Talking aboot Winnipeg versus Twin Cities Urbanism with the CBC

A few months ago, I went on a lovely trip up to Winnipeg, Manitoba with my mother. The city is about a seven-hour drive, but when you get you your destination, you're in a different country!

Winnipeg was fun to wander around, and I ended up blogging about my experience and observations there over at streets.mn.

You can check that article out there, but here's a highlight:

By the way, mode share in Winnipeg is something like 14%. That’s the metro area stats, by the way.  

Are those numbers in metric or Canadian dollars or something, because that is far far higher than Minneapolis?

The equivalent numbers for Minneapolis are something like 9% city-wide and 5% metro-wide. In Winnipeg, they are doing something right with the transit planning. I suspect its a complicated series of land use, planning, and financial incentives that create this more transit-friendly environment. Whatever the reason, it makes me jealous!

At any rate, Winnipeggers seemed both pleased and nonplussed by my piece, and I got a lot of good comments from Canadian readers on streets.mn and social media. My little observations got so much attention, in fact, that the CBC called me up yesterday and interviewed me for their afternoon news show on the local CBC.

Must have been a slow news day up north (LOL), but what an honor! I'm a big fan of the CBC and Canadian media, so this was pretty exciting.

Here's the whole interview, for your listening pleasure. We chatted about urban freeways, walking, skyways versus tunnels versus sidewalks, and some experimental bike lanes.

If you listen closely, I think you can hear the host seem rather astonished that I actually liked Winnipeg. "Really? You liked it? Wow," he keeps implying. It's rather amusing, eh?

Enjoy!

BONUS, eh!