The Critical Mass bike ride wound its way through downtown last Friday night, before heading down Chebucto Road to end at the Mumford corner. There, in the parking lot of Saint Agnes church, the 60-or-so riders crowded around the church steps to listen to a short speech from Kevin Moynihan, one of the locals determined to stop city hall’s plan to widen Chebucto. Moynihan, who’s on the board of the Chebucto Neighbourhood Association, says the growing opposition to the widening is having an effect on the city’s resolve. He says at a recent meeting with residents, the municipal transportation people put a new option on the table. It’s a diabolical bit of coercion that a gangster would admire.
So far, the only option the city’s been willing to entertain is the ugly idea of expropriating land—and a house—from properties on the south side of Chebucto, in order to build an extra road lane. Now, however, the city says it can find the room it wants by nibbling away from the Saint Agnes parking lot on the north side. The residents even get to make the decision: Sacrifice your property to the commuters, or save yourselves and don’t resist as we sacrifice the property across the street. Although the second option might be more palatable, it still tastes like shit.
Widening Chebucto is more than a bad move. This week’s edition marks The Coast’s 14th birthday, and looking back over those 14 years is a reminder our city government has made plenty of bad decisions. But Chebucto stands out as the worst thing the city’s done since 1993.
While the fact that Chebucto’s happening now gives it an advantage compared to past problems—time does heal all wounds—other memorable mistakes also seem less awful because they’re sins of omission. The city stands by and does nothing while the Bloomfield Centre falls into disrepair; while former Africville residents ask for some sort of justice; while developers bulldoze downtown heritage and throw up suburban apartment blocks.
A sin of commission feels more wrong. The city has deliberately gone out and done something—overcoming the bureaucratic inertia that makes sins of omission so common—to fuck the public over. Sins of commission are rare in Metro. At the top of the list are mayor Peter Kelly maiming a young boy by throwing candy during the Parade of Lights, and Chebucto Road. The bleeding kid didn’t stand a chance.
The city’s traffic people have been talking about the need to widen the Chebucto bottleneck since 1960. The impetus behind the latest activity is a pending redesign of the Armdale Rotary. More cars should be able to get through the renovated rotary during rush hour, and computer models say an extra lane on Chebucto will maximize the rotary’s capacity. People will still be stuck in traffic on that extra lane—after Mumford, there’s an even worse bottleneck at Connaught—but at least they’ll be out of the way of cars taking other routes through the rotary.
So. We have a government willing to amputate front lawns and transplant residents, in order to clog an artery leading to the heart of the city. This doesn’t sound like a wise course of action for the patient. Luckily, a second opinion is as close as the Regional Plan. The omnipotent report calls for the city’s planning, transportation and development efforts to work together to get cars off the road and allow more people to travel by alternative methods like bike and bus. Enabling traditional commuting with a wider Chebucto Road flies in the face of this mandate. It also defies today’s environmental reality, and the best practices other cities are developing.
London’s tolls to drive downtown have been a success. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg announced in April that he’s planning a similar fee and Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay followed suit in the middle of May. Halifax should join the race to be the first municipality in North America with a congestion charge. Or take the well-travelled path of inaction. Just stand back, leave Chebucto alone, and let rising gas prices and traffic delays convince commuters there must be a better way to go.
What’s your vote for the worst—or best—thing the city’s done in the last 14 years? Email: editor@thecoast.ca
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2007.
Chebucto Road is one of only 4 main entrances onto the peninsula. It is not a residential street and has not been for decades. To maintian that charade is simply lunacy. It is a major artery that has been undersized for over 4 decades and it needs to be upgraded, desperately. Once it is done, then we move on to the next section as HRMs obsolete and antiquated street network finally — hopefully — gets upgraded. How is sitting in traffic idling good for the environment? Move those cars and trucks along, and the buses too, which right now are stuck in that same traffic. We need a street network that is not out of the 1950s but more in line with a city of our size and growth rate.
Riiiiiight. That’ll work. Just keep widening ALL of our arterial roads until we look like Los Angeles or Houston? Listen Keith, it’s been proven time and time again that widening roads in order to accomodate traffic only creates more traffic! I live near Bayer’s Road (which, like Chebucto Road, IS a residential street by definition because people live on it), and I cycle past literally hundreds of cars on a daily basis which are stuck in traffic on what is basically a four lane highway through a residential area. The extra lane is FULL at rush hour. And the same will happen on Chebucto within 5 years. Then we’ll be where we started, except with even more people trying to drive downtown and choke our poor city to death with exhaust and fighting over more parking spaces. And when it’s not rush hour on Chebucto Road? Well then people will drive almost as if they ARE on a highway, regularly reaching speeds in excess of 80km/hr jsut as they do on Bayer’s Road. The real problem with this city is that we continue to built car-dependent, transit inaccessable suburban subdivisions. Before we look at widening Chebucto for cars, why doesn’t the city implement it’s plans to have MetroLink rapid transit service to Spryfield and beyond? Hey, why not put in some freaking bike lanes?It’s odd that you suggest that we need a street network that’s not out of the 1950s, because that’s exactly what you’re proposing. The 1950s were the era when the private automobile began it’s long, suffocating dominance of transit planning. The 1950s are when the muh beloved streetcars (or “Jitneys”) were removed from Halifax Streets to make way for cars. Widening Chebucto Road is exactly in line with anachronistic 1950s-style planning. Want to join the modern era? Do wht big cities are doing? Then why not check out NYC or Montreal. They are following London’s lead and implementing congestion charges. Montreal is going to use the money to fund mass transit and cycling improvements in the city. That’s what the smart, hip, successful cities are doing. Your 1950s-type thinking will only encourage 1970s-type urban decay. These lessons have already been learned by others, and I’ll be damned if the city I love will repeat them.
ps. there are actually 5 entrances to the peninsula: the rotary, bayer’s road, fairview overpass, the mckay bridge and the macdonald bridge. if you include the woodside and alderney ferries, that makes 7 ways to get on the peninsula. a fast ferry from bedford sometime in the future would make 8.
The old chestnut that better roads create more traffic has been proven to be a fallacy. Do the research and see for yourself. Not that it ever made any sense anyway — by that logic we should all be using ox-carts on dirt trails. The arguments about cities like Montreal don’t wash. Ever been to Montreal? At least they have roads already. Halifax has nothing of the sort. Talk about transit and bikes all you want. You still need roads for commerce and movement of goods. And unless we all move to the peninsula and live withing walking distance of our jobs, we are going to need cars too. Bikes will never be worth any significant percentage of commuter traffic in this climate, and until Metro Transit can deliver something more than steerage-class service and maintain something resembling a schedule, it will remain a service of last resort that people will avoid like the plague. When was the last major road project taking traffic off the peninsula to the mainland? Can’t remember? That’s because it was in the early 1960s when Bicentennial Drive was built. How much suburban growth have we seen since then? Now do you understand why Bayers Road is backed up? You’re comparing 2007 volumes with a 1960s roadway. Talk about lack of vision — our elected officilals have constantly let us down over the years with their inaction on vital infrastructure like this. Now it will be painful to fix — but it is painfully necessary.
Halifax’s roads would work perfectly well with a host more buses and fewer cars on them. The investment in purchasing land and widening the road could pay for improved bus services, whilst the implementation of progressive fees on motorists heading into the city would pay for more. Ally that with enforcement of multiple-occupancy vehicle lanes, smart parking charging and you’d see the volumes return to 1960s or earlier levels. Investing in a system that encourages more people to spend more of their shrinking income on a commodity (gasoline) that is only ever going to increase rapidly in price, before it completely runs out anyway, is absolute madness and needs to be stopped.
One of the problems with reasoning like Keith’s is that it is reactive rather than proactive. It seems to assume that a community has no control over its growth patterns. So if traffic is getting bad, for instance, you better get the hell out of the way, instead of trying to reduce the amount of traffic. A somewhat goofy analogy (hey, it’s the mood I’m in) would be dealing with a child marking on the walls of your home by repainting every time. Why not try to prevent the marking in the first place? There are lots of ways to proactively influence growth patterns: development policy that limits sprawl, investment in efficient public transit, encouragement of active transit options (bike lanes, keeping the city pedestrian friendly), encouragement of responsible private transit (carpooling etc). I’m sorry, but there *are* many cities achieving this. In fact, Halifax looked at those cities, and consulted experts, and talked to citizens about their experience of this city, when it developed its regional plan. Now we have a plan that can make our city the way we all said we wanted it to be. Shouldn’t we just, you know, follow that? This project is not in keeping with the plan. The ironic footnote to all of this is that the Chebucto Road Widening *won’t even* eliminate “sitting in traffic idling”. Read the proposal: it’s only intended to move the bottleneck a couple of blocks away from the rotary. If you follow this plan out to its logical conclusion, we have a great deal of expropriation ahead of us, that will continue long after this section is done. And certainly, some people think that is what they actually want, but I think this position is rooted in a fallacy: that efficient transportation necessitates paving lawns. I assume that everyone, as they move about in their community, would rather encounter lawns than turning lanes, homes rather than parking lots. Guess what – you can have the lawns AND reduce traffic! Who doesn’t want that?
The problem with your kind of thinking is that it ignores reality. The regional plan talks about future development. What we are dealing with is current settlement patterns that will persist well into the future. Since our road infrastructure has not been upgraded in decades, we need those upgrades just to get into a position where the regional plan initiatives can start to achieve benefit. Would I rather see lawns than pavement? Possibly so (though I would prefer to look at grass rather than dandelions, so maybe pavement isn’t so bad). But what I would really prefer is to be able to get to my destination in an efficient way. That’s why we need to upgrade our roads.
Did the developers and buyers of the suburban sprawl which makes up our “current settlement patterns” not take transportation into account when they made their decisions? Why should Chebucto Road residents be made to pay for the mistakes of others? And why on earth, given the problems it is causing, should we allow our “current settlement patterns” to persist at all, let alone “well into the future” if they are causing such problems? If you want to get to your destination in an “efficient” way, try lobbying the city to get MetroLink service to mainland Halifax. Then take the bus. The fact that you equate efficiency with cars, Keith, shows that we have a very very different idea of what constitutes efficiency. I find it very efficient to pass hundreds of cars stuck in rush hour on my bicycle, which I and many others do year round. I also consider it efficient to take the bus, in terms of reducing my impact on the environment, reducing urban sprawl, and conserving resources for the future. In a just world, buses would be given signal priority, and would arrive at their destination at least as fast if not faster than private automobiles. But this requires a more sophisticated and inclusive definition of “efficient” than you are offering.And what the heck do you have against dandilions anyway, Keith? Do you really hate nature so much that you’d rather pave the glibe rather than see a dandilion? Dandilions are beautiful. Please leave them out of this.
Keith’s reasoning is reminisent of a crack junkie who rather than thinking he should should stop doing crack, though he “desperatly needed” another $5 fix of crack. This whole debate centres around letting go of an inefficient way of getting people around and instead beinging to impliment new solution that are going to be what will work in the way of the future. Get with the future! Stop you addiction to an ancronistic way of thinking.Widening the road will temorarily relive the presure that our current way of doing things has created, but, in the near future it just creates a increasingly bigger problem. Like a drug, increasing road capacity just fuels an increasing dependance on more roads, which is totaly unnecessary and not the future I will accept for my city. Keith’s reasoning clearly point’s this out: he says we will need to widen all the roads throughout the downtown! What an unrequired nightmear! Most of the people posting on this board are planning students who have reasearched these issues. Research I’ve done shows that increasing road capacity leads to more cars on the street. And, that, in fact, is the expressed aim of this plan. David McCuser, the City’s Transportation Manager has stated that this plan will allow 300 more people an hour to get through Chebucto road at peak time at about the same speed as they currently do. The idea to increase the capacity of people to get on and off the penisula is not a bad idea. The problem is that the solution the city has concived does not go in the direction we want. Halifax needs to immediatly expand its options and change its ways of doing things towards an idea of moving people not cars and locating people closer to where they need to go. This quick fix is easy, but it does take the leap to a new way of doing things that is essential.Joel
I’ll come out first off and say that I agree w/ most of the folks here that sustainable and mass transit is really the ideal longterm sol’n. Better short and long-term enviro health, better health for people who are active and riding bikes, and quicker transport from A to B, particularly at rush hours. Having lived in Paris, Toronto, San Salvador, Managua, and Accra, I’ve been a consumer of public transit in countries both in the North and South. Needless to say, in Paris where there is no point in the city more than 500 m from a subway station and high population densities that make mass transit cost effective, taking a car into the city makes little sense. On the flip sides, cities like Accra are busting at the seams with 100 new cars on the road every week and no road system to accomodate them. The city is choking and it is not uncommon, even for those on public buses, to spend more than three hours travelling between points within the city.The points that Keith raises are important one: look not only at current population and density levels but also projected growth. Other issues of course include cars are symbols of success. I know many of us cringe at such a crass way to show you’ve made it, but for mainstreamers, it’s still part of having made it. There are areas outside Toronto where hanging your laundry to dry is actually not permitted by by-laws because it is seen as lowering property values and an activity of the poor. Cars play a central role in our society in distinguishing the rich from the poor. Addressing conspicuous consumption is part of the challenge that lies ahead.And of course the issue of convenience. At non-peak hours, it is often more convenient to go by car, even in places where the public transit system isn’t so bad. At peak hours, while you may end up waiting for a long time, many people prefer the “solitude” of their vehicles to having to deal with the unpredictability of public transit, who you’ll meet, whether you’ll get a seat, yada yada yada. I’m not saying these are my own positions – I’ve intentionally chosen not to buy a car – but I do think that what many of us believe to be common sense is a hard sell for the majority of car consumers.Peace.
People are suffering from delusions of grandeur on this board. A little dose of reality : adding a lane to Chebucto Road is not going to turn Halifax into LA or Houston, and solutions that are appropriate in London or New York (cities of 20X the size of Halifax) are not going to be appropriate in a small city with a sixth rate transit system. If we charged a toll to drive downtown, you can say ‘goodbye’ to downtown Halifax as a business district. This would come as a bit of a shock to all the people who are patting themselves on the back for being able to walk or bike to work from their fashionably downtown homes, as your office will have moved to Burnside or Bayer’s Lake. And you complain that Barrington St is abandoned now…I’m all in favour of more buses (although no-one will ride them until Metro Transit learns how to make and keep a schedule), and I’m in favour of more ferries and more routes, but Halifax is never going to have the kind of transit system that is going to allow the bulk of commuters to leave their cars behind. We’re just not that class/size of city. A partial solution may be to increase housing on the peninsula through high density developments, but with the shit-fit that certain heritage groups throw whenever someone proposes an interesting development on the peninsula I just can’t see it happening. In any event, we need a combination of approaches, and improving traffic routes into the city is one of them. And really now, it’s not like the status quo is allowing kids to play road hockey after school on Chebucto Rd. Keith is right, it’s not a residential street, hasn’t been for a long time, and never will be again. I really don’t see a strong principled objection to this plan. Opponents are either objecting to car culture and urban sprawl (worth objecting to–but far beyond the realistic scope of the problem here), or are NIMBY’s who want to hold on to a few square feet of heavily fertilized lawn at the expense of the greater good.
Your reality is your perspective and your opinion. I respect it. Please respect mine.Nobody is saying that Halifax will turn into Houston or LA overnight. And anyway, Houston and LA didn’t become what they are overnight either, they got there one road widening project at a time.What people are saying is that we need to CHOOSE a direction, and they are giving examples of good and bad models to follow.
I wasn’t done. Just hit “enter” by mistake.So anyway, how big and sprawling does Halifax have to become before we have something better than a “sixth rate” transit service? Is your idea of “reality” that we just have to keep growing bigger and bigger, and eventually we will have the popualtion to support transit? Let me tell you something: with that line of thinking, we’ll never, ever get there. Maybe that’s what you want. It’s not what I want. Let’s be really realistic here. nobody has delusions of grandeur, as you say. We all just have a vision of what makes a good city, and we feel that squeezing more cars onto the peninsula is a serious step backwards.What we need is more transit, and transit oriented development. A city of any size can work on such a model, is has almost nothing to do with the population of a place, but more about whether population densities and transportation networks are planned and designed for transit or for cars.And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are residential developments happening all throughout the core of Halifax, and plenty of room for more developments that don’t interfere with hertitage concerns. We need to build on this desire which people obviously have to live in a real urban environment, not a shitty asphalt-and-car wasteland. For this we are going to need land for more homes, more public greenspaces, more bikelanes, and more bus lanes/transit hubs. Sorry, but this issue IS important. It is symbolic as well. It says that we need this space for more important things than to move single occupant vehicles from A to B.As a final note, the one thing that seems to unite people here is our distain of Halifax Metro Transit’s poor service. Maybe this is something we shoudl move on. Maybe residents and other folks wouldn’t be so opposed to widening Chebucto Road for a reversing BUS ONLY lane? Try suggesting something progressive like that, rj, rather than preaching and insulting.
I’m beginning to think I’m the only person who thinks Metro Transit does a wonderful job, given the limited resources budgeted to them.
Despite what I said earlier, I do agree with you Chris. If i have my figures right, Halifax Metro Transit is funded 70% from the fareboxes, and only 30% from government. This is pretty much opposite the situation of many other cities in Canada, where the split is exactly opposite.THe one thing Metro Transit could do right away is to have better mechanisms for rider input. And there are a few bus drivers that should be fired for their habitual lateness and generally bad attitudes, but the union probably wouldn’t allow it.Halifax needs to implement some TOD (transit oriented development) NOW, before it’s too late. Each new car dependent subdivision that is built lessens the opportunity to take Halifax is a different direction, the direction of resource conservation and efficiency, which we need to taek if we’re going to survive the coming energy crunch. The point of discussing Chebucto Road in this context is that widening Chebucto will only encourage developers and home-buyers to make the same poor choices they have been making. Making new roads is expensive – about $100 per square foot – lets put that money into mass transit instead. If we’re going to build a better kind of city, there’s no better time than the present to get started.