Councillor Jennifer Watts (Connaught-Quinpool) says the planning efforts to widen Bayers Road go back to 1994. “Things have changed since then, so does [widening roads] reflect the reality today?” she asks. “Construction costing is based on oil-based products and the numbers are unbelievable—$292 million for the construction costs alone, from the actual Stanec study, for the whole 102/Bayers project.”
Watts makes a good point. Things looked rosier in 1994, or even in 2006 when the regional plan was adopted; our blinkers were more firmly affixed. People are starting to clue in to the fact that bigger roads inevitably draw more traffic, sucking us back to square one with more SUVs in our way than before. People are observing the irreversible ascent of oil prices and impending catastrophic climate change and thinking twice about how we get around.
Sadly, it seems those people don’t include our city planners. They’ve got blueprints, damn it! A road network functional plan. A corridor study. These link back to the regional plan. It specifically lists widening Bayers Road as a planned project. If the road network functional plan is adopted—that decision has been deferred until September— the project will practically be a Commandment: Widen or face plague.
HRM staff handily list alternative courses of action in every report. In the road network functional plan submitted to the Transportation Standing Committee on June 23, they state, “Regional Council may choose not to adopt this plan. This is not recommended as this document simply provides background to a set of recommendations which was approved as part of the Regional MPS [Municipal Planning Strategy].” The first plan says so, this plan affirms it, shut up and do it.
Bayers Road is one of many projects planned in the road network functional plan. There’s a new intersection at Burnside/Commodore Drive, a new Wright Avenue Extension, a new Highway 107 Extension, a Herring Cove Road widening, a Mount Hope Avenue extension, a Bedford South Interchange, a Middle Sackville Connector and a Highway 101 Connector and Interchange. No one knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars that will all cost.
Long-term planning is one of our city’s more noble attempts at reasonable foresight. But rigid adherence to out-of-date plans is worse than having no plan at all. Yes, some constants remain. Our population is still growing. Housing in the urban core is still expensive. Most of the jobs are still in the urban core.
And bureaucratic and political imaginations still haven’t incorporated an alternative to road building to accommodate the growing suburban population. The road plan calls the regional plan’s goal of having 23 percent of person-trips by active or public transportation “an ambitious initiative that will require very substantial investments in active transportation (i.e. bicycle and trail facilities), public transit systems and the infrastructure associated with deploying that transit fleet effectively.”
This “very substantial investment” is a fraction of the cost of building for cars. Compare that $292 million figure to Metro Transit’s planned increased capital and operating costs of $20.5 million by 2015. Consultant reports observe that a metre squared of active transportation trail costs $40, while a metre of four-lane arterial roadway costs $2,060, and six lanes is $3,010.
To its credit, the road plan states that “if widening is to occur it should be focused on supporting bus transit (in the form of queue jump lanes or bus only lanes) or carpooling (in the form of high occupancy vehicle lanes) initiatives.” It recommends considering road tolls, maximum parking allowances for new developments, and educating employers about “travel demand management.”
The report is clear that all these roads should be linked with active transportation routes to major employment areas. But that’s lip service compared to the perpetual spending on roads. The fundamental naivete the flawed belief that you can solve the problem of too many cars by building too many roads, remains.
“With major growth centres identified for Bedford South and Bedford West,” the report argues, “traffic demand on Highway 102 and Bayers Road is certain to increase even with good transit service in place.” This is the big lie, and it relies on the subjectivity of the term “good.” However “good” HRM thinks its transit planning is, it’s not good enough if it allows more motor vehicle traffic as catastrophic climate change looms.
This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2011.
Jobs are already shifting from the urban core to the suburban areas (RIM,etc) and more people can stay home and work online now. In another 10-20 years, the peninsula’s traffic problem will disapear on its own.
If HRM & the province want to spend that kind of money I suggest they spend some time on the peninsula looking for opportunities to move certain commercial enterprises off the peninsula and then build family homes on smaller lots and greater density to support existing schools. I would start at reviewing possible opportunities to the north of North Street and as far as Bedford Basin; lots of great areas for housing but the land may need to be cleaned up.
Working with outdated ideas about urban development and transportation solutions has been a problem for Halifax since the Regional Plan was brought down on two sacred tablets from heaven (I assume). Can’t we change the plan and be more creative in our solutions…Halifax will become a great big parking lot during the day and an abandoned city on the weekends.
What have other cities in North America done? Look at Ottawa and Tuscon for example..They have actually narrowed roads to save the city core.
The problem may be that road engineers only talk to other road engineers and not to planners. Let’s expand the dialogue a bit and include some creative solutions.
Unfortunately Halifax’s unique charm doesn’t extend into its planning department. As is the case in most of urban Canada, planners in the city cling to the dinosaur model of mass automobility, refusing to imagine a paradigm shift through cycling and LRT. Will Halifax have to grow to 600,000 or 700,000 before it considers BRT, one million before it builds LRT? Or can it skip the cue, reject conventional wisdom, and construct creative, healthy travel systems today? My money’s on listening to the younger planners who already bike to work.
“suburban areas (RIM,etc) ” LOL OKay buddy, RIm wont even be around in another 5 years the company is starting to go under and they are cutting a mass amount of jobs.
Rim…………………….etc. Yeah exactly, lol. There is nothing in the suburbs except for Burnside or BLIP
Don’t forget Dartmouth Crossing and Bedford Commons, both intending to add housing to their odious developments.
Long-term planning is fine as long as the end decision is based in the reality of the present while taking into account future possibilities. So do they think oil prices are going to go down?
As for bike lanes, build them and they will come. It has been proven in numerous cities that ridership increases after the bike lanes are put in. For all those fair weather cyclists and people on the fence about cycle commuting. Having a simple line painted on the road separating them from the traffic makes all the difference, and even more so if the is an actual partition. Anyone who has ridden in Vancouver, Victoria, or Montréal’s bike lanes will agree.
If the road is going to be widened, then the recommendation in the report that the extra lane be used for public transit (queue jumping) is what the lane should be for. This area is a huge bottle neck for many transit routes getting into and out of the core from the suburbs and if a queue jumping lane were there, I’m sure it would help.
But we really need to start investing in alternate forms of transit. Regional rail has been on the drawing board for how long? Would it work? Well – maybe, if we can get the right trains, level of service and a solid way to get people from the train station. If you do regional rail, Mumford and the train station should be the main connection points – with routes out from each point to the downtown core, universities and hospitals. But you need to make sure that if a train arrives, there is a bus waiting for them.
The other mode of transit that has been talked about is fast ferries and there has been good work on this. It will take about 5 years for this to go, because you’d have to build the vessels and it takes about ayear or so per ship, but the test they did worked well. The harbour speed limits can be changed, simply by request to federal government. We need to get out of this old habit of just building roads – that doesn’t fix anything.
Bike lanes are the current boondoggle du jour. Fair-weather cyclists cannot possibly justify the expense of millions of tax dollars while the vast majority of taxpayers sit idling in gridlock on a 1950s road infrastructure. The Toronto experience is instructive, where a huge expense was incurred to add bike lanes that resulted in another 100 bike trips per day – 50 commuters, in other words. Hardly cost effective. This road project badly needs to be done and I hope it proceeds.