Slurpees & Murder

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The first leg of Winnipeg’s long-awaited, long-debated rapid transit system is set to officially open for public use on Sunday, April 8 of this year. Prior to that date, the City is conducting tests on the 3.6-kilometre  corridor, running trial buses up and down the transitway at speeds of roughly 80 km/h. So of course — Winnipeg being Winnipeg — the first that we all heard about this was when the City asked everyone to please stop trespassing on the rapid transit corridor, because it would be really quite unseemly for a rapid transit bus to kill somebody prior to the official rapid transit start date.
   
You may consider it tempting to dismiss or downplay the City’s concerns; it is not particularly difficult to discern where the corridor is, and the trick to not dying underneath a rapid transit bus is to not be standing on those particular 3.6 kilometres when one happens by. In this case, however, the City’s fears are actually rather justified — and before you disagree with the warning’s underlying implication that we aren’t generally bright enough to keep ourselves out of harm’s way, may I submit for your consideration the lowly locomotive.
   
Ours is a city not unfamiliar with train travel, if you’ll pardon me a brief bout of understatement. It is unclear when precisely the first train arrived in Winnipeg, but an article in the Dec. 9, 1878 edition of the Manitoba Free Press celebrated the departure of Winnipeg’s first regular train route providing a connection to the rest of the Dominion. (The article is also worth mention because it proclaimed, even as far back as 1878, that Winnipeg is destined to be "the Chicago of the North-West." We’re, uh… we’re still kind of working on that one.) Winnipeg has prominently featured trains and their accompanying train tracks for somewhere around 133 or 134 years now. And do you know what we, the streetwise and ever-vigilant citizens of this fair city, still do on a regular basis? We still get hit by trains.
   
The following is a true story, one that appeared in local news reports just last week: a man was driving a work vehicle around one morning to pick up his co-workers when he approached a rail crossing and, according to CBC Winnipeg, thought to himself — and this sentence was presented verbatim —"Oh no, that train looks close."
   
And then he got hit by a train.
   
The driver sustained injuries but survived, which puts him somewhere in the middle of the pack: better off than the fellow who got hit by a train and died last February, but worse off than the couple left uninjured when their vehicle got hit by a train last June. I mean, yes, you do have to feel bad for them all, but at the same time, how do you manage to get hit by a train?
   
Compared to most other prospective catastrophes, which can befall you literally anytime and anywhere in this city, trains are profoundly limited threats; they have clearly demarcated route boundaries, purposefully loud signaling noises and unwaveringly predictable movement patterns. There is no such thing as being ambushed by a train or having a train fly around the corner from out of nowhere. We as a city have well over 130 years of experience with them. And we still get hit by trains.
   
So the race is on, now, to see who can become the first person hit by a Winnipeg rapid transit bus. These buses may, in fact, soon eclipse the threat traditionally posed by trains; trains have an obligation to slow down within the city, whereas the entire point of rapid transit is to traverse the city in as little time as possible. Yes, it is inevitable that someone will be the first one hit; all I ask is that you please just try your best to keep it from being you.
   
James Hope Howard has, as yet, not been hit by a train.
   
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