My car approached the intersection as the morning sun drew long shadows across the road from the adjacent buildings, July Talk’s “Picturing Love” on the radio. A commercial truck was in the lane beside me and a Honda Civic in front. Starting two blocks back, I followed the Civic through the green light, taking advantage of a break in the traffic to glance to my left up Portage Avenue. Five people were walking across the street, two in one direction and three in the other. Office workers probably, with their backpacks, wearing jackets on this unseasonably cool late June morning.

The above “disaster” that played out above is typical of my morning rush hour experience driving through Winnipeg’s most notable intersection now that it is once again open to pedestrians.

I put “disaster” in quotes because that is one of the words that was used to predict the state of affairs once the barriers came down at Portage and Main. The rhetoric was surprising at times. A former colleague of mine who rarely if ever drove through the intersection was adamant that opening the intersection to pedestrians would cripple downtown, calling it extremely stupid. There were predictions on social media of gridlock and people being run over by buses. What specifically made Portage and Main one of the only intersections in the world that is incapable of managing pedestrians was never explained.

This post is not some elaborate “I told you so” … okay maybe it is a little bit … but it is also a reminder that people tend to assume the worst. This is especially true when it comes to matters involving automobiles.

You can see this knee-jerk tendency to react negatively to change everywhere. “It will just jam the streets up” one person is quoted as saying about a proposed six floor apartment building on a bus route in Old St. Boniface. Spoiler: no it won’t. Do you know what will? Saying “no” to infill development like this and forcing all new units to be built on the periphery of the city.

The logic rarely holds up. It didn’t with Portage and Main either. I can think of any number of other intersections in Winnipeg that are more difficult to get through in a vehicle and are more hostile to pedestrians. If we closed every intersection where there was potential conflict with pedestrians we would have to walk exclusively in underground tunnels like voles, eventually evolving into colourless, hairless earth people who are allergic to sunlight. Nobody wants that.

This is not to say we shouldn’t listen to people’s concerns, but their concerns need to be balanced against the advice of experts and the need for smart policy, and judge the validity of the concerns accordingly. Sometimes people are just afraid of change. People are risk adverse. This is normal, but if you take the populist approach of farming all your decisions out to the public, like with the Portage and Main referendum, you will end up with a dysfunctional city.

Portage and Main is a notable intersection, maybe even a little bit famous, but it was never “iconic”. What it has been for most of my lifetime is an embarrassment. An ugly, hostile place that confounds visitors and makes life more difficult for people with disabilities.

It no longer is. Portage and Main is now just a normal intersection, and that is all we need it to be.