This morning at a media event at City Hall, Winnipeg Transit released its latest updates on the new Southwest Transitway. In a unexpected but widely appreciated move, they announced that the new station at Plaza Drive was to be named Brewery Station.
“We recognised that Plaza was rather a strange name for a narrow street with no obvious public space” said a city official. Transit officials were also keen to point out that it would have created confusion with the other stops at Plaza and Pembina.
The Southwest Transitway is a dedicated high-speed roadway for buses, physically separated from the regular street system linking Downtown to the southwest part of the city. It is scheduled to open in Spring 2020. Brewery Station will be the last stop before the University of Manitoba heading south. Construction of the station is already well underway.
“This is a wonderful vote of confidence in what we are doing at the brewery with our partner breweries Devil May Care and Kilter Brewing” said President and CEO Paul McMullan of Stone Angel Brewing at the event at City Hall. “It’s a clear sign that we have become a landmark on Pembina and with the new rapid transit route passing our building, will continue to be so.”
“This has taken a lot of work, and we’d really like to thank our local councillors, urban planners, and MLA for making this happen” added James deFehr also of Stone Angel, “They were very receptive to our proposal from day one, and imaginative proposals like this could help revolutionize public transport in Winnipeg.”
As part of the station development, Stone Angel are planning gateways to the active transportation route from a redeveloped car park and beergarden, and also seeding the ground alongside the route with wild hops. Allowing for a couple of years for the plants to reach maturity, the brewery eventually hopes to release a beer “Bus Shelter IPA” using these hops.
