My five-year-old almost became fatherless today because I was cycling in the HRM. Portland Street in Dartmouth is a four-lane monstrosity where the speed limit is 50, but most people drive at least 70km/h, especially down the Breakheart Hill. (And enforcement is not an effective deterrent because suburban development doesn’t provide enough taxes to support the amount of enforcement that would be required.) The motor vehicle act says “(171)(4) A cyclist who is not riding in a bicycle lane shall ride as far to the right side of the roadway as practicable or on the right-hand shoulder of the roadway unless the cyclist is (d) encountering a condition on the roadway, including a fixed or moving object, parked or moving vehicle, pedestrian, animal or surface hazard that prevents the person from safely riding to the right side of the roadway.” And that “171B (1) A driver of a vehicle shall not pass a bicycle travelling in the same direction as the vehicle that is being ridden to the far right of the driver of the vehicle on the roadway, on the shoulder or in an adjacent bicycle lane unless (a) there is sufficient space to do so safely.”
On Breakheart Hill (and all roadways, really) the odds of someone on a bicycle being clipped by a large truck and sent flying onto the asphalt at over 50km/h are very high. That means the safest legal place for a cyclist to be is taking up enough of the lane to force motorists to be deliberate in their passing.
“That’s illegal bud,” yells the driver of the truck, describing my legal taking of space in the lane that prevented him from passing me dangerously. Then, when the opportunity to pass me presented itself in front of the Boston Pizza, the driver accelerated at me trying to hit me with his truck and trailer and end my life.
Shared responsibility is a lie. Do more to protect cyclists. My kid does not deserve to lose a father because local politicians care more about caving to the selfish demands of drivers than my safety and my son’s future.
This is especially callow of politicians expecting cyclists to wait for safety. People like me have started biking because politicians tell me this is what individual responsibility looks like. I am doing what I can to make the world a better place, which is what politicians are telling me is necessary for the future.
I’m likely going to get killed for it. Politicians: When are you going to do your part? Enough is enough.
The new regional plan will be discussed in the notable debates section because a truck driver tried to kill me, a legal road user, because I slightly annoyed him by obeying the law.
The driver’s share of the responsibility is to try to avoid killing me—if they fail, they get a fine.
My share of the responsibility is to try to stay alive—if I fail, my son has no father.
Shared responsibility is going to kill me.
Things that passed
The deferred Beechville street sign changes happened today—the changes can be found on page 7 of the report below.
Councillor Patty Cuttell put forward a motion that these changes needed to be deferred because people in her district complained about not being consulted. “I don’t think anyone is operating with a full deck of cards,” said Cuttell, after an hour and a half of debate that ended when her valiant effort to delay the correction of a historic injustice went nowhere. She then requested a staff report to end-run her defeated motion to see if she could appease the concerned residents of her district. It seems like it may be relevant to note here that the group of people protesting these corrections to the boundaries of one of Halifax’s historic Black communities could be described as a “historic community”—but they’re not Black. Cuttell then asked for a supplemental report, which should get her a bunch of information already available in the report she was given prior to today’s meeting. Council let itself be run around by Cuttell’s shenanigans, with only Shawn Cleary voting against the supplemental report. Council eventually decided to pass the initial motion that Cuttell had initially tried to defer. Cuttell voted in favour of the unchanged motion.
What a good use of everyone’s time. Except for staff’s time. They have to do another report duplicating the work of at least one other report. Good job, everyone. This is efficient government. High fives all around.
Councillor Pam Lovelace brought forward two information items—one was a motion that Lovelace put forward last year about creating cooling stations, and the other is about the ownership of Kemptown Road to make staff start thinking about how these two things can or should be used in the near future.
Since modern suburban life is so atomized and isolated, a lot of vulnerable people are on their own when it comes to surviving major storms that are amplified by our climate emergency. The city is starting a municipal program to start checking in on our most vulnerable atomized and isolated citizens with the voluntary vulnerable persons registry.
Clayton Developments, on behalf of SHX Developments Limited (Shannex) wants to make its planned development on Starboard Drive far more dense by adding the capacity to house 1,000 more people. The city’s starting the process to see if that’s cool.
The Youth Worx program is continuing, and expanding; instead of working at the Enviro Depot, new hires will be working at the Sackville Sports Stadium in a “small-scale food service operation.”
How the city is dealing with land lease communities (AKA trailer parks) may change. Land lease communities aren’t well regulated, which means the people who own them can get away with treating their renters poorly. These changes, should they come to pass, will mean land lease communities will be held to the same habitability and livability standards as any other community in the HRM. Should this bylaw pass as is, residents can expect things like safe drinking water, street lights and working fire equipment.
The city passed a motion to take advantage of federal housing money. The city will be spending $1,229,833.27. This money comes from the density bonus reserves, and will support three new affordable housing projects.
E-scooter regulation is coming to the HRM. City staff see the potential for scooters to help people with the “final mile” problem—i.e. when you get off the bus, how do you get to the specific place you are going? But council wants to make sure these scooters are only used on the road and have places to go when they are not being used. This legislation has only passed first reading, so expect it to change, but also expect scooters to be regulated in the near future. Will anyone be able to enforce these new rules? Smoking bylaws and speeding laws say not a chance in hell. If council wants to learn from their mistakes escooter regulation needs to be proactive. If the city relies on enforcement to shape human behaviour, e-scooters will continue to annoy people who complain the most to council.
The city is giving money to museums! Cole Habour Rural Heritage Society ($4,563), Lake Charlotte Area Heritage Society ($5,000), Army Museum ($23,000), Fultz Corner Restoration Society ($25,000), Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame ($20,000), Fort Sackville Foundation ($2,370).
The city is leasing 11 Station Road to Unicorn Theatre, and 15 Station Road to Safety Minded ATV Association, at less than market rate as part of the reorganization of the management structure of the Head of St. Margarets Bay’s community centre.
The city is giving money to community festivals and events. A full list can be found in this report, and it seems like this summer is going to be pretty fun.
Lovelace put forward a motion asking for staff to write a report about how to gear the 2023-24 city budget towards fixing the city’s fire vulnerabilities. This could be a deceptively transformative staff report as this would likely be the first full accounting on one narrow aspect of the city’s currently invisible infrastructure deficit.
Cuttell redeemed a bit of her debate performance late in the game when she put forward a motion for the city to try and figure out what community resources exist to help each other in an emergency and put together a comprehensive emergency plan. Councillor David Hendsbee told council that the Eastern Shore has been neglected for so long that it has a solid framework in place (depending on volunteer availability) that the city could crib for notes.
Finally, Cleary put forward a motion to try and see if Halifax has bureaucratic bloat. This may take some time, and will probably come back to the next council in a few years, but it’s been a while since council has had a good hard navel gaze, and it’s long overdue.
There was also a public hearing, but it was at the same time as Timbits soccer.
Notable Debates
The large regional plan review has been OK’ed by council and will now go out to us, the public, for consultation. Many councillors pointed out that their residents are already starting to feel jittery about what the densification could mean for them. People who live in suburbs with water and power service may get jittery when they learn that the land under their houses may be zoned for three units per lot instead of the current one.
And it’s early days, so things could change, but it’s worth pointing out that this will be a net positive short-term on property values and a net positive long-term on property values. Because the city is planning on preventing new development where there are no municipal services, the development money taps are going to turn on to densify the suburbs. Developers will be throwing cash around to lure homeowners out of their properties, which means anyone who wants to leave for beiger suburbs should have no issue doing so. And the long term data suggests that creating dense walkable communities only improves property values.
Deputy mayor Sam Austin put out a call to all nerds asking us to dig into the regional plan and give our feedback to the city. But if you are not a nerd and have some specific questions about this massive plan, we’ll do our best to get answers. Please reach out!
And in case the regional plan review was starting to give you optimism, councillors then spent the better part of an hour and a half debating whether they should defer moving the boundary of Goodwood over by one street, because a handful or residents were able to lobby their councillor and get her to delay a very minor change—a minor change city staff proposed only after years of extensive consultations with the people in the affected areas. But a handful or people on one street organized and managed to almost get correcting an injustice delayed.
While that is massively depressing, it shows the power of organizing. What could you do with a little bit of organization?
This article appears in Jun 1-30, 2023.
As a cyclist in HRM, it’s crazy to have to drive my car out of the city in order to find quieter, safer, less hostile roads to cycle. I can get downtown using back streets but wouldn’t be caught dead (literally!) on the many four-lane ‘streets’ like Robie and Portland Streets. Matt Strickland is right – drivers push us over to the side of the road and overtake us, instead of treating us like another vehicle and passing after the oncoming vehicles have gone by.
One more thing: those four-lane ‘streets’ are more like highways and pedestrians who use the overhead beg lights to get traffic to stop must SCURRY to get across before being mowed down. My husband is blind. There should be a median in the four-way streets so he could at least stop safely if he knows he can’t make the light change countdown. As it is now, he’s standing on the yellow line separating traffic in four lanes.
Halifax, surely we can do better! The car is not king.