Winnipeg bus stops, like Beaumont Station, are just small spot marked by a blue sign. The BLUE Rapid Transit Line, which links Downtown to the University of Manitoba, calls its stops “stations,” yet most are little more than isolated enclosures tucked between single-family homes, industrial buildings, hydro corridors, and train tracks. Located away from main roads, they are disconnected from pedestrian activity and embedded in leftover slivers of land, limiting any potential for meaningful development around them.

The stations themselves are nearly identical, uniform in form and function, differentiated only by nearby Indigenous artworks. While these installations add cultural value, they are not enough to establish a true sense of place. The result is a series of generic, often desolate spaces, frequent targets of vandalism, occupied by only a few: someone sleeping on a bench, another shouting into the wind.

Winnipeg bus stations are treated more like utilities than spaces for people. But bus stations aren’t just infrastructure. They don’t transport goods; they transport people, they transport life.

This project reimagines what public transit can be. It proposes that cities like Winnipeg grow not by expanding outward, but by centering development around transit, transforming stations into seeds of urban regeneration. Instead of allowing infrastructure to divide, this project sees transit as a tool for connection, encouraging walkability, density, and vibrancy in the spaces around it.

This thesis aims to challenge these boundaries and cross the lines so that stations are not merely stops between destinations, but destinations in their own right.