[someone123]

I agree that it's bad to promote suburban sprawl, but there are two factors at play here that people tend to conflate:

1) Sprawliness of city. Basically this is % car traffic and acres of land used per person.
2) Population growth in the metropolitan area.

As a city grows it needs more roads and more bridges. There is no avoiding this. You can increase transit ridership somewhat but some people need to use cars, there will still be bus traffic, truck traffic, and newly developed areas need to be connected to the older parts of the city. Note that Paris, a densely populated city, has more roads and bridges than Halifax, which is much sprawlier.

Halifax will need more road capacity onto the peninsula even if it builds more transit. When the MacKay was built the city only had about 220,000 people. Soon it will have 500,000 people. Even if we double or triple transit use over the next 10-20 years we will need more roads. Even if we use the existing bridges more efficiently we will need more roads.

The correct way to look at this is in terms of increasing transit modal share so that maybe we will look at 2,000 new cars per year instead of 3,000, but the cars will still be there. The idea that Halifax is behind so it needs to halt road construction is based on horribly oversimplified assumptions and following that plan would have very bad consequences for the city, particularly if there's no good plan for a transit system, which there isn't right now.