Street murals aim to slow down traffic along bike routes: City

The City of Winnipeg is adding a splash of colour to its summer bike routes, hiring artists to paint 20 murals along four neighbourhood streets across the city.

The city's Enhanced Summer Bike Route program began again in May 2022, reducing speed limits to 30 km/hour along 15 different residential roads to allow for more pedestrian and cycling use. Signs indicating the speed reduction are visible along all routes.

However Erik Dickson, Livable Streets Specialist at the City of Winnipeg Public Works department says that wasn't enough on some of the streets.

"We saw that traffic was going a little bit faster than what we'd like to see on those streets, so we were coming up with some different ideas of how we could do some additional traffic calming," said Dickson, "we pulled this together in the last six weeks or so."

A total of 20 murals are being painted along Churchill Drive, Wellington Crescent, Lyndale Drive, and Kilkenny Drive. Artists working with Cool Streets Winnipeg have been commissioned for the project. Dickson says the art is incredibly eye-catching.

"There's many different abstract pieces, there's a sea creature themed one, and there's a few other fun ones," he said.

The Enhanced Bike Route Program will be in effect until October 31st. Dickson says they will continue to monitor traffic along the routes to see if the traffic-calming art is effective.

"We're going to learn a lot about how traffic responds to these, how the community responds to these, as well as just how the artists come together and design and plan and implement these different murals on our streets.”