Who does HRM contract to pave roads in this city? The roads here are the cheapest and lowest quality I have ever seen, even comapared to small cities in China and Vietnam. I thought HRM would have the expertise and if not that then at least the brains to understand that hiring “Walmart” to build our streets will result in the shit we see now that needs to be rebuilt every two years. The only good street in Halifax I have seen is Inglis Street beside SMU. It’s actually smooth, lighter coloured, and no cracks at all. Peter Kelly, find who built this road and ask them to pave the rest of HRM’s roads, if you spend money on something, don’t buy the cheapest shit you can find, you’re sending your citizens and tourists a cheap and insulting message.
—cptstubing
This article appears in Apr 2-8, 2009.
Inglis Street is six months old. Give it time, it’ll fall apart too.
We have this thing in Halifax. It’s called “weather.” Perfectly designed for potholes, more than anywhere else on Earth.
Yet another fine example of the backward thinking of the HRM leaders. Maybe someone should educate these people on the basics of economics. WalMart is an American owned company. When we elect to send our money over the border… what happens? Sure we might spend less up front money on the road but what about the opportunity to keep the money (Canadian corporate tax), resources and jobs (tax payers!) on THIS side of the border. Our American “cousins” tout BUY AMERICAN as a viable response to the current financial crisis… Peter Kelly should take a lesson or two from Obama and learn what happens when you stimulate an economy by creating jobs and revenue flows on THIS side of the border.
kay– I can assure you that Walmart does not pave our roads.
A lot of the work is done by Peter Kelly’s brothers. They’re owners of one of about three firms win most of the paving contracts locally.
I’ve long thought we should use the European model– the company that builds the road has to maintain it. You get much better roads that way. Of course, most of the roads in the urban areas go way back, so that wouldn’t get us much.
Actually most of the resurfacing jobs last year went to the Miller Group, a completely Canadian company. There are a number of problems with doing roadwork in Halifax. The first problem is that the weather here, as Tim mentioned, is perfect pothole weather. We get deep-ass ravine sized potholes. Other cities that have bad winters don’t see it this bad. Winnipeg, they see hardly any because the ground is soft and they stay frozen for most of the winter. Montreal get them, but not as bad, because there’s less freeze/defrost cycles. Secondly and this seems to be a Halifax problem and I’ve never been able to wrap my head around it; we don’t do roadwork at night. For some reason it has to start during the start of morning rush hour and finish slightly before the supper rush hour. It leads to rushed jobs, and slightly less quality. Finally, I just feel that HRM can’t keep up sometimes. I mean, the province gives them no help whatsoever (with the exception of the 100 series highways that go to and from the city) with this task. It’s must be extremely expensive to keep these roads in decent repair, especially given the damage after just one winter. The only thing that I can think of is to keep large, heavy vehicles, out of the main route and side streets, and create a main route for them to take to reduce wear and tear on some of our more important streets (Hollis comes to mind).
Kay— just as an aside, the US economy has lost approx. 600 K jobs in the past 6 months. They haven’t created one job with this “stimulus package” yet. We won’t see an effect of this yet until next year. Canada on the other hand, did not have to create a “stimulus package” if the central Ontario didn’t have a concentration of Auto manufacturers. Think of it like the Cod fishery drying up in Newfoundland. That’s the effect it would have. Except, in this case there are 3 times the amount of people and all of them are in the middle class (unlike our fishery friends, who were able to spend a bundle of money once a year and suck off the system the rest), who are the largest tax payers in this country. “Buying Canadian” has nothing to do with it, in fact most large Canadian companies have large American stockholders. So buying Canadian is a bit moot.
My poor truck! It needs new shocks. I have to put some of the blame on the roads of Dartmouth and Halifax.
Tim Bousquet,
Inglis Street between Tower and Robie is more than half a year old. Next time notice the surface quality is different than any other road in the city. It has lasted at least 3 years patch-free!
I also can’t help but point out that every other place on earth has this thing called “weather”. Our roads aren’t built well which is why they crack.
Perhaps geothermal cooling/heating is a possibility. Pipes under the road would collect heat in the summer to keep roads warm in the winter, and collect cooling in the winter to keep them cooler in the summer months, thus reducing the contracting/expanding cycles. It works in Europe.
Please take note I said ‘Walmart’ and not Walmart.
Pete doesn’t have time to worry about roads. He’s too busy getting the next big concert for the Commons.
Stu- your idea is fine, but we don’t exactly have a source of geothermal here. This isn’t exactly Japan.
When the government decides to pave a road they open it to bids. The lowest bid wins. Lowest bid=cheapest materials.
Following this, the roads fall apart and needs to be repaired. Again, they are bid on, lowest bid wins (same company) with the cheapest materials.
The cycle goes on forever.
No government has the balls to pave them properly, i.e. with reinforced steel, because that costs a lot and then they have less money to spend on other shit and the opposition and the public goes “ohh what about the nurses and the old age homes and the schools and universities and the CBC and blah blah blah blah”
THE wall mart
Fever,
Japan has geothermal yes as they share the same fault line as Taiwan and Philippines, but England doesn’t and they have implemented geothermal on their roads. Actually just digging down below the frost line is a way to take the ambient temperature of the earth and using it to heat roads. Regardless of location.
HRM tenders out all paving contracts. Any company that can do the job and is a qualified firm, is more than welcome to bid. The winning company is the company that bids the lowest price. The majority of the companies that win these contracts are Dexter, Ocean, and Lafarge. There are a few others that get in there, too, but these are the main three. Miller is not the one who does the most of HRM’s jobs. Check out http://www.halifax.ca/procurement/TenderRF… to see all paving tenders in the last year if you don’t believe me.
Does Peter Kelly have brothers in these firms? I don’t know, but it’s irrelevant if he does, it doesn’t factor one way or the other into the awarding of the jobs. Price and the ability of the firm to do the job are the only criteria.
I’d say look more into what materials for paving that are requested in the tender specifications than blaming the contractors doing the work. I suspect that’s where the problem lay. If the grade of asphalt is lacking, but that’s what was asked for, then that’s not the contractor’s fault.
Every other place has weather, sure. But they don’t have freeze/thaw cycles with lots and lots of precipitation to the extent we do. We’re tops. You could not design better weather for potholes.
“But they don’t have freeze/thaw cycles with lots and lots of precipitation to the extent we do. We’re tops.”
There’s loads of places in Canada, the USA, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, etc. which have worse conditions in regards to the forming of pot holes.
I agree with Yorke and also you as well to an extent Tim, but if this place is indeed the freeze/thaw capital of the world or something, we should have had the solutions to this problem before anyone else in the world, and we don’t.
Walmart building roads? What’s next? Tim’s building houses?
Yorkke– Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia? Really? All 4 of those countries have Arctic weather cycles that are worse than most of our cities that are actually in the Arctic. In fact, they stay frozen for most of the year. What temperate weather they do have comes in very slowly, unlike ours, where there are multiple times throughout the season where we freeze, then thaw. I’d love top know what US city has a cycle similar to ours, in all honesty. Finally, Stu, yes, the UK has geothermal, but most cities in the UK have twice the capital that this city has. Not to mention, London itself has about gets about 2/3rd of our GDP year after year and geothermal isn’t cheap….
Dr. Fever,
Probably Boston and above, so Portland and Agusta as well. Anywhere along the coast but no further south than Boston.
I know geothermal is expensive, but so are two high speed passenger ferries and so is repaving every two years. It would be ideal to test a section of road out with geothermal, maybe a high volume street that could benefit from not seeing a plough every 10 minutes in a snow storm, such as Barrington.
If we’re gonna get geothermal, there are a hell of a lot better places to use it than on roads.
Boston actually sees less precipitation than us, and the temperature is more moderate (relatively speaking). We’re in a odd spot, mostly due to the fact that our weather is dictated by the Arctic flow (unlike our American counterparts) and the prevailing warmer winds from the Gulf of Mexico that travel up the Atlantic seaboard. We receive much different weather than Boston, et al. Your point of the geothermal being expensive as a high-speed ferry and so is repaving, however, high speed ferries don’t disrupt traffic or tear up entire sections of road, and repaving can be done in a relatively short time frame. Putting geothermal into the existing infrastructure would require a shut down of a specific area, and given the problems we have with traffic now and how congested it is in the main arteries, we cannot afford that.
Boston and Halifax are both zone 6a or b, not a lot of temperature variance between the two places with the exception of summer months, but I would imagine we do have more precip in Halifax. Even so, yes a ferry doesn’t chew up streets or disrupt traffic, but they’re unnecessary expenses that could go towards median bus lane setups and widening of bedford highway. i digress.
I once lived in Boston and I’ve gotta say its hardly different. Summers are hotter though. Just be happy we didn’t have to deal with that Big Dig digestive tract explosion. That was enough to make your brains liquify.
German engineers use recycled tires in their asphalt. The effect is roads that expand and contract without cracking. The other option might be concrete.
Thats a great idea! (the tires in the road idea)
if we all had hovercars, would they fly all wonky because of the potholes? If hovercars can’t solve the problem, I don’t know what can.
I agree that the “Walmart” approach is used in this 0-bit town. Everyone knows that the weather here is terrible in the winter (freeze/thaw anyways), so build the roads right. Have a good base that DRAINS the water rather than keep it where is freezes and expands. This alone would help a great deal. Recycle tires in the pavement, that sounds like it would be good as well.
As it was pointed out, the problem lies in the way the municipality has to do the tenders, it has to go with the cheapest one. So you get what you pay for, dumb fucks! Or is it we get what we “pay” for since it is OUR money…
Use cement. I can’t recall any patch holes in Oxford stretch of the 104 and maybe 3 on the Mt Uniake of the 101.
It might not be WalMart but it might as well be. For an example, check this tender award:
http://halifax.ca/council/agendasc/documen…
So Sackville Trenching (there’s a comforting name for a company) undercuts the next lowest bidder by 1/3 and is 60% of the high bid price. Imagine the quality of work this is going to be.
Speaking of Miller: they did a lot of work last year on a street nearby. Those sections are now cratered again. A total waste of money. Wonder if they give a warranty.
the freeze/thaw cycles aren’t even that bad this year…
I mean Maple trees are the best indicator of that I’ve found.
They’re all screaming this year that production is down and it’s going to be a short season because it’s either staying too cold or staying too warm at night and not getting cold enough for the sap to run.
I do know first hand, I made a batch just this past weekend.
What should have been 9 buckets of collection was barely 6 (we didn’t have pipes so we collected the sap by hand from tree to tree).
Anyhoo, this is the worst year for sap easily in the past 5 years because the weather’s been always cold or always warm between days and nights.
Point being, the shit they use to fill potholes may as well be made out of TTFN’s ass-shining SoS pads because it ain’t making a fuck of a difference. I don’t know enough about it but if I had to choose,I would agree that cement would be the way to go.
Keith thanks for that info, that’s disgusting, i’m really disappointed there is no mention of exactly how the company will do the work, only that it will take six weeks to dump more ashphalt on the road that is already there and jump up and down on it to pack it down.
FYI – almost all tenders (especially Government – run) have a little fine-print note on the bottom that states that the contract is NOT always awarded to the lowest bidder. They do this so that they can not get screwed when they hire the highest bidder who happens to be a family member, boinking their daughter, etc.
Oh, and don’t think for one minute that the tender process is closed – more often than not, someone on the committee who “votes” on the tenders is contacting the companies putting in bids, and telling them EXACTLY what they have to put into their bid to win the contract.
Trust me, I used to work in this area. This kind of stuff is why I stopped.
So, when you give a contract to the lowest bidder, shouldn’t there be expectations written into that contract about how long their work should hold up? Can’t you write into the contract what types of materials they have to use and what standard you expect?
There’s nothing wrong with going for the lowest bidder as long as you cover your ass against shoddy workmanship.