Much like that other saviour, Jesus Christ, the Windsor Street Exchange redesign project came back to life at Tuesday, Feb 25’s council meeting after a brief period of being dead.
Last month, council crucified city staff for not prioritizing council’s priorities in the new design for the Windsor Street Exchange and rejected staff’s proposal. One of the big issues with that design was council’s instructions. Back in 2023 at the start of this, council instructed city staff to enter into a phased design-build process and design the project in such a way that it would qualify for federal funding, then halfway through the process after seeing some initial designs, council instructed staff to follow council priorities around non-car transportation and do a redesign. Staff, in trying to make compromises between those three mostly incompatible priorities—contractual obligations from the design-build process, federal funding requirements, and council priorities—came up with a hot mess of a design. As a result the Windsor Street Exchange met its end when council voted to reject the hot mess when it was put in front of them last month.
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Except, it didn’t meet its end because city staff still have longstanding instructions from council to redesign the Windsor Street Exchange to follow council priorities in such a way that it would qualify for federal funding and meet contractual design-build obligations. Those instructions weren’t revoked or cancelled when the last design was rejected, so when the rest of us figured the project was dead, staff just went back to the drawing board to figure out how to meet federal funding requirements, council priorities and continue the phased construction contract we’ve already signed. And they needed to get council’s approval on this new strategy, which is why staff brought this report forward for council’s approval at this meeting.
As explained by staff, the new plan starts
exactly the same: a phase one widening to create a transit lane while keeping the car lanes. But a transit lane at the intersection is useless when there’s congestion, because the buses can get stuck in traffic leading up the intersection. To solve this, city staff are also going to figure out how to prioritize transit in the network around the exchange and then on phase two, in six years’ time or so, start re-allocating road space and redeveloping the network leading up to the intersection. This is how, on Feb 25, 2025, after a few failed attempts by city staff, city councillors got to see the plan they instructed staff to produce on August 24, 2023.
City staff explained that when the lane allocation and phase two were complete, the Windsor Street Exchange would meet all of council’s priorities and still qualify for the federal funding. On top of that, going ahead with phase one means the city can get roadwork done at the same time Halifax Water does their required work, and everyone saves money and disruptions in a transportation hub are kept to a minimum.
Councillors did have some concerns, like the fact that this design still seems pretty car-focused. Staff explained that this is in part because of the federal funding requirement for truck access. Anything that makes the intersection better for trucks will naturally encourage car traffic and work against council’s goals. Staff assured council that they had planned for other modes of travel as required by the Multi-Modal Level of Service Framework. However, staff’s 99-page “multi-modal” analysis is still extremely car-centric and relies heavily on the extremely flawed evaluation process of “value engineering.”
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Councillor Laura White, who is incredibly strong on the transportation file and seems to have been a huge pickup for the city in the last election, wanted to know why we weren’t doing lane re-allocation in phase one if that would achieve all of council’s priorities. This led to an incredible moment where city staff explained that if they reallocated lanes to transit at the expense of car throughput, congestion would get really bad for drivers.
This is funny (not haha) because, in other words, staff said that if council prioritized transit at the expense of driving, driving might start to suck so bad that people would seriously consider taking transit. Meaning that if Halifax did lane re-allocation in phase one, the city might achieve its stated modal shift goals. And we wouldn’t want to use municipal powers to shape people’s behaviour to achieve our policy goals, now would we? This is Halifax, where we try to achieve our policy goals without changing anything and hope the outcomes we want magically produce themselves. But that needs to change because the resurrection of Windsor Street alone is not enough for Haligonians to keep the faith.
Things that passed
Councillor David Hendsbee’s motion to have a do-over on the decision to kill the Windsor Street redesign was unnecessary and died on the order paper.
6 First Avenue in Bedford became a heritage property.
Councillor Trish Purdy’s motion from a previous meeting got council a briefing on the annual Public Safety Strategy report. This was just an information item, but the TL;DR is that the city of Halifax has taken a big swing at redefining public safety, and so far, the work is progressing well and showing early signs of promise. This type of societal reform is incredibly slow-moving, but early actions seem positive.
Councillor White pulled an information item about the HRM response to the Halifax Independent Civilian Review into the Aug 18, 2021 encampment evictions onto the agenda. She just wanted to make sure Halifax was still considering an apology, because some reporting had made it seem like the city wasn’t. Procedurally speaking this debate was to inform a staff report that will come back later with recommendations, like (probably) making an apology. During this debate, councillor Tony Mancini continued his odd campaign to make sure that if the city was taking blame for making mistakes on Aug 18, 2021 that former NSNDP leader Gary Burrill also took some blame for inciting Haligonians at the protest. This is an odd line of rhetoric for Mancini, who does not normally engage in such political attacks. It’s also an odd accusation to level at the soft-spoken Burrill, because if the former NSNDP leader had the skillset to incite a public uprising, he’d be the premier of Nova Scotia right now.
Halifax is going to get an official Tartan, Soon™.
Melissa Chunick is Halifax’s newest development officer, congratulations.
A two-storey office building will be going up at 1274 Hammonds Plains Road in the near future. This development got first reading and will be heard at a public hearing at a future meeting.
As discussed in the intro, the Windsor Street Exchange is back from the dead. All in all the new plan looks promising and is what should have been presented to council when they first asked for it.
Council is going to get some staff reports about kicking some funding to the Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame ($300,000) and a potential aquarium ($200,000). They also approved giving RadStorm $100,000.
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Halifax is considering getting a new police headquarters, and city staff have been instructed to look at potential sites. Councillor Sam Austin wanted to know why the city needs six acres of land for a police HQ when other cities manage HQs in urban parts of their cities. And if we want community policing, we need our HQ to be in a community, not in a place like the Burnside Industrial Park. So have we considered maybe building up instead of out when consolidating services? The cops explained that they would love to densify, but they needed all that space for core police services, like surface parking for employees.
It should not need to be said, but parking for employees is not a core police service. In fact, the city runs a public transportation service that is constantly criticized for being unsafe. We also pay police officers overtime for core parts of their job, like going to court to testify, patrolling Alderney Landing or protecting city councillors during council meetings. Why on earth are we considering razing part of our city for parking instead of not charging or paying cops to take the bus to work? Reduce congestion, make transit safer and more efficiently use public resources to save taxpayers money? Get out of here, we hate that shit in Halifax.
Councillor Virginia Hinch put a motion on the floor asking if the city can buy back Bloomfield after it burned down. After a brief debate about whether or not in-camera was required, this passed and will get a staff report.
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Councillor Patty Cuttell wants the province to reconsider their requirement to limit ground-floor commercial space on mixed-use zoning in the upcoming suburban planning process, and council agreed to send a letter to the province asking for this change.
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.
Bloomfield property looks like prime real estate for a centrally located, in the community Police HQ. Densify-centralize different police outfits, justice departments etc. in one centrally located highrise. Make employees park underground like many other cities. Have roadside parking and underground parking for police vehicles…. Seems like a great idea for a great place to me🤷🏻♂️. Or is that make too much sense for Halifax City Councilors?? Thoughts??…
“This is Halifax [Nova Scotia, Canada, the world], where we try to achieve our policy goals without changing anything and hope the outcomes we want magically produce themselves.”
Not to dismiss any other part of Matt’s EXCELLENT writing, but the containing para of that sentence and the one above are the key ones in this piece. We know what needs to be done, we can do it, but we refuse to. Ditto the twinning of the highways down the South Shore. Not exactly the road to nowhere (I live there), but so much car-centric money being wasted in a time when we need fewer cars on the roads and more effective transit.