Manitoba's Rural Highways

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Manitoba’s waterways formed the backbone of transport for indigenous peoples and the first migrants to the area in the 18th and early 19th centuries. With the development of Fort Garry into the commerce center of Manitoba during this period, a series of trails were established by traders and settlers, often following indigenous routes, primarily along the Red and Assiniboine rivers. While established ad hoc without any formal engineering input, with no explicit ownership or provision for maintenance, these trails established routes that were later followed by the first Provincial Trunk Highways of the early 20th century.

The very first roadway to be designed with engineering input and built by a government agency in Manitoba was the Dawson Trail, between Fort Garry and Port Arthur on Lake Superior. It was named after Simon J. Dawson, who initially was a surveyor to the Hind Expedition of 1857. That expedition was authorized by the pre-confederation Government of Canada to identify a potential land bypass of the Winnipeg River to avoid its falls and rapids. In early 1867, Canada authorized the expenditure of $55,000 from the Upper Canada Colonization Road Fund to build a roadway along the route surveyed by Dawson. He was ultimately put in charge of its construction, which commenced in May of 1867 and was completed in 1871.

With the establishment of the Province of Manitoba in 1870, rural roadways became a provincial responsibility for construction and maintenance. At that time, there were approximately 1,100 km of trails within the then “Postage Stamp” boundaries of the province. In 1871, work was performed to upgrade the major roadways emanating from Winnipeg, specifically the roads to Pembina, Portage la Prairie, and Lower Fort Garry along with the establishment of a new road along the east side of the Red River.

In 1880, the province passed the Municipal Act, which placed responsibility for roads and road allowances under the newly incorporated municipalities. Maintenance and construction of new roadways proved problematic under this change. Many municipalities required landowners adjacent to road allowances to take on responsibility for their development and maintenance. However, there was no effective means of enforcement, so the local roads were generally in poor condition with no governing design and safety standards. The municipal governments were poorly funded and maintaining roadways within their jurisdictions ultimately proved beyond their financial capacity.

In 1912, Manitoba attempted to address this issue through two acts. The first was “An Act Respecting the Improvement of Highways” that set aside funds to aid municipalities in road construction and improvements. It allowed for two-thirds provincial funding for roads “declared by the Minister of Public Works to be of sufficient public importance for the purposes of common traffic and travel.” The second was “The Good Roads Act” which allowed the Minister of Public Works to issue loan guarantees to municipalities for road improvements, deemed at Manitoba’s discretion, to be in the greater interests of the province and municipality.

While a significant improvement over the previous situation, these two acts proved inadequate to address the needs for improved provincial transportation so that they were repealed and replaced in 1914 with the “Good Roads Act, 1914”. That act identified a network of Main Highways and Market Roads for which Manitoba would provide funding for as much as 66% of the costs for improvements and maintenance. This network was initially established with 3,630 kilometres of gravelled roads and 2,039 kilometres of earth roads.

A 1925 amendment to the “Good Roads Act, 1914” established a Provincial Trunk Highway (PTH) network of approximately 2,700 km of core roadways that would ultimately become a network of hard-surfaced roads serving major communities throughout the province. The provincial government assumed responsibility for the construction and maintenance of this network that started as a series of earth- and gravel-surfaced roads.

The next year, construction of the “Trans-Canada Highway Extension East” from Whitemouth to the Ontario boundary was sanctioned as a contribution to Manitoba’s portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. Opened in 1932, it completed the Trans-Canada Highway route through the province by connecting to existing roads to Saskatchewan. Although the term Trans-Canada Highway was in use by the 1920s, it was not until 1949 that the federal Trans-Canada Highway Act initiated construction of the national highway network with consistent design standards that currently bears this name. The highway initiated in the 1920s was largely an endeavor of the provinces working towards a national goal without federal funding, at least until the Second World War. In 1941, the federal government, recognizing the strategic importance of the highway to the war effort, provided funding to complete the few remaining gaps outside of Manitoba. This highway opened in 1946.

In 1926, Manitoba began implementing a system of highway numbering that, while not the first jurisdiction to do so, had been first proposed by pioneering automobile advocate Arthur “Ace” Emmett. He had presented the idea at the 1920 Canadian Automobile Association meeting in Winnipeg. The Wisconsin Highway Commissioner had attended Emmett’s presentation and became the first to adopt it in his state.

A downturn in highway construction during the 1930s came as a direct result of the Great Depression. Other than completion of the eastern extension of the Trans-Canada Highway, and extending the amount of paved roadways, there were no significant additions to the PTH network. At the beginning of the decade, pavement was limited to a few roadways radiating from Winnipeg but none longer than 15 kilometres. By the end of the decade, highways from Winnipeg were fully paved to Portage la Prairie, Emerson, and the Ontario border. A pioneer road outside of the PTH network, from its northern limit at Swan River to The Pas, was completed in 1938. It represented a novel engineering achievement by crossing 20 kilometres of peatlands using a floating roadway on top of a log raft base.

With war raging in the early 1940s, expansion of the provincial road network was not a priority. A few existing roads in the Interlake were added to the PTH system and a new PTH connecting Pine Falls and Whitemouth was built. By the end of the decade, the pioneer road to The Pas had been extended to Flin Flon and a second pioneer road connected the newly established mining community of Snow Lake to the CNR Churchill line at Wekusko. The highway between Brandon and the Ontario border was fully paved, as were ones between Nesbit and Wasagaming and the future Yellowhead Highway between Minnedosa and Gladstone.

The 1950s marked the start of a boom in road building that would last for the next 25 years. It resulted in the establishment of the core highway infrastructure for Manitoba that exists today. Its kickoff was the 1949 Trans-Canada Highway Act that provided federal funding of up to 90% of the costs to develop a national highway across all ten provinces. Construction of Manitoba’s section started in 1950. It did not follow the route of the former Trans-Canada Highway because existing roads did not meet the federally mandated standards. Completed across Manitoba by 1959, the Canada-wide route opened in 1962.

Also started during the 1950s was the Perimeter Highway around Winnipeg that was envisioned as a four-lane divided ring road. Conceptual work began in 1952 with land acquisition following in 1955. Unlike the open and public manner in which such work is done today, the original alignment for the Perimeter was set in secrecy, for fear that land speculation would drive up prices if the intended route was made public. Construction of the southern portion of the ring, in the vicinity of Pembina Highway, started in 1957 and, by the following year, portions of the north Perimeter were under development. The first “cloverleaf” interchange built in Manitoba at the intersection of Pembina and the Perimeter was completed in 1958 but would not open to traffic until the connecting roads were finished in 1960. By the end of the decade, the southwest quarter of the ring road was open to traffic.

The 1960s saw the greatest expansion of the provincial highway network. In 1965, about 11,000 kilometres of former municipal roads were placed under provincial jurisdiction as designated Provincial Roads (PRs). It represented a dramatic expansion of the PTH system to about 17,000 kilometres of primary and secondary roads. Work began in the 1960s to upgrade the Trans-Canada Highway to a four-lane divided highway. By the end of the decade, it had been twinned from Portage la Prairie, through Winnipeg, and ending near Ste. Anne. A four-lane bypass of Portage la Prairie was about half complete.

The south Perimeter Highway was fully completed in the 1960s. By 1969, the north Perimeter was open as a two-lane highway from Portage Avenue to PTH 59N with twinning of this section underway. A gap in the ring road, from PTH 59N to PTH 15, would last for the next 30 years as a result of Manitoba agreeing to cost-share the development of Winnipeg’s Lagimodiere Boulevard into a four-lane divided expressway which deferred the need to fill the far eastern gap. Work to connect PTH 101 (north Perimeter) to PTH 100 (south Perimeter) started in the late 1960s and was completely twinned in the early 1970s.

The 1960s also marked the start of an unprecedented expansion of the PR network into Manitoba’s far north to tap its mineral wealth and hydro-electric potential. Thompson and its nickel mines, developed in the 1950s, was the catalyst. By 1960, work began on what would become PR 391 between PTH 10 and Thompson which was opened in 1964. PTH 6 was extended from Gypsumville to Grand Rapids in support of a hydro-electric dam being constructed there. By the end of the decade, PTH 6 was further extended from Grand Rapids to Ponton to provide a more direct route from Winnipeg to Thompson. Lynn Lake had been established without road access in 1950. By the late 1960s, an extension of PR 391 was under construction along with a network of local PRs to mines in the vicinity of Lynn Lake. A new PR connecting Easterville to PTH 6 was also completed at that time.

Upgrading of the entire PTH network to a standard like that of the Trans-Canada Highway started in the 1950s and were largely completed by the 1970s but the bulk of the work was done in the 1960s. By 1969, PTH 10 from the US border to Flin Flon, excepting Riding Mountain National Park, was upgraded to a high-speed, fully paved highway. The Yellowhead Highway, now numbered as PTH 4 between Portage la Prairie and the Saskatchewan border, was almost completely reconstructed to bypass most of the small towns along its route.

The 1970s marked the end of the boom years. By 1975, the northern road network was largely in place. The PR 391 extension to Lynn Lake, opened in 1974, included the longest clear-span bridge ever built in Manitoba to cross the Churchill River at Leaf Rapids. By the end of the decade, pioneer roads had been extended to Norway House, Split Lake, and Southern Indian Lake. The Trans-Canada Highway was now mostly four lanes between Brandon and a point 18 kilometres west of the Ontario border. Large sections of the highway had eastbound and westbound lanes that more closely followed the terrain with separation by as much as a half kilometre. This “independent alignment” innovation allowed for a safer and more aesthetically pleasing design.

Economic inflation and recession in the 1980s meant limited funding for highway infrastructure. Given that the network was near fully built out, preservation became a greater priority than expansion, so emphasis was placed on the rehabilitation of deteriorating roadways. But there were notable exceptions. A new highway was constructed north of Selkirk to connect PTH 59 and PTH 9 with a new Red River bridge. That crossing on PTH 4 became the longest and highest bridge in the Province. New interchanges were constructed on the Trans-Canada Highway and the Perimeter Highway. Twinning occurred on PTH 44 from PTH 59 to Garson, on PTH 59 to Scanterbury, and on PTH 12 between PTH 1E and Steinbach. Work also began to twin PTH 75 from Winnipeg to the US border.

The focus on preservation continued into the 1990s. Manitoba began to invest in technology to maximize the value and durability of its infrastructure investments. Pioneering work was undertaken in instrumenting roadways and structures to monitor structural condition. Manitoba joined in international initiatives to develop new materials and construction methodologies that extended the life of built works. The most significant new road infrastructure filled the gap in the Perimeter Highway between PTH 59N and PTH 15. The building in 1995 of a four-lane expressway, along with the twinning of the last two-lane section between PTH 15 and PTH 1E, saw the virtual completion of the Perimeter as a continuous ring road. One minor exception was a three-kilometre detour roadway that permitted the future construction of an upgraded interchange at PTH 59N + PTH101. While planned to be built in the 1990s, it was delayed by changing government priorities. A major milestone during this decade was the completion of a four-lane PTH 75 to the US border.

Preservation continued to be a priority in the 2000s but the government recognized that inadequate funding over the past two decades had resulted in insufficient preservation work. To address the deficiency, capital funding nearly tripled in 2007 and significant rehabilitation work was undertaken across the Province while twinning of PTH 1W was completed to the Saskatchewan border.

The 2010s saw further increases in capital spending that led to a resurgence in new infrastructure. PTH 190, also known as CentrePort Canada Way, was built as an eight-kilometre, four-lane expressway to connect the Perimeter Highway with Brookside Boulevard. Opened in 2013, it was designed as the road transportation backbone for a new inland port located in the northwest quadrant of Winnipeg and the Rural Municipality of Rosser. The last portion of the Perimeter Highway, with a new system interchange at PTH 59 + PTH 101 to replace the temporary detour, opened in 2018. This is the highest-level interchange ever built in the Province with free flow in all directions and a semi direct ramp for eastbound to northbound traffic requiring four dedicated structures.

The decade also saw substantial work towards providing all-weather access roads to First Nations and indigenous communities. In 2017, a 150-kilometre road was completed from PR 304 near Manigotagan to Bloodvein and Berens River. It is intended to become an artery for future all-weather roads to communities east of Lake Winnipeg. In 2019, a 24-kilometre road was completed from the Trans-Canada Highway near Falcon Beach to Shoal Lake 40 First Nation on Lake of the Woods. It restored land access that had been severed through the construction of the Shoal Lake Aqueduct.

Through the efforts of all those involved, including many members of Engineers Geoscientist Manitoba, Manitoba now has a comprehensive, effective and efficient road network as a backbone for the economy and services required throughout most of the province.