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This article was published 13/6/2011 (3397 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg media outlets will get their first look at the city’s first transit tunnel this afternoon, when Winnipeg Transit takes media outlets on a tour of the Southwest Rapid Transit Corridor.

Construction on the 3.6-kilometre, $138-million bus corridor, which runs from Queen Elizabeth Way near The Forks to Jubilee Avenue at Pembina Highway, is slated to wrap up late this year. Winnipeg Transit expects to open the busway in April, allowing buses running between downtown and Fort Garry to bypass Confusion Corner traffic.

The busway includes a new tunnel below the Fort Rouge Yards and a bridge over Osborne Street south of Confusion Corner. A bus station is slated to be constructed over the bridge. Other stations are slated for Harkness Street near The Forks, Morley Avenue in Fort Rouge and possibly at Jubilee Avenue.

The first phase of the busway was funded by all three levels of government, with the city and province paying for the bulk of the costs.

A long-simmering infrastructure dispute between the city and province have sidelined plans for a second busway phase that would extend six kilometers to Bison Drive near the University of Manitoba.

In 2009, Ottawa and the province offered the city $126 million toward a busway extension that was pegged at $189 million at the time. Mayor Sam Katz declined, insisting the cost of the project would be higher and requesting federal infrastructure money be spent on other Winnipeg infrastructure projects, such as Polo Park traffic improvements and a western extension of Chief Peguis Trail to McPhillips Street.

In 2010, Katz removed the second phase of the Southwest Rapid Transit Corridor from a list of city infrastructure priorities and encouraged Premier Greg Selinger to fly to Ottawa with him to lobby the Conservative government to build a light-rail system. Ottawa sided with the province.

The Katz administration then made rail the city’s preferred mode of rapid transit, citing data from a pair of city-commissioned studies that actually state there are no obstacles to upgrading a bus corridor into a rail corridor.

There has been no movement on future rapid-transit planning since July 2010.