I'm upvoting you because this is definitely a myth that needs busting - we have on Kenaston commercial traffic being blocked from movement in morning and afternoon rush hours which only lasts a finite amount of time.

There are tonnes of other hours in the day with which that traffic flows freely, although that's not my point - by building more lanes the commercial deliveries will suffer longer delivery times. Read on to understand.

The private traffic problem would be made worse everywhere that those trucks would be. Adding lanes actually hurts commercial interests like the major trucks on this major truck route in the long run. Most of the traffic is actually private car/truck owners! Thanks to this fancy trick called induced demand which has been scientifically proven building more lanes creates more demand. When compared to alternatives like frequent buses, cycle lanes, prioritizing sidewalk snow removal, etc., it's a no-brainer that a $400m Kenaston widening project is a money-sink while the rest of these options actually reduce traffic and makes commercial routes safer/faster.

That said, there is a revolution coming with regards to automated delivery with drones and on-the-road vehicles being driven by robots. Why double down on this failed experiment into widening highways? I don't think it's worth it.

Accelerating demand for private car/truck use by making it easier for that mode of transportation to be used won't fix the fact that there's no more space left in those corridors already.

It's not worth it to widen the road, in every sense. We lose on the debt load, we lose on the ROI which is negative, we lose on permanent traffic levels increasing (read: private cars/trucks) in every neighbourhood between St. James and downtown, plus downtown will see more traffic problems. Where do you think all those people want to get to?

Adding capacity upstream is going to cause problems downstream and you can't escape that fact when that's the only actual option for anyone. Biking in Winnipeg is a minefield where only some trips actually are great. Biking to my kids school: great mostly. Biking to CostCo: nightmare shit. Biking to the ass-end of town at U of M from downtown: decent. What the hell?

An additional lane is going to improve travel times for a while until it fills to capacity and now we're in the same situation except with more traffic to fix and a shiny new bridge + lanes we're indebted $400m for. Those lanes of traffic create very real financial debt for us to service the new stretch of road at that level of quality forever. This is very, very expensive and in fact we're actually broke because we're investing so much into roads.

We're continuing to overbuild capacity when we largely find that there's a glorious 6 hour stretch in the middle of the day for deliveries to be made. We are not at the point where the actual transportation challenges of this city are not working and in fact, we have a very, very long way to go when it comes to hours of traffic - see the 401 in Ontario! Who likes being stuck in literal gridlock for hours?

Adding lanes and lanes of highway traffic into the heart of your city is how you add more traffic. Simple as that. It's unpleasant to be outside in Winnipeg where there's high levels of traffic.