that we just changed.

Natalie: 08:28

Why no changes?

Adam: 08:29

We wanted to give the network a chance to stabilize. We wanted to give people a chance to experience the new routes. And we wanted to give people a chance to go out there and try and change some of their travel patterns in order to provide themself with better access to different places.

Natalie: 08:42

But

Adam: 08:44

when I go back to saying no changes for the first year, what we really meant was no major changes for the first year. Things like schedule changes, minor route tweaks, things like that, we were always having stuff like that on the table. And we're all actively making changes on stuff like that as we speak. Within the first year also, we did look at a couple of the routes that weren't performing as well as we would have liked. We wanted to make sure those were giving a little bit of changes towards them, and we just changed some in June of this year.

Natalie: 09:12

Oh, that's Yeah. Yeah. Can you remind people what recently changed?

Adam: 09:16

Yeah. So this June, we, we just changed three of our routes. So that's the D16, the D18, and the D19. So the D16 and D18 were actually a route that was split apart into two. That route was just seeing very bad on time performance just due to the number of turns, the congestion it would go through.

Tamara: 09:32

What part of the city are they

Adam: 09:33

Yeah. So that that one would go along Academy Road through Saint Boniface and then through downtown all the way up to Red River College. So that was essentially split into two routes. One Academy Road to downtown now through Saint Boniface, the other Red River College to downtown.

Natalie: 09:49

And and it's working?

Adam: 09:50

It's working much better. The on time performance is definitely much better. So that's always a good way to get passengers by and back because we wanna make sure that those routes are traveling a little bit more on time.

Natalie: 10:00

So a message for people that if you stepped away from some of those routes, it's time to give it another try.

Adam: 10:05

That's right. Yeah. We also did I'll also mention that we did change the D-nineteen route. So that's the Cordon bus going from Assiniboine Park Zoo to downtown, bringing that a little bit closer to the Winnipeg Clinic, helping folks get better access to that clinic.

Tamara: 10:19

So it sounds like you've taken a lot of the feedback that you've received to heart, especially they're getting patients closer to the Winnipeg clinic. Is there something that stands out to you that you've heard over the past year when it comes to people's thoughts on the new system?

Adam: 10:34

So I think the thing that stuck with me the most that I've heard from people is just the importance of our schedules. So we have a very hard working schedules group that's always looking at making improvements to those schedules, trying to make sure that those those buses that we have that are transferring now, the transfer times are lining up a little bit better. So it's just been the overall feedback around schedules. We've been working hard to adjust some of those trips in our schedules, make the the routes a little bit more efficient if there's too much time in them. But we've also been may working to make the the schedules of certain buses, especially at rush hour, especially at some of those terminals or the malls, line up a lot better.

Tamara: 11:10

So if you were, waiting for a bus, you get off, you won't have a long period to for the next bus to come that you're transferring to, essentially. Exactly. Is there a target for what you want that transfer window to be?

Adam: 11:20

It's always gonna depend on the type of service you're coming from transferring to. But generally speaking, we're looking at, you know, under fifteen minutes for sure, but ideally getting a little bit less than that even.

Natalie: 11:31

So just to put kind of a bow on this, when it comes to making change, remind us of, you know, the kind of criteria you're looking at when you're going to make an adjustment to the network.

Adam: 11:41

Yeah. So there's a lot of criteria that can come into play. It's it's all different perspectives from different people. We look at, you know, the the major origins and destinations that are connected to that route. We look at the type of route it is, how often it should be stopping, and, you know, what what the service is like or how frequent it is.

Adam: 11:57

And then we look at how that route is performing from on time perspective, also from the spacing of the buses or what we call headways. We wanna make sure that, you know, you're getting buses that come every ten minutes, not one in once in once an hour and then five in five minutes. That's not the frequency we'd wanna shoot for. But if some of those things aren't being met or some of those criteria aren't being met, that's where we start looking at does this route need to change and do we need to do something a little bit different here.

Tamara: 12:24

We've talked a lot about the schedules and transfers. Let's talk more about the the stops that people are at, the infrastructure that is helping build the network around it.

Adam: 12:33

When we launched this network, we originally had it on a little bit of a longer timeline. But what we heard when we talked to Winnipeggers is that they wanted this faster. So council did vote to accelerate this plan. So that's why we we started saying, you know, the some of the infrastructure may not be there on opening day, but we're putting the service out there first because this is what Winnipeggers want. So when we look at the infrastructure that's at the stops or just things like shelters, bus bus benches, little things like that, or it could be like a major transit station, something like you see along the Southwest Transitway, we wanna make sure that we're making improvements in that area.

Adam: 13:08

So playing a little bit of catch up right now, but we are looking at expanding our shelter program. We're looking to get more benches out there, and we're also looking to expand some of our bus terminals just to make those a little bit more, friendly from a passenger perspective in terms of the overall passenger experience.

Tamara: 13:22

And that's work that's ongoing right now that that kinda happened the moment everything launched?

Adam: 13:27

Yeah. So we've been working hard on that, you know, since about 2024. We've been getting upgrades to our stops in in advance of the network launch, But more activities going on in that this year, last year as well in 2025, and we have some plans for 2027 and 2028 at this point.

Natalie: 13:44

We're lucky to have you here because you have this perspective of a planner who can see the whole network. And it's a chance maybe to share what, you know, kind of how the sausage is baked kind of thing. Like, what is getting in the way of a more frequent, better connected network right now?

Adam: 14:04

Yes. So the thing that I like to point to most is the reliance of our downtown with the transit routes. So a lot of the transit routes, a lot of the main transit routes in our network now, just like in the old system, they go through downtown. And what that means is that the streets that we're traveling on downtown need to be a little bit more suitable for transit use. We want to make sure that we can deliver frequent service, but that it's also spaced out, and people are getting, you know, buses every ten minutes.

Adam: 14:33

So when we look towards the future, we want to make sure that we're trying to plan for dedicated, you know, corridors and things like that that the buses can travel exclusively on in the downtown so that they can avoid some of that congestion.

Tamara: 14:44

Okay. So speaking of corridors, what do you have to say to people that said, on, we had one already going through Graham Avenue Mall?

Adam: 14:51

So we did have a transit corridor down Graham Avenue, but I would say that that one was a little bit tricky to deal with from transit's perspective. What we saw before we changed the network was a lot of congestion on Graham that was generally caused by ourselves. It was just buses every day, and we were backed wall to wall traffic on Graham. When you look at Graham as a street too, there are two turns that you need to take to get on at either side, to travel east west through downtown. And those turns often slowed some of the buses down, which created issues for overall functioning on the Graham Transit Mall.

Natalie: 15:26

And and Winnipeg isn't new to this corridor discussion. We we have the Southwest Transit Way. And and so, thankfully, this is a space that we've already made a lot of, we've learned a lot of lessons, and and we've made a we can make a lot of assertions as well. So when we look at that corridor in particular, how has it affected all of the land that surrounds it?

Adam: 15:51

Yeah. So I think it's definitely affected all the land surrounding the area. You've seen countless developments going up around the corridor, along Pembina Highway itself, which I know isn't, like, exactly on the corridor, but it still all plays into that. I'd also like to point just to the fact that it makes, I would say, Winnipeg see rapid transit as a possibility. It was it was you know, it's part of the network.

Adam: 16:14

It's not a complete network, but it does show us as a city that we can do this. We can build a corridor like this. So when we look ahead to our downtown corridors, which would be what we have slated next on our major projects list at Transit, we know it's possible. And we can take some of the lessons from constructing the Southwest Corridor into our downtown, which we know is going to be a lot more complex.

Tamara: 16:34

We've talked a lot about different pieces of a big transportation puzzle right now. Bus stops, schedules, routes, corridors. When everything is fitting together as it should, what will we notice?

Adam: 16:46

I'd say the biggest change that people will notice with something, say, like the downtown corridors would be the consistency in bus service. Right now our goal is to make, you know, our travel on buses as predictable, consistent as possible, just so you can more equate it to the types of travel that people are used to when they drive a car. We want to make sure that people can get to where they need to go in a predictable way so that they can consistently do it and they can you know, understand the time it's going to take instead of having a, you know, unpredictable, travel time that's gonna be between thirty minutes and ninety.

Tamara: 17:22

What does it all mean for our future?

Adam: 17:24

I'd say this is gonna be a big part of Winnipeg's future, especially when you look at our downtown. You know, I don't think we've seen as much development around the Southwest Transitway as we're going to yet. I think that's still coming. And I think when we look at our downtown, that's that's gonna be another area where we're gonna see it coming in the future. When we've been doing some of the planning studies for downtown, we've been talking to other jurisdictions, other cities.

Adam: 17:47

And so I remember talking to one of those places, I think Cleveland. They built a rapid transit corridor. And I can't remember the exact stat, but I think it was within ten years following the construction of that corridor, almost twothree of all development in the city was occurring around that corridor. So building these things is very important. It's very important to infill type discussions when we're talking about reconstructing parts of our downtown or really beefing it up, and then allowing folks to get around faster and in a more consistent way.

Natalie: 18:19

Can we make a kind of analogy about where we are in our growth and change with Transit? Last year marked the kind of the kickoff of that change. But is that where does that fit?

Adam: 18:34

Yeah. So I think a lot of people are looking at this big network change and they're thinking, you know, Transit's done. They changed the network and they're not going to do anything else now. And I like to view it a lot differently than that. I I view the network change as just the beginning.

Adam: 18:48

It's just the start of something new. So we had this old network. We've now moved on to a new network. And our job at Transit right now is to make that network as best we can for the Winnipeggers and evolve it from where it is right now make it serve Winnipegers better and better every year.

Tamara: 19:05

So what message do you have for people who maybe wrote off transit because they tried network last year and it didn't work for them? Or maybe never tried it?

Adam: 19:15

So for those who have tried the network and, you know, maybe something went wrong or they've got frustrated by it, I definitely hear you on that one. I've been experiencing some frustrations with the new network as I take the bus. One of the routes that we actually ended up canceling for this network launch was the bus route that I took to work every day. So no not exactly a fan of it. But at the same time, as somebody who took that route every day, I do know that the the volumes of riders were low.

Adam: 19:41

There wasn't very many people on the, you know, non peak ridership runs or buses. So I knew that if we take those hours, take those service hours from that bus and, you know, repurpose them elsewhere, that's that's probably gonna be more so what Winnipeggers need in terms of their network. I'd ask people to understand that there are going to be some growing pains as we do a substantial change like this. And we are going to continue adapting. We are going to continue to make changes at Transit.

Adam: 20:06

I know it can be frustrating to feel like you're kind of screaming into a blank wall or something when change that you're requesting can't be done quickly or you're not necessarily getting the feedback that you want on it. But it's really hard for us to make all of the changes from all of the feedback that we're getting immediately. We need to take a little bit more time with it because we need to understand that when we make another change, that's gonna affect people too. So just like we already made a change and there's already people that, you know, may have maybe wanna change back or something, We want to make sure that if we're going to make a progressive change in the future, we're trying to minimize the feelings of negativity on that.

Natalie: 20:45

End of the line. Last question is one that we do give to everyone, and that is, what is one thing that you wish, or a few things you wish, people knew about Winnipeg?

Adam: 20:56

When I think about what I want people to know or what I think about Winnipeg the most and why I'm, you know, the proudest to be from here, I think about, you know, the way the place has kind of shaped a lot of the people here. You know, we choose to live here for a reason, whatever that may be. We also take the fact that Winnipeg has really cold winters and, you know, literally dark winters and stuff like that. But that really is what makes us who we are as Winnipeggers. I think, you know, we we have this more, you know, small town mentality, but we're in a big city.

Adam: 21:27

Or, you know, sometimes you might say we're big big city mentality, but we're kind of like a small town, however you want to say it. I think that really creates this this sense of ownership. And I think that when when I look at a lot of the feedback that I've been getting about the transit network, it's it's really evident that people feel a sense of ownership on it, which is good. That's what we want. We just wanna make sure that we have that trust with people and we're making the changes that we need to make so that we make this network a little bit better every year and just get some of that trust back with Winnipeggers.

Tamara: 21:58

Great.

Natalie: 21:58

Thank you.

Tamara: 21:59

Thank you for joining us. Alright. We are gonna go from buses to books on next month's podcast. We are chatting with one of the people whose job it is is to buy the books in all of our libraries.

Natalie: 22:11

And this is really fun. Did you know that that some branches actually have, higher distribution of of certain genres? So what parts of Winnipeg love romance?

Tamara: 22:22

And westerns. And sci fi. Oh, it's a good one. Alright. If you have any questions for us to look into or episodes you want us to tackle, please let us know.

Tamara: 22:32

Email us, city-podcast@Winnipeg.ca. Thanks for listening. Bye.