To recap earlier chapters of this special three-part feature, part 1 answered the question “Who cares about a speed hump?” and yesterday, part 2 explored “Halifax’s plan for a strategic bankruptcy.” We hope you enjoy today’s conclusion.
The city of Halifax streams almost all of its meetings. This is helpful on weeks when life is busy. Listening to a HRM committee meeting in your ear while navigating the city’s patchwork bike infrastructure brings a joy in a purity that’s rare for humans post-adolescence. That joy is short-lived this ride, as the Transportation Standing Committee meets.
The committee is hearing a presentation from city staff who are explaining that three years of increasing road violence was a success for road safety because Halifax’s population had grown. During the conversation about road safety, Cole Harbour councillor Trish Purdy asks Halifax’s director of traffic management Lucas Pitts what the point of speed humps is. Pitts tells the committee that speed humps lower speeds, but don’t necessarily make roads safer, because the most dangerous place in our transportation network is at intersections.
Related
The saga of Otago Drive part 1: Who cares about a speed hump?
Related
The saga of Otago Drive part 2: Halifax’s plan for a strategic bankruptcy
When asked by Purdy why we keep building them, Pitts replies that they make us feel safer. But he has no evidence to suggest they actually make us safer, as that is data the city doesn’t collect. And, besides, making streets safer is not the point of speed humps. The point of speed humps is to slow drivers down to the speed limit. On most of the HRM’s residential roads that speed limit is a fatally dangerous 50km/hr.
Adults understand the danger. Children and pets do not. It is fortunate for the city, you say to the silhouettes of gravestones whipping past as you ride through the uneven and unlit cemetery section of Halifax’s “complete” “AAA” bike “network” in the Dartmouth Common. It is fortunate that residential roads don’t have kids or pets. Your joke about the future residents of the cemetery falls on dead ears.
You have to slow down now. Even though the HRM painted the Victoria Street bike crossing as though cyclists have the right of way, the Motor Vehicle Act disagrees. At this intersection the city doesn’t care about provincial rules, but you do. If you get hit in this intersection you’re at fault. Bad sight lines mean drivers can’t see you until your wheel is jutting into the intersection. This is where human beings become statistics, you remind yourself. It’s not your turn tonight.
It’s only 6pm and last week Dahlia Street felt as dead as the neighbouring graveyard. But it’s past Remembrance Day now, Christmas lights have started coming out. Now the street feels snug. Warmly lit windows illuminate the street with snapshots of life. They push back against the stillness of the night. Your fingers and nose are cold, you lean forward in the seat to see how fast you can go down the hill at the end of Dahlia. There are no cars and the next few turns are fun. You start to get a brain freeze, your smile so big your gums get cold.
Gliding past Lake Banook opens up to a sprawling winter vista lit by a startling crescent moon. Confronted with unexpected beauty it’s easy to feel poetic about life’s little moments. You imagine yourself as a cell moving lifeblood through the arteries of the city. One little cell, carrying oxygen, making this city come alive. One little cell, moving through the municipal circulatory system, is listening to the brain make bad decisions.
Your flight of fancy is brought back to reality by Active Transportation Advisory Committee member Paul Young. He’s making a pitch for the city to adopt a 30km/hr speed limit for residential zones. “Do we even have the authority to do this kind of change in the HRM?” asks Young at the start of the presentation. “Yes!” you scream as you approach a mostly empty Lawtons parking lot. Young is saying some interesting things, but you have to be on high alert here. This is one of Dartmouth’s many Dehumanized Zones. Tim Halman’s constituency office gazes out into a concrete courtyard of his provincial fiefdom. After the rolling greenway and picturesque Banook vista for Cole Harbour-bound riders, the only safe way to cross the Circumferential Highway is a jarring clash of two cities.
One city is inside the Centre Plan and one is not. One city gets love and attention, one does not. Cole Harbour-bound riders on the Banook Greenway have only one safe way to cross the Circumferential Highway. The overpass is narrow and shared by all of the human detritus that impedes the smooth flow of vehicle traffic. Right before winter they cut the trees back to reinvigorate the carceral atmosphere of the visibly neglected pedestrian skyway. There are some smiley face emojis. They don’t help alleviate the brutalist vibes.
That skyway spits you out into a slip lane encouraging 80km/hr traffic to glide seamlessly into a Tim Hortons drive-through.
The slip lane marks the start of the danger of the Main Street DHZ. There is no poetry anymore, it’s survival time now.
Surviving would be easier for you if drivers were limited to 30km/hr like your bike is. Two drivers have put their cars into stores this week. As you approach the DHZ, a driver treats the slip lane as an exit ramp en route for a double double. His eyes are downcast, his face embraced by soft light, the siren call of vehicular manslaughter. He is careless with his potential for violence. That was the only dicey moment tonight. The smell of KFC starts to fade as you safely exit the Main Street DHZ, back to quiet residential streets. This is no longer Dartmouth, you’re not in the safety of Centre Plan.
You’re approaching Cole Harbour now. The streets are rivers of lifeless concrete wider than they are long. As you climb out of Dartmouth into Cole Harbour, you listen to Paul Young make his pitch to the committee.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that slower speeds reduce deaths and injuries because drivers have more time to react.
Sweden’s government partnered with the World Health Organization to mandate a maximum speed in Sweden where drivers and other road users interacted, in order to “have a beneficial impact on air quality and climate change as well as being vital to reduce road traffic deaths and injuries.”
Right now the posted speed on most residential roads in the HRM is 50km/hr. Speed humps help keep speeds to just under 50km/hr. But at 50km/hr drivers are still *at least* five times more likely to kill the people they hit than if they are travelling at 30km/hr.
Poor kids are over four times more likely to be hit by drivers than rich kids. The electric assist is helpful; the hills in Cole Harbour are as bad as those of downtown Halifax. You want a challenge tonight so you turn it off. Your legs are screaming as you listen to Paul Young talk about Wales.
Wales was seeing a drop in traffic injury numbers, but there were still a lot happening: 4,000 in 2018 and that was considered too high. And even though overall numbers were down, fatal and serious incidents spiked in 2018 after holding steady at about 100 broken human bodies a year. Welsh efforts had been effective at reducing the volume of traffic incidents, but unsuccessful in decreasing the severity. So in 2019 one of their ministers formed a task force to reduce the speeds on Welsh streets. That task force did a bunch of research to make sure slowing down streets was a good decision. They found that doing the work of road safety requires more than just addressing the physical risk of being injured. The British Crime Survey found that across both genders and all ages, speeding traffic was seen as the greatest problem in local communities.
Or, in other words, if speed humps were successful at making us feel safer, as Lucas Pitts told councillor Purdy they do, then parents would feel comfortable letting their children play on them. It does not feel safe for a child to play on Otago Drive.
That truth, the Welsh taskforce explains, is why your child doesn’t have safe independent mobility. It is why your child is not growing up in a healthy, safe society. “Minimising a child’s independent transport is associated with substantial loss of physical, mental and social health benefits and can establish habitual sedentary behaviours across the life-course,” reads the task force report. You’re sitting at the end of Spikenard now, Woodlawn High School looms in the darkness before you. You wait for a gap in the six lanes of traffic. No one seems interested in stopping for the crosswalk tonight. Eventually you climb the crisscrossing driveways of Woodlawn High’s interconnected parking lots. Instead of a space for these young adolescents to socialize, the outdoor common area in the front of their school is designed to entrench their dependence on parental chauffeurs. You have to ride within swinging distance of school doors to get to the bike path behind the building.
Young continues, he’s being allowed to go over time, you’re back on quiet streets listening to a Welsh task force report on a cold winter night. Professionally, it would be easier for you if his presentation was wrong. Then it doesn’t even need a story. You can just enjoy a cold night’s ride. Young, and the Welsh government through him, is not wrong though. Walking and biking is a healthier way to move around than driving. It’s better for you if you walk or bike, it’s better for everyone if you do it instead of drive. More walking and biking means you run into more people you know and have little social interactions. Earlier today you ran into a former classmate on her lunch break. You ran into a friend at the bike racks in front of the Central Library. Earlier this ride you had a prolonged conversation with a stranger waiting at the bridge lights because you both had the same helmet with lights. Slower traffic speeds result in a higher perception of safety, which in turn leads to more cycling and walking. That increase in cycling and walking leads to more social connections and interactions. With lower speeds in Halifax, the city’s transportation network could start to move us as people through the city again. We could wake the city from its automotive coma and breathe it back to life.
The Welsh also found that higher speeds lead to more annoyed drivers. You remember Lucas Pitts telling a different committee that one out of every four incidents on HRM roads are caused by aggressive drivers.
The Welsh did some fancy math and found that high speeds create more pollution, and lower speeds would save 54 Welsh citizens from a pollution-induced premature death. Since intersections are where congestion happens, slowing down between intersections doesn’t increase travel time. And thanks to the constant stopping at lights, stop signs and crosswalks, drivers rarely stayed at the speed limit—30 miles per hour in Wales, about 50km/hr—for more than a minute or two before they had to slow down again or stop. In Cole Harbour, it’s not unusual for drivers to reach speeds of 70km/hr between stops.
The Welsh government looked at some polling from across the UK and found that most people supported slowing the speed of streets, and in England where slow streets had been implemented support for the new speeds increased from 70% to 80% approval after everything slowed down. Polling also found that most people who support slow streets are in the majority but wrongly believe that they are in the minority of people who want safer streets.
After presenting all of this to the advisory committee, they talked about how important it was to them to slow drivers down, before abdicating their responsibility and ultimately deciding not to even try to make the streets of HRM safer.
You can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Paul Young didn’t start his presentation with a lie.
Related
The saga of Otago Drive part 1: Who cares about a speed hump?
Related
The saga of Otago Drive part 2: Halifax’s plan for a strategic bankruptcy
“Posted speed limits are an admission of failure.” You’re listening to Chuck Mahrone pontificate about speed cameras on his podcast. He’s a reformed traffic engineer who founded Strong Towns, an advocacy group trying to correct the mistakes of the past 70 years of infrastructure building. To Mahrone, speeding is a design problem. It’s possible to design a street so drivers only feel safe navigating it at 30km/hr. Other cities, like Ottawa, have design guides to achieve the outcome of 30km/hr on their streets. By comparison, the city of Halifax’s redbook has suburban streets designed for speed. The wider the lane, the faster the cars. Drag strip lanes are 7 meters wide for cars that travel over 500km/hr. Formula One lanes are a minimum of 6 meters wide for cars that go 350km/hr. HRM residential street lanes are 4.5 meters wide for cars we want to be travelling 50 (but really 30) km/hr. We engineer our streets for speed. We don’t have a speeding problem; HRM streets are working exactly as they were designed to do.
Your neighbour is an EPA in schools, which means she also has a second job. She delivers pizza in the evenings and on the weekends to make ends meet. Every day around 4pm she comes home in between jobs. She’s always in a rush to make it from one job to the next. Your neighbour on the other side built a Batmobile with a spare drill motor that’s way too fast for his toddler. He asks if you want to borrow it for your kid. You decline, people drive too fast on this street. You write your MLA about getting the speed reduced. “Lower speed limits are only considered in locations where the majority of vehicles are already going well below 50km/h. Globally lowering the prima facia speed limit is not likely to be realistic or palatable for the majority of drivers,” the provincial traffic authority writes back.
There must be something in the charter preventing council from acting, you rationalize. “318 (1) All streets in the Municipality are vested absolutely in the Municipality. (2) In so far as is consistent with their use by the public, the Council has full control over the streets in the Municipality.”
You start to realize the province isn’t lowering the speed because the HRM isn’t designing streets for the speed they want. The city has the power to design streets to be safe, and has had this power this whole time. Our councillors, instead of instructing the bureaucracy they lead on our behalf to start designing our transportation infrastructure to be safe, they throw their hands up, fingers pointed at the province, happy to let us die in the streets they govern absolutely. Instead of designing safe streets they design dangerous ones. When it’s too hard to keep us safe on those streets, your city changes the metric of success, so they could call a three-year trend of increasing road violence a road safety success. You have discovered the second foundational process of your council’s automotive inertia.
You start to mull the implications of the true scope of failure you think you’ve uncovered. You start to realize that the HRM will never be successful in achieving any of its stated strategic goals unless it starts fundamentally changing the way it does transportation planning.
The city and the province are happy to blame each other as we continue to maim, dismember and kill each other’s family members due to dangerous street designs. Your municipal leaders point fingers at the province. Their power to protect us goes unused in the charter. At any time, this whole time, your municipal councillors could have used their power to fix this.
They have not. They have so far been content to continue their failures and abdicate their power.
You get a familiar sensation. Cold tendrils of fear start snaking up through your bowels. You wonder if the last month might have been different if you preferred Smarties to M&Ms. “Danger, Will Robinson,” the line from Lost in Space, intrudes into your brain. Your junk food TV diet means your brain tries to warn you with TV show clips. You find this funny and laugh as the panic attack starts.
A note from Matt Stickland: Thanks for reading this. I had a lot of fun writing about moving around this city. It’s something I didn’t think was possible before I bought an ebike on a whim this spring. While I do have some pretty major concerns about the future, I think it’s important to highlight that this story should be one of optimism. Our city council can do a lot more than they are right now—all it will take is a little bit of bold leadership. I remain ever hopeful that this is the year our elected officials are finally up to the task.
Editor’s note: Want more stories like this? Paying Coast Insider members help us produce great journalism. Support The Coast for as low at $1.90 per week, and you’ll also receive Matt Stickland’s weekly City Hall newsletter, an exclusive bonus to Insiders. Join us, make a difference and become a Coast Insider member today.
ICYMI: The saga of Otago Drive part 1: Who cares about a speed hump?
The saga of Otago Drive part 2: Halifax’s plan for a strategic bankruptcy
Related Stories
The saga of Otago Drive part 1: Who cares about a speed hump?
The saga of Otago Drive part 2: Halifax’s plan for a strategic bankruptcy
The Grand Parade podcast: It’s time for Halifax to ban drive-thrus for real
This article appears in Nov 6 – Dec 2, 2023.
I still think that an increase in the police department would solve many of these issues. Most accidents happen because of dangerous driving. Holy shit there is revenue to be made there. Where are the study on increasing police presence.
You’d be pleased to note that on page 47 of the recently released strategic plan update..
https://cdn.halifax.ca/sites/default/files…
That pavement quality index is shown as a benefit to the integrated mobility plan.
It’s Chuck Marohn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Maro… He gave a very interesting presentation at Dal some years ago.
I like the article series; it seems well-researched, and as a bike commuter (at least for eight months of the year) I get it, but what in the world are you talking about with six lanes on Woodlawn? That intersection can be a real PITA waiting for a gap in traffic, but it’s only three lanes, counting the left turn one.