Transport committee preps for a parking tax on big cars

Thursday, Jan 24th’s Transportation Standing Committee meeting was one for the record books—but only because the city keeps records of all municipal meetings.

The meeting started off with a few public speakers. A few folks said they don’t want to see Robie Street widened: They suggested that three lanes is enough, and that the HRM could use a lane that switches directions depending on the time of day, like the Macdonald Bridge and two of five approaches to the Armdale Roundabout. The city could do this, and it would save money and be less toxic to nearby residents of Robie, but that would require our city to care more about saving money and healthy citizens than quick car commutes. To make three lanes work with Halifax’s plans for Bus Rapid Transit, the options are taking one lane away from drivers, or buying land in order to have a place to install yet more unsustainable infrastructure that poisons people. Naturally the thing that doesn’t inconvenience drivers at all is the better course of action for our city. This may also demolish some affordable housing, but our priority is car throughput, no matter the cost.

The two information items—one about removing the city’s designed-to-fail Colby Village Traffic Island pilot and the other about prioritizing pedestrians on Main Streets—will be brought to the next TSC meeting and debated.

Councillor Shawn Cleary’s motion to charge higher permit parking fees for bigger vehicles came back to the committee. Cleary’s original plan to use vehicle weight to determine different parking fees had been modified at council to use vehicle length instead, which introduced a host of problems as enumerated in the staff report. After a brief debate to ensure that most of them agreed they wanted to move forward with differential parking fees based on vehicle weight, this committee briefly entertained treating the ongoing collapse of earth’s life support systems due to global warming like an emergency and asking for a staff report on two policies at the same time. Ultimately, the committee decided that saving the planet and making our roads safer should not be rushed into, and it decided just to get a staff report on higher parking permit fees for heavier vehicles. Pay station parking fees will be considered at some later time. God forbid we solve the problems of this city too quickly.

Councillor Trish Purdy voted against this motion because she does not believe that people who drive should be asked to pay for the societal cost of driving because the personal cost of driving is also high and the city doesn’t provide people with any alternatives due to limited resources thanks to the high cost of accommodating and subsidizing drivers.

The committee also got an update on how the last year of our old Road Safety Framework went. Even though council passed a new, worse, Road Safety Framework in July 2024, due to the delay in police reporting numbers, the city only has road safety numbers from 2023. And due to issues with the quality of the data police did report, we have no idea how many people were seriously hurt on HRM’s streets.

Speaking of reporting issues, during their presentation staff said in 2023 there were six fatal injuries on HRM roads, but the Road Safety Dashboard says eight. City comms staff said in an email after the meeting that staff won’t be available to confirm which number is right until early next week. During their presentation to the committee, when they were available, staff extolled the three pillars of road safety: Engineering, Education and Enforcement. Naturally, the topic of enforcement is popular because photo radar is being promised whenever the provincial government proclaims the Motor Vehicle Act. Enforcing speed limits by camera is way cheaper than redesigning our streets to be safe. Councillors asked what the city is or could be doing to beef up enforcement at hotspot areas. Not much is the answer; our roads are designed to be lawless places.

Although it is worth pointing out that pre-COVID, police were giving out tens of thousands of tickets. A few years later and the number of tickets has gone way down. But the year-over-year trend is that our roads are safer now, with fewer tickets than they were before with more—a curious trend in the data. Especially considering the city has had no meaningful education campaigns in a while, and all the city’s been doing is making minor infrastructure improvements so that non-drivers can move around the city. In the early stages of this data, early correlation suggests that a meagre investment in road safety has resulted in meagre improvements in our injury trend.

I wonder what we could do with more investment in the engineering side of things. To that end, TSC had a special guest—District 7’s Laura White stopped by to ask questions about the Road Safety Framework because road safety was a large part of her campaign.

White, an engineer, told our traffic engineers that in her previous job in a nuclear power plant, engineers tried to keep people safe by removing hazards or separating people from them. Seeing as how cars are a hazard in our road system, maybe we should look at ways to remove them or physically prevent them from killing people?

This is really good advice because the city’s own data from 2020 suggests that getting cars off the road lead to a drastic drop in road violence. In nearby New York, they started charging a fee to enter the city and have seen an expected and desired decrease in traffic. But they’ve also seen a massive drop in injuries—currently down by about 50%. Unfortunately, even though White’s suggested approach seems like it would be widely, and wildly, successful, the city of Halifax can’t charge tolls.

The city of Halifax can, however, charge more for parking to achieve the same result. And because we have a functioning bureaucracy and a competent staff in our Department of Public Works who are diligently implementing an evidence-based, systems-level approach to road safety and a fiscal sustainability strategy as instructed by council, Cleary’s motion will come back to council suggesting high fees and a schedule to raise them to make our streets safer and more sustainable. Unless, of course, we don’t actually have a functioning bureaucracy.

This article appears in Dec 19, 2024 – Jan 31, 2025.