Public spaces like the Convention Centre, the Halifax Metro Centre (currently known as Scotiabank Centre) and the new stadium being proposed for the Wanderers Grounds live in a weird place in this day and age. They are built and exist with public money, and yet don’t give the HRM much direct benefit in return. Most of the time, these venues are a way for private operators to make money by putting on events. Sure, it’s awesome when Sidney Crosby plays a quasi-NHL game in front of a hometown crowd. But not everyone can enjoy these sorts of benefits from this public money, making government spending on these things feel like a waste. Especially on days like yesterday.
Monday evening, between everyone driving to the hockey game and driving home from work, and the inherent vulnerabilities of a transport system based around large mono-passenger vehicles, approximately five people having a bad day caused the city’s transportation infrastructure to functionally shut down for the better part of an hour. Because that’s what happens when everyone needs a glass-and-steel-enclosed couple hundred square feet to move around in. We can fix this, if we change how we move around. But in order to do that, we need to change what our roads look like, which means taking space away from cars. And because Tuesday’s city council meeting was quite boring and routine, it left a lot of time for your otherwise diligent scribe to think about what one night of bad traffic can teach us about our response to the climate emergency.
We have so much invested in cars that it feels insane to actively try to make it harder to drive. Investment in this case doesn’t mean just money and land use for roads, but culture too. We are a culture of car drivers. For a lot of Canadian kids, a foundational childhood memory is drive-through coffee for early morning practice. High school friend groups centering around the kids with cars. (Bonus points if it’s a minivan!) Roadtrips and Sunday drives; we are drivers. It’s why we fight so hard for publicly subsidized roads and free parking. And we demand this even though automotive infrastructure is absolutely eviscerating our government’s finances. And the planet. Even as we tell pollsters we want more urgent action.
One of the underrated forces at play in the climate debate is the fact that we need to deliberately change how we move around from something normal and known, to something unusual and strange. And we don’t want to make this shift because most of us spend an average of $11,300 per year on the way we’ve always done it. We are rational people, being led by rational people, so it’s hard to imagine that a city would spend more money on a few blocks of highway than it ever has on affordable housing, but that’s starting to happen as road maintenance prices continue to spike.
Our city council wants to be investing in good, reliable, efficient public transit; that’s why the Bus Rapid Transit plan exists. But that takes time. It’s expensive. It requires provincial cooperation. It requires a functional transit service, which we don’t seem to have these days.
Is there anything council could do? If they wanted to treat this like a World War II-level event (as deputy mayor Sam Austin is fond of saying), then they need to change our culture and behaviour now. The only way to do that is to change something, and the only thing council can effectively change is land use. A lot of the roads in the BRT plan are wide, wider than they need to be.
So the city should use that extra space and put in some dedicated, protected bus lanes, and let bikes ride there too. (The density changes to support this are coming down the pike.) Road congestion would get worse, a lot worse. Which would make us look for things closer to home, things that were easier to get to by foot, bike or transit, in a way the Integrated Mobility Plan has yet to do in the past six years. Because let’s be honest, how many days of being in serious traffic would it take for you to switch? How many bike riders flying past would it take for you to get your freedom back? How many times would you rub your bleary eyes at people sleeping through their morning commute on the bus until you joined them?
It would change our transportation patterns to better accommodate the city’s future plans, and make the city more fiscally sustainable. Although it is understandable why the city would not want to take this spoonful-of-medicine-with-no-sugar approach, such things are often required in times of emergency, like World War II, when sugar was rationed.
It’s fun to think about things like that on unexpectedly short afternoons when council meetings are routine.
Things that passed
Events East gave a presentation where they told the city what exactly we’re getting for our money ($4.1 million last year, $905,964 so far this year. They also got public money from the province to the tune of $4 million last year and $817,485 so far this year). Council accepted their audited financial statements.
The audit and finance committee recommended the city move $25 million around in our reserves to cover the cost of climate change so far this year, with Hurricane Fiona and this year’s floods and fires driving up the costs to our public service. This passed.
Audit and Finance also wanted the city to spend $55,000 on a playground for William King Elementary, which passed.
Since the economy is made up (or more specifically a human construct), not everyone uses it the same. Historically Black communities in Nova Scotia have, for generations, just passed land down to family members without doing all the paperwork required by the state. This caused issues for residents for generations and only recently have we started to reverse that injustice by giving land titles back to the people who should own them. But when people get title to their land after generations of not having it, there are property taxes in arrears that need to be paid. Council waived some of those unpaid property taxes on Tuesday.
Councillors Paul Russell and Patty Cuttell were selected to rep us on the Halifax water board.
And finally, councillors approved their meeting schedule and budget season schedule.
This article appears in Oct 1 – Nov 5, 2023.