“We can’t do the same things and use the same excuses that
cars and roads work well,” says Patrick Klassen, a graduate student at
Dalhousie’s School of Planning. He’s one of several students making an
old idea new again: a Halifax Tram system.
“We haven’t considered streetcars here per se,” HRM transit planning
specialist Brian Taylor acknowledges. Trams, or streetcars, are outside
Halifax’s box. It wasn’t always so.
“We had trams here until the 1960s,” notes Larry Hughes, an
engineering professor at Dal. “They were fairly extensive; they went
all the way to West End Mall.”
Kathy Yeats, a Haligonian studying planning in Vancouver, offers
another explanation for the streetcar’s demise. “We used to make them
locally, but General Motors muscled their way onto the scene in the
’50s.” She is referring to the Great American streetcar scandal, in
which National Lines bought out transit systems across the continent,
replacing streetcars with General Motors’ buses and paving the way for
car dependency.
We’ve relied on petroleum-powered buses and cars ever since. They
have major disadvantages to the electric trolley. Yeats observes, “In
Vancouver I can predict where the streetcars go by way of the wires
overhead. There’s a sense of permanence that comes with this level of
built infrastructure. It encourages people to rely on it.” The
streetcars themselves last twice as long as buses.
Their permanence makes trams a starting point for sound urban
development. In an independent research report, Klassen writes, “By
providing an efficient, high capacity and reliable form of transit,
with a sense of permanence, a streetcar system has the potential to
attract residents and investment, increase transit ridership and
stimulate core area business and pedestrian activity.”
He examined modern streetcar systems in mid-sized cities in France,
Germany and the United States, and concludes that the peninsula’s
population can support a tram, and that such a system would encourage
the kind of development city planners are aiming for.
“The benefits are mostly economic,” he argues. “A tram system
catalyzes development along routes. It targets investment downtown.”
This combats sprawl and reinvigorates urban cores. Klassen notes that
Portland’s tram system has spun-off more than $3 billion in private
investment.
A permanent, predictable streetcar infrastructure replaces
complicated destination-based bus routes with a hub-and-spoke model.
The hub is where streetcars begin their routes. In every city where
this is the case, development is focused on the hub. In the process,
bus congestion and emissions are eliminated.
“The buses themselves cause congestion,” says Troy Scott, a
Dartmouth architect, but once a starry-eyed Dalhousie grad student
himself. His thesis focused on using existing and new rail
infrastructure in and around Halifax. His study indicates that creating
a streetcar loop on the peninsula could “reduce the number of buses
from 33 to 11, alleviate congestion, and increase ridership.”
Scott adds heritage to the list of streetcar advantages. “Why not
bring back a historic aspect of Halifax right in Historic Properties?”
he wonders. “I worked out what all the old routing was. The tracks are
still in the road, paved over.” New routes could also be added using
ultra-light tracks, which don’t require overhead wires and avoid
disturbing pipes.
“Streetcars the world over are celebrated icons of city life,” Yeats
adds. “They are the town clocks and cathedrals of the transportation
world and evoke warm feelings of community and home.”
Despite the arguments for a Halifax tram system, it may be an idea
ahead of its time, for two reasons: power and size.
“Streetcars aren’t much good if Nova Scotia has to burn coal from
South America to power them,” Yeats says. “This technology would have
to come with more renewable—and ethical—energy sources.” Yet, she
argues, electric vehicles allow a greater flexibility for power
sources. In time, the power can come from wind, hydro, maybe even tidal
or geothermal. “Buses only take petrol. If that fails us we’re
screwed,” she says.
Should Halifax get trollified? Let me know at
chrisb@thecoast.ca.
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2009.
Trolleys could work only if we levy a congestion charge downtown. Trolleys worked in the 50’s and 60’s because there was about 400 K less people in the Halifax region. That said, if there was a congestion charge in the downtown core, trolleys could be the levy for faster movement in this area. Even if the power come from unreasonable sources (such as the aforementioned South American coal) it’s still an interesting thought.
Inconvenient facts for Peter Klassen :
Portland population : 675,000
Greater Portland population : 2,000,000.
City of Halifax pre amalgamation : 116,000
When there were trams less people worked downtown and there were fewer cars. Trams would be quaint but verry little else.
The one good thing in Toronto when the TTC would go on strike was how much better traffic moved without streetcars. Even with the added drivers (who couldn’t take transit) traffic flowed much better. If you want a solution, build a subway.
Maybe its time we stop waiting for other cities to show us how to do things. Halifax is unique in many aspects, including some fundamental ones such as topography and geology. Subways are out; obvious if you’ve ever strolled down that beautiful cross section of a railway cut that lines the northwest arm. And furthermore, the peninsula is tiny and houses only a fraction of it’s daily workers/commuters.
Naturally then, a perfect Halifax transit strategy is difficult at best.
I cannot, however, excuse how unbelievably unintuitive taking buses and ferries can be in this city. Depending on the time of day, there can be as many as 25 different bus routes travelling along Barrington Street. How many of us regularly see bus tailing bus after bus, with little or no passengers?
Something’s gotta give.
From another small city that is already reintroducing trams/trolleys:
“That early losses from the operation of trams – now estimated at £5 million a year – will be met from the revenues of the bus company must put at risk its ability to maintain its present network and service frequency.”
http://news.scotsman.com/opinion/Leader-Tr…
Edinburgh a ‘small city’ ???population 470,000 and rising 5% a decade. It has 2 train stations a very short distance apart.
Waye Mason should join Peter Klassen in Reality 101.
The last 2 paragraphs read :
‘These routes need to be protected at all cost and if trams require heavy subsidies from the coffers of Lothian Buses then some services will inevitably face the risk of being axed or restricted to compensate for the loss.
If the price of creating a tram line is the running down of what is one of the best bus companies in Britain due to a reduction in access to public transport for those that have come to depend on it then many will say that price is far too high’
Halifax is not a city, it’s a small town. Too many people confuse peninsula Halifax with HRM. Anyway we are the largest municipality in the world by area !!!
Will, a voice of reason. They should hire you at the School of Planning.
Le Mans, France has light rail even though the population is only 150,000 (yes THAT Le Mans).
What was the cost in Le Mans ? Was it put in to transport workers to the Renault car plant ?
Not to mention too, Le Mans has millions of visitors in that small city for one event, so there is definitely a need for it. Plus the FIA has more money than most governments, and they funded a portion of it, to allow ease of traveling for the racing teams.
Joeblow, the irony of your moniker is readily apparent. Your brief analysis is quite appropriately missing any objectivity, as well as any understanding of the more complex reality of economic development and its relationship with transportation systems – I bet your that guy at public meetings who stands up to comment just to hear his own voice. Anyhow, I’ve taken the liberty of providing you with some objective feedback so that you might understand your bias:
1) You’ve discounted the ‘planning’ process to a shortsighted review of the status quo in suggesting that the success of something as complex as a streetcar (and indeed a larger transportation system) is solely dependent only a single variable such as the total population of an area. There are so many more robust variables in considering such a system and its potential application that you’ve totally missed (ie. economic development, population density, transit system integration, etc…).
2) You’ve assumed that a graduate planning student wouldn’t adopt a thesis that acknowledges the reality of the existing environment and population of Halifax, and the use of case studies such as Portland that are contextually separate. Your argument, as such, is fundamentally flawed.
3) You’ve narrowed your concept of a streetcar to a alternative to a bus, which is it absolutely not. Within the context of this article and indeed the studies upon which it draws, it is conceptualized as a supplement in a more efficient and effective system at large and as a tool to target economic development and population settlement in accordance with the Regional Municipal Planning Strategy (RMPS and Downtown Plan).
4) You’ve made the assumption that the persons commenting in this article have concluded that the HRM should move ahead with installing streetcars, and in doing so you’ve missed the point of the article which is to explore its ‘potential.’
Anyhow, to qualify my points, I conducted a through investigation of the Halifax environment and the potential application of modern streetcars within downtown. In this sense the streetcar was viewed as a component of a broader transit system, and as a tool for the catalyst of economic development and Peninsula population settlement – in layman’s terms – as a tool for Halifax to achieve the goals it has outlined with its RMPS and Downtown Plan. Within this process I looked at numerous case studies to extract pertinent information that would contextually relate to the Halifax environment (realizing and accounting for the contextual divide of such obvious things as the difference in population between cities), and then conducted an analysis and investigation the potential benefits and shortcomings of streetcars in Halifax. My findings were not that we should build them now, but rather that the conditions within downtown Halifax, with the regional transportation and economic development goals in mind, warrants the consideration of such modes. My point is this – planners should be looking forward beyond the status quo. They should be conducting more robust, meaningful and accountable analysis to explore the full picture of our environments. It is for these reasons that I found the irony in your comments… and in your moniker as ‘Joeblow.’ There is a reason(s) you are not a planner.
If you intend to respond to my comments by providing a range of statistics (that I am already aware of and have researched throughly) then I have made my point to its entirety. Some objective discussion, on the other hand, would be perhaps be more compelling.
Partick – I appreciate that you have spent countless hours/days asssembling data, analysing the data in the intellectual exercise required to prove you are entitled to be granted your degree. I think you thesis will probably end up in the ‘Wouldn’t that be nice’ section in the Dalhousie Library, once a regular haunt of mine.
In the more than 3 decades of living here I have lost count of the planning issues I have been involved in, neighbourhood and regional, so now I tend to give them a pass other than reading council documents I deem worthy of my attention. I see many people I know still find the time to pursue big issues but they have yet to realise the cause is lost. There is no regional plan and the downtown plan would have been more interesting when Halifax was Halifax and not HRM. I realise it is too late to change your focus but I would suggest a more pressing issue is the future of peninsula Halifax. More specifically, how do we re-generate the area with families,schools and community amenities and thus reverse the increasing suburbanisation of the perimeters of Halifax and Dartmouth. In this context we have to decide how to attract families to communities with greater density and less home space. Taking the opposite view, should we accept that the population shift is permanent and consider locating workplaces closer to living spaces thus reducing downtown congestion and the attendant traffic problems. This alternative may even be more environmentally responsible than continuing to treat central Halifax as the dominant focus it was 50 years ago.
The moniker is a common phrase and nothing else other than being so anonymous as to defy any analysis, I may consider changing it to ‘Downtown homeowner’ but then others will also make erroneous assumptions. Based on my life experiences I am happy not to be a planner in Halifax. The N American culture, political & economic, is entirely different from that of Europe as is the meaning of ‘community’.
Will you be posting a link to your thesis ?
Jowblow – thank you for your response, I found your comments quite valid, although I am quite surprised by a couple of your contradictions – you seem to have overlooked the complex nature of the issues in which you are involved. I’m also quite sorry to hear how jaded a tone with which you present yourself. If I might make a suggestion – you really need to move beyond a silo way of thinking. In that sense I mean that there are some tremendous interconnections that you are seemingly overlooking. A few comments:
1) Just a bit of housekeeping, our Regional Plan: http://www.halifax.ca/regionalplanning/Fin…
Surely you’ve seen this? It’s the HRM’s primary and fundamental planning document.
2) You state: “I would suggest a more pressing issue is the future of peninsula Halifax” – which is exactly what my study was concerned with (a streetcar is an urban core system). The interrelationships between transportation infrastructure and (as I mentioned before) urban core population settlement, urban density and economic investment are quite outstanding. I could forward you a number of reports.
3) “how do we re-generate the area with families,schools and community amenities and thus reverse the increasing suburbanization of the perimeters of Halifax and Dartmouth” – You nailed this when you said by investing in the quality of life & amenities within our urban core. Where you didn’t make the connection was in thinking more broadly – it is quite common knowledge by now that infrastructure geared at the community level, such as a streetcar, is a very compelling tool to achieve such goals – you’ll have to take my word for it as I am unable to post the numerous studies that support this – I can email them to you, but I’m unsure if you’d read them. To make the connection, here are a few facts you may not have been aware of:
– Streetcars have been shown to dramatically catalyze mixed use development within proximity to alignment – ie. the fixed nature of the line provides developers with an incentive to develop where the lines are located – development = family dwelling (people), retail (stores), businesses (jobs), open spaces etc.
– Demand for urban dwellings increase considerable with increased proximity to streetcar lines – people want to live near them (again, these are documented facts, not assumptions or subjective statements).
– Households located within walking distance from a streetcar have been shown to have reduced automobile ownership (compared with households not in proximity), and automobile use has been shown to drop considerably.
– Streetcars have been shown to increase transit ridership by upwards of 50% when replacing bus lines – again, people tend to drive less.
Anyhow, so my general points (again) are these –
1) Everything changes… adapting to change is fundamental.
2) Planning is concerned with these changes, and in ensuring a positive outcome for society as a result.
3) Our community and its foundations are complex, and require a multifaceted understanding to address the horrible issues that we are all concerned (for example, the problem of traffic will never ever ever be solved by building roads).
4) To address these horrible issues that concern us, you need to have an understanding of these interconnections, and, above all….
5) You need to have a positive forward looking attitude and a great lot of patience to understand that change is slow and to work with the processes with which it occurs.
So anyhow, I’m sure you are genuinely concerned with our community, I’m not contradicting that. What I’m suggesting is that our society is changing (as it has always) and that in order to address the issues of today and tomorrow we need to better understand the connections that underly. From your comments, I am not sure you do, and I mean no offense at all by this, I am simply suggesting that you should understand these issues better before you claim to have knowledge of the answers – you have knowledge of the issues.
Following up on Will’s comments, it would be possible to use a fleet of N buses more efficiently if you had a larger number of shorter routes, and more hubs where many short routes would interconnect.
Would passengers accept extra stops provided that the full trip was no longer in duration, often shorter, and possibly buses travelled given segments more frequently? They might…but Metro Transit should then consider building some proper all-weather stops for a change.
In fact, even if they didn’t change the existing routes at all they should build some proper all-weather stops. I don’t know the mindset of the transit planners, but they’re quite ignorant in some respects…do they seriously think it encourages people to use mass transit when there is inadequate (or no) shelter from weather?
As far as trams are concerned, looking at the pros and cons in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tram, I don’t believe they are a good solution for HRM. Buses plus some light rail are likely the best mix.
Patrick, I took a few days to consider your comments and offer the following.
Several of your comments such as the ‘silo’ reference and another in the first post demean you and not me. As a well educated person pursuing your chosen career you will inevitably encounter the public who will reject your ideas or conclusions and if you become a planner who has to present to politicians and/or the public you may well have to bite your tongue. A few public hearings will soon knock that out of you. In this case I shall regard it as expression of pressure at this time of year.
In the metro area many people are very well versed in and fully understand these issues and potential solutions and have been for many decades to the point that they know the planners, the economists, the developers, the businesses and the politicians on a first name basis. They have seen reams of voluminous reports for all 3 levels of government. Bottom line, they know what the politicians will buy. Change around here takes place at a snails pace and now that we have HRM the political clout has moved out of the 2 cities and the competing interests between urban and suburban are played out on a regular basis to the detriment of the 2 former cities. I went back to HRM by design to refresh my memory and saw pages of plans and comments that were lifted from 25 year old documents. The simple fact remains, HRM council has no political desire to spend the money to turn this into a great little town. The provincial government has no desire to turn Halifax into a great little town. The bold decisions and spending that is required from the two levels of government is not there. I chose to raise my family here and it has been an interesting experience. The kids have moved well away from NS and will never return(short of an economic meltdown). I don’t expect them to put the time and energy that many of us did into the issues/solutions only to see miniscule change. I will keep an eye out for your thesis or you may consider leaving a copy at the desk at The Coast.
One bold suggestion, HRM buy Ashburn and Brightwood golf courses and then hold a design competition to determine future use.