When it comes to transit, Haligonians overwhelmingly support it—for somebody else.
A GPI Atlantic transportation study released Wednesday shows that 90 percent of Halifax urbanites and suburbanites live within 500 metres of a bus stop, but only 12 percent actually ride the bus. Private vehicles travel three billion kilometres a year in Halifax—8,000 km per person—while transit use accounts for just 26 km per person annually.
The cost of this driving is enormous: GPI pegs it at $2.7 billion a year. Traffic congestion alone costs $7 million, almost all of it in time lost. Then theres the 2.2 tonnes of greenhouse gases emitted by each of us each year through our cars.
The absurdity of the situation is brought home to me at city council meetings. Councillors and staff swear their support for transit measures, and promise to build transit Nirvana. To cite just one example, the lengthy community visioning planning process incorporates transit as a policy driver.
This is good stuff, truly. But so far as I can tell through casual discussion, after praising transit all evening long, every individual council member, and each city employee, gets in a car to drive home, alone.
Heres the thing: we wont get decent, well-funded and well-run bus service until political and business leaders, and bureaucrats and technocrats (including reporters) themselves use the bus.
If people with political clout would start riding the bus, wed soon find schedules sensical, rude drivers reprimanded, dangerous stations better patrolled and so forth. But as it is now, riding the bus is for other people, you know, poor people, so no one with the power to make change gives a damn.
This article appears in Mar 20-26, 2008.
I’ve been busing Halifax-Dartmouth for a year now, having broken my car habit some time before that. There is a chicken-egg problem with the quality of the transit system here as you say. It does seem that a paradox shift is what it will take, with large middle-and-up class masses being driven by conscience and cost-savings into the system. I know that in the California Bay area, for example, where individual social responsibility rules and traffic is a bitch anyway, large corps in Silicon Valley give transit passes (the “Green Pass”) as an employee benefit. If a few large Metro employers (like the Province, banks, others) would start this ball rolling we’d have some hope of attaining the critical mass and demand necessary to revamp and revitalise our transit system. Even after a year of constant commuting by bus, I personally fear and dread the Dartmouth Bridge “Terminal”, where I happened to be one day just after work last summer to witness the blood spatter and aftermath of a just-happened knifing. Cops were searching through garbage bins for a weapon while the rest of us stood in despair on gum, phlegm and butt coated pavement, dodging panhandlers while we waited for our overcrowded stench-soaked buses home.