[someone123]

It is hard to identify any major improvement to Halifax's transportation network that was built after the 1970's or maybe 80's. Since that time the city's population has grown significantly, so predictably there is a lot more strain on the infrastructure now than there was back then.

Even if we assume the larger items in this report like commuter rail and the transit priority corridors are going to happen, they are strikingly modest projects for a city where the population is now growing by around 2% a year. Halifax many billions of dollars worth of transportation infrastructure. For it to keep pace with growth this means spending hundreds of millions on new projects, not $10M on a boutique project every 5 years. Transit in Halifax needs a huge overhaul at this point and the city should be looking at something like LRT if they really want to move the needle on modal share.

For what it's worth this problem is not unique to Halifax. Toronto and Vancouver have gotten horrible and the pace of infrastructure development is nowhere near what it needs to be to make up for growth. Toronto's 1980 subway map would look familiar to a transit rider in that city today, and the city has doubled in size since that time. We are living through an urban infrastructure crisis in Canada that has a terrible impact on the lives of millions of people, but little is being done, probably because the privileged people with outsized influence on planning aren't affected much by the problems and in a lot of cases gain from them. Better infrastructure would have a great democratizing effect and postwar planners recognized this, even though not everything they built turned out well. Today we are going backwards in some ways and the gradual failure of our ability to build new public infrastructure is part of what is causing this new Guilded Age we live in.