Halifax Transit gave its budget presentation late on Feb 20 and early into Feb 21, on days two and three of the budget debates about Halifax’s operations business units. Even as Halifax Transit is bringing back routes lost to COVID and adding $1 million in new spending, its annual budget is down $7.9 million. All in all Halifax Transit spends $146,527,700 but brings in $85,815,600 through fees and special area rate taxes, totalling a $60.7 million cost to taxpayers in net expenditures.
During the budget debates, deputy mayor Tony Mancini was given the leeway to ask a non-budget-related question and instead asked recently hired Halifax Transit boss Robin Gerus to introduce himself to Haligonians. Gerus told council he used to “drive streetcar” for the Toronto Transit Commission before working his way up the ranks. After being with the TTC, Gerus moved to Guelph, where he was the transit head for the better part of eight years. While in Guelph, he worked on their Future Ready Action Plan for public transit. But a plan on a page isn’t worth the ink it’s printed with if the people who ride the bus don’t notice any improvements. The good news here is that anecdotally speaking, riders of Guelph Transit who responded to a Coast call for feedback said they noticed a mild to massive improvement in the city’s formerly underwhelming transit system, even if individual route complaints, like late buses, persist.
Gerus has only been on the Halifax Transit job for three weeks, but so far, he is talking the talk. In answers to councillors’ questions during the budget debate, he explained that Transit’s main strength and main vulnerability are the same: its drivers. Drivers account for $100 million of spending in Transit’s $146 million budget. If you treat them horribly, they will leave, and if they leave that causes a slew of other problems any rider of Halifax Transit is familiar with. Gerus explained that in order to have better public transit, we need to have better working conditions for drivers, and that’s why Halifax is putting temporary staff bathroom trailers along busy transit corridors.
Transit still has some massive issues. For example, on Feb 19, the day before Gerus gave his presentation, the Alderney Ferry was cancelled 15 minutes before the 7:15 ferry departure. No shuttle was provided (which prevented The Coast’s city hall reporter from attending the budget meeting in person). Then on February 26 the Woodside ferry was cancelled, and no shuttle was provided.
As Gerus explained, incidents like these can lose someone as a transit rider for life. Because even though cars are realistically outside of the budget of many Haligonians—a car costs an average of $32,600 to $77,508 in household capital costs and about $9,966 to $17,208 in annual household operating costs—and require people to take on massive amounts of risky personal debt to obtain them. But being oppressed by debt and being employable is better than not having a car and not being reliable enough to be employable thanks to things like short notice ferry cancellations with no shuttles.
Halifax Transit is trying to make its service more reliable more of the time, and it was helped in this effort by councillor Kathryn Morse, who put a Budget Adjustment List motion on the floor that council spend $2,137,700 to extend the life of 10 Halifax Transit buses beyond their planned retirement date. Councillors Cathy Deagle Gammon and Trish Purdy voted against, but this still got a majority, so new spending on old buses will be sent to the budget playoffs, the Budget Adjustment List debates, where it will be debated along with all the other items on council’s budget wishlist.
All in all, Halifax Transit’s future is starting to trend in the right direction, but there is one massive hurdle Gerus and Halifax Transit will have to overcome to be successful, and that’s council. Even though councillors say they want to make public transportation better when they are focused on Transit’s budget, they won’t stop making the policy choices in other areas that make transit an unviable transportation option for so many Haligonians.
Right after Halifax Transit presented its budget, Transit’s 70-year nemesis, the Planning and Development business unit, presented its $10.3 million budget. This debate itself was largely unremarkable. Councillor Sam Austin sent two heritage planning positions sent to the BAL ($310,000), with mayor Andy Fillmore, councillors Tony Mancini, Janet Steele, Deagle Gammon, and Purdy unsuccessfully voting no. After that, the business unit’s budget was approved in principle in its entirety. But during the planning budget debates, the ongoing suburban planning process came up. This planning exercise is vital for the city’s future and Halifax Transit’s success, because suburban land use and its anti-transit unsustainable development incentives are major reasons this city is dying.
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The city you love is dying: Halifax’s sustainability crisis explained
This problem is much easier to see when zoomed out and starting from the past, so come along as we take a little history trip into the weeds.
North American cities first started this slow policy shift to unsustainability when cities grew primarily by rich people buying cheap land on the outskirts of cities. It was cheap because no one could access it, making the land functionally useless. So, to increase the value of their land holdings, the landowners built mass transit to make their lands accessible and thus get a return on their investment. Transit was built not as a public service but by private companies as a loss leader for real estate, and thus, streetcar suburbs were born.
In the 1940s, as private automobiles gained popularity, streetcars were bought up by car companies and, for some reason, almost immediately started falling into disrepair. Even though the problem with congestion and the physics of four-wheeled vehicles pre-date the automobile by a few thousand years (ancient Rome had a strict daylight-hours ban on cart traffic, and installed physical barriers and modal filters to keep carts out of pedestrian areas), people were somehow still surprised by the almost-immediate congestion when automobiles started gaining popularity as a mode of transportation. Combine economic incentives like Eisenhower’s post-war highway funding and the 1930s automotive trade agreement between Canada and the USA, and like magic, there’s a massive demand for both cars and car infrastructure.
In response to this demand, cities started picking up transportation infrastructure costs and building and maintaining roads. This led to the developers we started seeing in the 1960s, such as Clayton Park developer Shaw Brick, building single-family homes in the suburbs. Even though single-family home developments tend to have a lower return on investment than larger development projects, their lower up-front cost and cost per unit make single-family-home subdivisions popular with developers.
However, the low population density of suburbs dominated by single-family homes has very real costs to the city and to the people who live there. According to an HRM study, the city pays twice the amount to provide services—water, sewage, public transit, fire protection and so on—to suburban homes than urban ones. At the same time, there are relatively fewer people paying property taxes to the city, making the suburbs fundamentally, foundationally, fiscally unsustainable for Halifax. This drain on the budget means, among other things, the city does not usually have money left over to invest in socially beneficial loss leaders like Halifax Transit.
The huge amounts of space between people in suburban areas is also a policy choice made by past iterations of the Planning and Development business unit, which dictated what developers were allowed to build per land use bylaws and municipal planning strategies in the past. This also means that by policy, the HRM’s suburbs were developed lacking the density to make Transit fiscally viable, even as a social good loss leader. In very real terms, this means Haligonians who live in the suburbs are also subsidizing real estate development profits by being forced to pay for their own transportation. Given the spaces involved and the lack of bike infrastructure, we’re talking about a car—at, you will recall, an average of $32,600 to $77,508 in capital costs and $9,966 to $17,208 in annual operating costs per vehicle. The operating cost of bus passes for a family of four with one teenager and one child under 12, would be $2,424, or $2,952, depending on the school.
Judging by the budget presentations from Halifax Transit and Planning and Development, it seems like those two municipal departments are ready and willing to tackle Halifax’s fundamental fiscal unsustainability. And it is genuinely good news that the city of Halifax may legitimately have a plan to address this unsustainability that you are subsidizing, making your life unaffordable, in this upcoming suburban plan.
Halifax will need a council willing to work hard and make hard decisions on ending the public’s automotive and real estate subsidies to achieve this goal. The bad news is that so far this budget season, our council has chosen to do fiscal sustainability theatre led by our mayor, who’s been lauded by councillors for his performative fiscal responsibility of $20 million in public service cuts that will likely save you about $100 in property taxes but likely to cost you a lot more to other parts of your budget than you’ll save in taxes. In much the same way that councils past have made rational but short-sighted policy decisions that have resulted in transportation costs to the average household of $32,600 to $77,508 in capital costs every 10 years or so and about $9,966 to $17,208 in annual household operating costs per vehicle for your personal transportation.
But more on that $20 million in service cuts in the future as The Coast continues its coverage of Halifax’s 2025 budget season.
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.