Halifax Transit’s network redesign can finally shift into high gear.
On Tuesday city council accepted—for the most part—staff’s recommendations on the Moving Forward Together (MFT) plan, while asking for an exterior consultant to report back in a year’s time on further refinements to planned route changes.
The full redesign was already approved by council back in April. At that meeting councillors tacked on 23 requests for amendments, mostly all related to preserving individual routes that transit staff felt were inefficient as is. Staff studied those amendment requests, and came back with a report recommending only one be implemented.
Foreseeing a lengthy debate on each individual amendment, councillor Waye Mason quickly brought forward a motion Tuesday asking for a staff report to hire a consultant and review MFT’s corridor routes in one year’s time.
The consultant would also incorporate outcomes from the upcoming Integrated Mobility Plan, commuter rail project and several other expected advancements like realtime ridership data and travel-time mapping in the final report that’s brought back to council.
“There are some concerns…that [MFT]’s not sufficiently bold or doesn’t have enough transfer-based network connectivity,” Mason told reporters after the meeting. “Having an outsider set of eyes come at it fresh…I think that’s totally worthwhile.”
The staff report request cut short what likely would have been several hours of debate dissecting each individual route change. It didn’t eliminate that discussion entirely, though. Councillors David Hendsbee and Stephen Adams both put forward amendments to the recommendations on the floor.
Hendsbee asked for and received a six-month trial period running Route 370 to Mic Mac Mall.
Adams made two amendments in an effort to save Routes 15 and 402. The Spryfield–Sambro Loop–Prospect Road councillor argued that even if those buses didn’t have high ridership numbers, they were of vital importance to the small amount of people who did ride them every day.
Putting the few before the many in this case irked some of Adams’ fellow councillors.
“With all do respect to the residents of your district, councillor Adams, I believe this is wrong,” said Tony Mancini.
“I am consumed, Mr. Mayor, with despair,” said Mason, lamenting that after three years spent upgrading service standards “when the rubber hits the road” councillors were choosing politics over principles.
“Either we’re going to have a principled, policy-based decision system or we should just go straight Dukes of Hazzard and we should all do whatever we want, whenever we want and see if we can convince nine people to vote for it,” said Mason after the meeting.
“Council voted to move to a set of policies that include ridership over coverage and we need to defend those policies or all the money we spent on Moving Forward and all the time we spent on Moving Forward is useless.”
Adams’ motion to keep Route 15 as is and review it in a year passed 11 to six (with Lisa Blackburn, Steve Craig, Mason, Mancini, Sam Austin and Bill Karsten against). His motion to preserve Route 402 was defeated 12-5 (with only Adams, Richard Zurawski, Matt Whitman, Hendsbee and Steve Streatch in its favour).
The entire MFT report was approved, as amended, 15-2 with Adams and Whitman the only nay votes.
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This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2016.
Fekking knobs…
Of course we’re moving forward together, we’re on a bus.
Has anyone even seen one back up…?
Dicks. I guess its easy not to vote for something when it doesn’t directly affect your constituents. McCluskey probably has a big smile on her face and is slowly saying “yessssss…the transformation is nearly complete…let loose your feelings Sam….feel the power of the Dark Side…”
I gave up driving in 1999 for environmental reasons, and have been using taxis and transit ever since. When the province cut the bus down to the South Shore, I decided to commit to Halifax, and bought my first home in Sambro – BECAUSE THERE WAS A BUS.
Now I’ll have to sell my first home. Problem is I’ll need 20% downpayment on the next one, and that can’t happen since I haven’t been in the house long enough. I’ve paid basically nothing down on my mortgage, and IF I can sell the house for what I paid for it, the 5% to realtors will (hopefully?) leave me with nothing. Certainly this is not nearly enough to let me get into another house (which incidentally will cost more the closer you get to the city).
So, now I’m financially ruined, and out of the housing market. No point in working in Halifax anymore – I’m going back to Lunenburg. Screw you guys, I’m going home.
Of course I can’t wait for them to bring this bus route back ina few years, after I’ve left the area. There are new holes being punched into the woods everyday for more development, and the Loops is only going to grow, despite the dreams of a mega-core downtown. Nova Scotia’s charm is it’s rural areas, and all the people who they are hoping to cram into condos are eventually going to want a yard – and move out of town.
One further comment on the Bus 402 ridership levels: It’s really hard to find a job these days that allows one to work a ‘normal’ week of M-F 9-5. If you need to work on the weekends, or past 7pm you could in no way commit (as I have) to not having a vehicle, and riding the 402 bus. Understand people, this bus was never given a chance. You can’t get home at night, and you can’t go shopping on the weekends. Of course you’re going to have a car. Unless you’re me. Then you have to go.
Did I mention I pay $400 per year out of my house taxes for Transit? If you add up all the houses on the Loop, I think that HRM would be actually making money on running the 402. Are all the ratepayers going to have to keep paying for the bus that we don’t even get?
Metro Transit: We’d like to increase the frequency the the Number One bus downtown, from every 10 minutes to every 8 minutes. The problem is that we are going to need one of our 300 or so busses to do it. Which SINGLE BUS should we move to this highly serviced route to reduce wait time by a couple of minutes?
Council: Hmm…. We’ve thought long and hard about this, and we think it makes the most sense to remove the SINGLE BUS that serves the communities of Bear Cove, Portuguese Cove, Ketch Harbour, Sambro, Williamswood, and Harrietsfield.
Metro Transit: Oh cool! That means we can also get rid of the Acess-A-Bus service too! Thank you council, you are most wise.
Make the 420 420 friendly…?
So there are 300 busses driving around HRM, which has a population nearing 400,000.
That works out to about one bus to serve 1333 Haligonians.
On page 8 of the 2016 Municpal Planning strategy for the Chebucto Loop (District 5) in Table 1: Population Growth 1976-1991, the population is listed as being 6068.
I don’t know why they are using 25 year old population data to plan our future, but I’m going assume the population has risen a bit since then. Lets’s assume the population has risen by ~10%, to say…
6665
With a population of 6665, and one bus per 1333 humans, well that means that the population in that lives along the District 5 Loop warrants the service of no less than FIVE (5) BUSSES. At least, that’s how many busses we’re paying for I imagine.
I hear that next year they will be knocking about a hundred bucks off the $400 I am now paying in taxes to Metro Transit. 25% off for complete service termination, what a bargain!
That means that instead of paying for 5 busses next year I’ll only be paying for 3.5 busses!
Looking more closely, my finances will not permit me to sell my house. I’ll lose $20,000 that I don’t have. I have to keep my mortgage, and my job no matter what.
My only other option is to bicycle the 15 kilometers twice a day from Sambro to Herring Cove to get the nearest bus into town to my workplace. They spent a ton of money in widening the bike lane this summer, so I guess this is the Transit Plan for me.
I hear you can get bicycle tires with big spikes in them, so the ice on the highway shouldn’t be much of a problem.
At least there won’t be 3.5 busses splashing me as they fly by as I pedal home after work in the evening. It’ll just be pickups and fish trucks.
I also call foul on Metro Transit for failing to inform Council about the public interest expressed during the discussion phase of Moving Forward Plan.
An elderly lady name Cynthia started a petition on the bus and gathered over 600 signatures. I know this because I helped out a bit and gathered 30 or so myself.
Yet in on Page 9 of 160324tsc1213.pdf at Halifax.ca (The Moving Forward Plan) they say they had 140 comments, and a petition related to Access-a-Bus with 10 signatures.
METRO TRANSIT THREW OUR PETITION IN THE GARBAGE IN ORDER TO MISLEAD OUR COUNCILLORS ON THIS VOTE
I want an answer here! Why was my voice, and the voices of the 600+ residents who signed the petition to keep the Route 402 service to our communities completely discarded ?
The only reason I can find is that they say “However, requests for changes that were not consistent with the Moving Forward Principles were not accommodated, as well as those that would have required resource reallocation from higher ridership services.”
So now Metro Transit has editorial authority to just shred our opinions on what a REGIONAL Transit Service should be?
They can write all the reports and plans they like, but when it comes to Appendix A2 of the plan, they were not writing a proposal. They were reporting on facts: The level and type of feedback given by the stakeholders using these busses. The report is skewed because they removed any feedback that ran contrary to their wishes!
They don’t get to just edit our opinions out of the picture. By omitting our petition they made it look like there was no public will to keep this bus. How many other petitions for other routes were similarly discarded?
At best the Moving Forward Plan is a living Lie. At the worst, it is an example of the subversion of our democratic process.
You don’t get to shred our votes Metro Transit. You’re supposed to be delivering a service to the people who asked and paid for it.
Or maybe there was another petition with 600 signatures from angry residents who were so upset the the Sambro Bus because it was sucking resources from high ridership areas, and bringing Halifax to it’s knees? If that was the case, then the vote taken by the Council would make perfect sense.
But it wasn’t. And it doesn’t.
Every four years I’m paying $10,000 to keep this city going. How dare you throw out our petition ?