Halifax is finally able to think about non-car options

Halifax’s budget debates, specifically the Department of Public Works budget, is where hope for the future goes to die. Even though there are reasons for optimism, it’s hard to maintain that optimism in the face of Halifax’s dire affliction: This city is suffering from a severe case of the tragedy of the commons.

Before the tragedy, the good news. Halifax is finally starting to take its long-term transportation planning seriously. This is now evident in a few ways. In the Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency budget debates, chief Ken Steubing told council that speedbumps slow response times, and that he and the city’s new chief operations officer, Brad Anguish, are coming up with a plan to change how to make our streets safe because speedbumps ain’t it.

To summarize a few years of staff reports and municipal debates, the issue with speedbumps is that they don’t do anything for road safety. Speed humps are installed in the HRM to give citizens the “perception of safety,” but we don’t track data on whether or not they actually make roads safer. The roads in the HRM, regardless of whether it’s local, collector or arterial, are designed to make driving easier, so we have wide straight lanes to encourage quick and easy car trips. However, since roads designed for quick and easy trips are also roads that encourage people to speed, everybody speeds all the time because that’s what our roads are designed to make us do.

Since everybody speeds all the time, we install speed humps to try and correct fundamental issues with our road design, but in doing so, we increase the cost of road maintenance, increase emergency response times and increase the complexity of snow removal in exchange for not making our roads any safer. During the budget debates councillors asked city staff if we had ever tried evidenced-based things like narrowing roadways, instead of adding lumps of asphalt to local roads designed like highways. New Department of Public Works head Lucas Pitts told councillors that yes, this past year, in fact, the city had narrowed roadways instead of adding speed humps when roads were being repaved.

However, since Gregory Road in front of Joseph Giles elementary school was repaved last year, and city staff did add speed humps but did not add bike lanes, substantially improve pedestrian crossing infrastructure or narrow the road, The Coast asked how many streets were recapped last year and how many of those roads were narrowed in the process. A city spokesperson responded by email writing “traffic calming measures were installed on 95 streets within the 2024/2025 fiscal year. Street narrowing examples include Almon Street and Coburg Road.” City staff could not confirm whether or not any more than those two roads were narrowed last fiscal year.

The city needs a better solution to our fatal transportation network than speedbumps, and we need one that incorporates all the transportation demands placed on our network, like the needs of emergency responders. So on top of the fire chief talking to the operations chief, the city has stood up two new municipal departments: The Major Projects Office ($783,500) and the Strategic Infrastructure & Transportation Planning department ($1.7 million). The city knows that to achieve the stated goals of various municipal plans, how we move around this city needs to change fundamentally. But for that change to be successful, we need to change our infrastructure because we have spent the better part of 70 years destroying our city to accommodate car traffic. And changing our infrastructure piecemeal, one project at a time, is not going well due to the lack of a larger, coherent, actionable, integrated mobility plan.

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But now, almost eight years and three months after passing the Integrated Mobility Plan, Halifax’s bureaucracy has integrated its mobility planning into municipal transportation infrastructure planning. Whether we become a bike mecca like Copenhagen, a light rail leader like Hong Kong, a bustling bus city like Zurich or something in between, this is the administrative bureaucratic foundation required to build a transportation network in Halifax that’s ready for the future. While it is justified to be frustrated or angry that this did not happen in 2019 like it should have, it has happened now.

  All of this good news could yet be undone by a council that refuses to use their powers to achieve their stated goals, like being fiscally responsible with taxpayer money. But here too, there is reason for optimism, even in Halifax’s existentially threatening Department of Public Works’ $118 million budget which passed after a long debate with no amendments.

Take, for example, council’s desire to be fiscally responsible with taxpayer money. During the DPW budget debate, councillor Jean St-Amand asked why the city prioritizes speedbumps as traffic calming, since they don’t seem to be that effective at making things safer, and they slow down emergency response times. The answer, as it is every time councillors have asked this question for the past decade, is that council passed the traffic calming Administrative Order in 2015. Council is spending taxpayer money on infrastructure that’s slowing emergency response times and not making roads safer in order to make us feel safer in ways that are genuinely making our lives more dangerous. Is this a good, fiscally responsible use of taxpayer money?

But this new crop of councillors seems to have more political will than some of their veteran peers. There’s a report coming back to council Soon^™ about the impacts of traffic calming, and councillor St-Amand said he is “very interested in the practical effect of having the street calming where it is. I think left to our own devices, every resident would ask for every street to have speed humps and that’s not practical either.” Later on in the debate, St-Amand learned that council had the power to change the administrative order. “Oh, so that lies with us?” Absolutely, it’s a council approved administrative order. “Good to know,” said St-Amand. At the risk of setting expectations too high, it seems like this council has the appetite to change the traffic calming AO in positive ways, and these positive changes may have some political champions in a few of our rookie councillors like St-Amand.

Another rookie who’s showing a lot of promise is councillor Laura White, who spent much of her time asking incisive questions about Halifax’s transportation planning. One of her best questions was when she asked about roads and why they were considered an asset instead of a liability. In fiscal terms, an asset is something that earns money and a liability is something that costs money. So seeing as how we’re going to spend $1 billion on road maintenance in the next few years just so roads can be slightly worse in 2032 than they were in 2022, shouldn’t that be considered a liability? Yes, but roads are an asset class, not an asset specifically, which in too-simplistic plain English means both that roads are something we own and roads allow people to move around Halifax, which allows the city to generate tax revenue—even though roads cost a metric boatload of money in hourly maintenance.

The fiscal unsustainability of Halifax’s transportation network is the single largest alarm that is sounding in Halifax’s municipal bureaucracy, and it’s been clanging for a while. But in order to hear the discordant tones of your municipal democracy’s blaring alarm, there is some important context that makes it easier to hear.

The city of New York recently passed a law tolling drivers $9 to enter the city, and the results have been dramatic. Injuries and deaths? Way down. Congestion? Gone. Transit times? Faster. Public transit? Funded. In other words, it looks like New York achieved most if not all of our city and council’s stated goals by charging drivers $9 to enter downtown. Although the city of Halifax can’t implement congestion pricing in this way, it could absolutely achieve the same outcomes by increasing parking fees to like $5/hr at all times of day, every day of the week.

The Department of Public Works, like all municipal departments, is supposed to be following the Tax and Fee Revenue Strategy. This strategy directs the city’s various business units to look for opportunities to raise money within their department. Departments like Halifax Transit and Parks and Rec have suggested things like raising user fees to cover the costs of their department. Halifax Transit has a similar budget to DPW but recovers just under half of it back through fees and special area rate taxes. The DPW could, at any time, suggest to council a raise in parking fees to offset the cost of their department, which runs at a massive $100 million/year deficit. This budget year city staff have not brought any budget unders (service cuts or fee increases) for council’s consideration. Why did DPW not recommend increasing parking fees?

Councillors, with no exception, say they want to see a fiscally responsible and sustainable city. All of our councillors say they want to keep our taxes low, and they could do this with the DPW by charging user fees and taking some automotive maintenance costs out of the general rate. Councillors say they want safer streets, better transit, less congestion. All of this could be achieved by raising parking fees, and unlike the solutions to a lot of municipal issues, raising parking fees is explicitly and exclusively within their power to do. So why did none of them even try to use their power to achieve their stated goals and make a motion to raise parking fees?

There is no good answer to this question, because the answer is that our bureaucracy and councillors are just straight failing a relatively simple test of their capability to do good governance.

This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.