Rail-based Transit Discussion

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by someone123

It's not totally without merit and they put on that precast concrete decoration. We can say it is prettier than the TexPark which may have been the yardstick.

But it is still objectively ugly and didn't have to be. If they had made that precast outer portion most of the height of the building and done it in a brick style it would have been less of an eyesore. For now it is a legacy of a low point in downtown development.

Well, I believe it was a HRM-owned project and at that point in our history they were the opposite of today, doing everything on the cheap. Today they would have overspent on disguising the exterior with expensive cladding and some sort of faux-design touches, though perhaps no longer the faux-Victorian that they were in love with at the time. I doubt there would be much of a business case for them to do it now, though with the way HRM wastes money I would not rule it out entirely if someone gets a bee in their bonnet.

[MastClimberPro]

I have to confess that I had many preconcieved notions about the current state of mass transit in Halifax, based largely on a combination of 1) old third hand accounts of friends who used it very occasionally and hated it and 2) my own experience with OC Transpo in Ottawa in the 80s and 90s which was excellent and a bargain at twice the price.

I had a conversation yesterday with one of my kids who uses the busses quite a bit and indicated that in that past couple of years ridership has surged and that all busses they use are full all the time. Even to the point where they are sometimes refused service because the bus is at capacity and have to wait for the next one. Is there anyone on this thread who can comment as to whether this is a shortage of buses/drivers or actual usage increases?

If ridership is that high, isn't that a case for more busses and/or better alternatives? I still think rail that goes underground on the peninsula and DT Dartmouth is the way to go.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

Well, I believe it was a HRM-owned project and at that point in our history they were the opposite of today, doing everything on the cheap. Today they would have overspent on disguising the exterior with expensive cladding and some sort of faux-design touches, though perhaps no longer the faux-Victorian that they were in love with at the time. I doubt there would be much of a business case for them to do it now, though with the way HRM wastes money I would not rule it out entirely if someone gets a bee in their bonnet.

I wonder what the need was for HRM to build it in the first place. In that era, Halifax was full of surface lots.

At the time, real estate was more affordable (you could buy a suburban house on even a modest salary), there wasn't as much demand for downtown living, and there was nostalgia for an era when you would go to Barrington Street to buy a suit or a vacuum cleaner. There was a sense that suburbanites could be attracted with pay parking for some reason. Some American cities went as far as to publicly subsidize department stores around this time.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by MastClimberPro

I have to confess that I had many preconcieved notions about the current state of mass transit in Halifax, based largely on a combination of 1) old third hand accounts of friends who used it very occasionally and hated it and 2) my own experience with OC Transpo in Ottawa in the 80s and 90s which was excellent and a bargain at twice the price.

I'm not sure about the last few years but I think people have very different experiences depending on where they are and how they use the system.

Halifax has some very low density, distant areas like Hammonds Plains and Tantallon that have bus service but cannot support decent schedules. And it still has "milk run" style routes while most Canadian cities have some sort of grid of regular major arteries serving packed-in pods of suburban houses, office parks, and box retail. In the larger cities like Toronto or now Ottawa there is some sort of rapid transit to serve as a faster, more reliable spine for the network.

Around here if you have to take a bus you won't necessarily get great service and there are more weirdos that in Halifax (one time I remember the bus driver pulled over, went out of service, and told everybody to get off because a used needle was rolling around on the floor ). But the SkyTrain is much much better than any Halifax service. The ferries are about on par, with the Halifax ferry design being nicer; Vancouver's SeaBus is inside only. I think it has more to do with the type of service and type of areas being served than one system being run better or worse, although that does make a little difference.

If you are talking about comparing North American cities with 500,000 or so people, Halifax would be a big outlier for how much service and ridership it has. Most cities under 1 million probably don't have 10 minute frequency routes like the 1, express routes, bus lanes, or ferries.

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by MastClimberPro

I had a conversation yesterday with one of my kids who uses the busses quite a bit and indicated that in that past couple of years ridership has surged and that all busses they use are full all the time. Even to the point where they are sometimes refused service because the bus is at capacity and have to wait for the next one. Is there anyone on this thread who can comment as to whether this is a shortage of buses/drivers or actual usage increases?

It's true that transit use has surged in the past five years, but that's partly due to pandemic recovery. Ridership plunged in 2020, so if your kid is noticing a big increase in the past few years, that's accurate--compared to 2020/21, things now are jam-packed. But if you rewind to 2019, it's not such a stark difference (though the system is busier, having surpassed pre-pandemic ridership beginning last year).

And indeed, it is true that Halifax is an outlier among small cities. We have two sort of contradictory things true at the same time: transit service is mediocre-to-bad (depending on where you are in HRM) but it's also nearly best-in-class for small North American cities. More of a damning with faint praise thing.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

And indeed, it is true that Halifax is an outlier among small cities. We have two sort of contradictory things true at the same time: transit service is mediocre-to-bad (depending on where you are in HRM) but it's also nearly best-in-class for small North American cities. More of a damning with faint praise thing.

Halifax Transit has very high per capita ridership but low investment dollars per rider. So it can do things like run frequent packed buses on the major routes but not fund a nice streetcar that gives people space.

A lot of American cities are the opposite where they have very low ridership in large metro areas that can easily absorb billions in capital spending, so they build boutique underused services.

Canada's all sort of low investment but it depends on the province as well. If you're in a smaller province you tend to get less capital funding from the provincial and federal governments. Winnipeg has a lot of riders but still no LRT.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by someone123

I wonder what the need was for HRM to build it in the first place. In that era, Halifax was full of surface lots.

IIRC at the time the Tex-Park parkade that was built in the mid-60s to provide parking for downtown retailers was falling apart and scheduled for demolition as part of the original Twisted Sisters proposal. So that was the motivation to replace it and since HRM was behind putting Tex-Park where it was (even doing slum clearance and expropriation of the site) they felt a responsibility for providing a replacement. I will say from my personal experience that MetroPark is one of the better such parkades I’ve used.

[MonctonRad]

• Video Link

Very interesting video.

Waterloo Region was very flexible and innovative in developing their LRT system. Could Halifax show similar moxie???

[someone123]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

Waterloo Region was very flexible and innovative in developing their LRT system. Could Halifax show similar moxie???

They also innovatively occupied some politically strategic ridings and got a level of federal and provincial cost-sharing Halifax has never before experienced.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by someone123

They also innovatively occupied some politically strategic ridings and got a level of federal and provincial cost-sharing Halifax has never before experienced.

Yes, HRM voters seemingly have an innate ability to vote for the party that fails to attain any degree of power federally.

[TheNovaScotian]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

Very interesting video.

Waterloo Region was very flexible and innovative in developing their LRT system. Could Halifax show similar moxie???

That was a good watch.
One of the biggest successes I took away from the video was how the necessary powers and centralized authority mattered.

With little help from the province by way of funding and just plain ignored when things are proposed by the city like BRT. It's been a rocky relationship to say the least. Seeing how Tim just projected the largest deficit in Nova Scotia history of over a billion dollars. I feel this is him showing how thin the province's finances are stretched with the hospital construction starting in earnest. I don't see them pursuing something like this until the new hospital is off the books.

On the bright side, the province did recently pass the necessary legislation to start this process and a RFP closes in October for another study. I'm hopeful only because it's for a Regional Transit Authority that's been vested with the proper powers. On a federal level bill C-371 prioritized moving people on Canada's railways, so that will also be different if we plan on using the existing ROW's.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

• Video Link

Very interesting video.

Waterloo Region was very flexible and innovative in developing their LRT system. Could Halifax show similar moxie???

At the same time, showing the same moxie probably wouldn't yield the same results since we're such a different context. For one thing, they didn't do any tunneling at all and I don't see us getting a line with similar speed and efficiency without any tunneling. We just don't have enough wide roads in central areas to dedicate as a ROW and the rail corridor is of limited value due to where it goes and that trains don't just run occasionally overnight. Their main on-street segments on King St. and Charles St. each have a general road lane and an LRT lane in each direction. But it's hard to find a thoroughfare here that's consistently 4 lanes wide and that follows a useful route for transit riders. There's all kinds of routes that are 2 or 3 lanes or short stretches of 4 lanes but not 4 for a continuous stretch.

I think KWC teaches a great lesson in that cities need to identify and leverage any advantage they have, but it doesn't do much when such advantages don't exist.

[Dartguard]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

Yes, HRM voters seemingly have an innate ability to vote for the party that fails to attain any degree of power federally.

Well Keith its actually a National issue when it comes to Federal money for HRM. The argument in Ottawa is Halifax has the Navy and 40% of the paltry Defence assets located here, with more to come.Compelling Math in a Federal context. "Now they want a train?"

The real problem with N.S. are our Rural overlords. I just spent 45 minutes on the 102 leading to the Airport from Truro yesterday along with a few thousand friends as the contractors were fixing the pavement ruts in that stretch.The City and region have reached the point that fixes like that should be done at night. Period . Meanwhile the 105 Four lane in Cape Breton was getting a complete rebuild around Balls Creek with FAR less traffic. I guess it helps that the minister hails from Glace Bay.

I think the reason the Province has not released the Regional Transport plan is all the investment will go to HRM -where it is increasingly needed- and that is a very hard sell for Rural ministers."HRM gets everything, the Oval, University's, the Navy, Ikea, Costco." You get the idea.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Dartguard

Well Keith its actually a National issue when it comes to Federal money for HRM. The argument in Ottawa is Halifax has the Navy and 40% of the paltry Defence assets located here, with more to come.Compelling Math in a Federal context. "Now they want a train?"

The real problem with N.S. are our Rural overlords. I just spent 45 minutes on the 102 leading to the Airport from Truro yesterday along with a few thousand friends as the contractors were fixing the pavement ruts in that stretch.The City and region have reached the point that fixes like that should be done at night. Period . Meanwhile the 105 Four lane in Cape Breton was getting a complete rebuild around Balls Creek with FAR less traffic. I guess it helps that the minister hails from Glace Bay.

I think the reason the Province has not released the Regional Transport plan is all the investment will go to HRM -where it is increasingly needed- and that is a very hard sell for Rural ministers."HRM gets everything, the Oval, University's, the Navy, Ikea, Costco." You get the idea.

I think you have hit the nail on the head, but I also think this kind of thinking is harmful and I hope it is going away.

The navy isn't the same thing as the feds spending money on a train or an art gallery. It is a necessary service the feds must provide and now it must be scaled up for multiple reasons (NATO commitment, sovereignty, etc.).

The rural attitude is toxic. I don't know how this view is evolving but seats will be redistributed to the middle of the province eventually. Cape Breton has/had a terrible political culture with people boasting about how much they'd get in equalization money if they separated, due to their economy being so horrible. NS needs to invest in productive areas and focus on improving competitiveness. That will create more for the rural areas in the long run.

It's also undeniable that Halifax is in the central part of the province, most people live in that part, and placing infrastructure there makes more sense than say Yarmouth or Sydney. It's geography, and to the extent the province fights it, everyone will be worse off.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by Dartguard

The real problem with N.S. are our Rural overlords. I just spent 45 minutes on the 102 leading to the Airport from Truro yesterday along with a few thousand friends as the contractors were fixing the pavement ruts in that stretch.The City and region have reached the point that fixes like that should be done at night. Period . Meanwhile the 105 Four lane in Cape Breton was getting a complete rebuild around Balls Creek with FAR less traffic. I guess it helps that the minister hails from Glace Bay.

I think the reason the Province has not released the Regional Transport plan is all the investment will go to HRM -where it is increasingly needed- and that is a very hard sell for Rural ministers."HRM gets everything, the Oval, University's, the Navy, Ikea, Costco." You get the idea.

Certainly the typical hard-done-by rural attitudes and general lack of critical thinking leads to such comments. OTOH, if we could pick up the Oval and plunk it down somewhere else, it would be no loss and would allow funds to be spent on more useful things. It should never have been made permanent. Now of course it has expensive HRM infrastructure and staffing made permanent despite being built only as a temporary asset. I await the day sooner or later when it will need an expensive rebuild since it was never intended to last for long.

I was astounded to see that the long-overdue repaving of the 118 around Dartmouth Crossing has mostly been done overnight. That never seems to happen here. Not sure how that happened and why the 102 project was not also done that way. I think that the occasional visitor from rural NS would soon realize that HRM has become a very different creature from what it once was a decade or two ago, when it seemed more like a big small town. What now seems like an inevitable fixed-rail transit system of some sort will just confirm that point.

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by someone123

The rural attitude is toxic. I don't know how this view is evolving but seats will be redistributed to the middle of the province eventually. Cape Breton has/had a terrible political culture with people boasting about how much they'd get in equalization money if they separated, due to their economy being so horrible. NS needs to invest in productive areas and focus on improving competitiveness. That will create more for the rural areas in the long run.

When the province redrew ridings in 2019, the commission charged with making recommendations specifically recommended that rural areas be overrepresented in order to counterbalance the weight of HRM's growing influence.

Even now, the province is considering adding a fourth Acadian riding, by cutting Inverness in two. The funny thing is that Inverness currently has exactly the average number of electors. Slicing and dicing it to create an Acadian riding would result in two starkly undersized ridings, just like the three existing Acadian ridings (Clare, Argyle and Richmond), which are the smallest in the province, with between 6,800 and 8,000 electors each, based on 2021 census numbers. (The average number of electors per riding was just over 14,000.)

This is despite the fact that HRM-area ridings are actually among the most underpresented, with Halifax Citadel-Sable Island and Halifax Needham closing in on 18,000 electors, and Cole Harbour-Dartmouth nor far behind. Given that the province has added more than 100,000 people since then, almost all of whom have moved to HRM, it's insane that anyone is thinking about adding more rural ridings, and to provide representation to the most overrpresented constituency in the province. I have nothing against Acadians, but come on.

I think it is probably inevitable that the province will have to afford more weight to HRM, and I'd like to think it will be the 2026 census numbers that could do it, since they'll definitely show a noticeable urban shift in the population distribution. But I think it will take at least another census cycle, because there's no way the province is going to create a situation where urban voters are even marginally overrepresented--despite that we have rural ridings that are effectively half of what a riding should be, population-wise.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

When the province redrew ridings in 2019, the commission charged with making recommendations specifically recommended that rural areas be overrepresented in order to counterbalance the weight of HRM's growing influence.

Even now, the province is considering adding a fourth Acadian riding, by cutting Inverness in two. The funny thing is that Inverness currently has exactly the average number of electors. Slicing and dicing it to create an Acadian riding would result in two starkly undersized ridings, just like the three existing Acadian ridings (Clare, Argyle and Richmond), which are the smallest in the province, with between 6,800 and 8,000 electors each, based on 2021 census numbers. (The average number of electors per riding was just over 14,000.)

If those responsible used population statistics then one could argue that HRM should have an Indo/Pakistani riding I’d guess just based on observations, or possibly other types as well. But that just goes more towards my belief that these sort of “cultural distinction“ riding designations should not exist at all, Acadian or otherwise. It is a slippery slope.

[OldDartmouthMark]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

I will say from my personal experience that MetroPark is one of the better such parkades I’ve used.

I will echo that sentiment, and by the number of vehicles occupying it any and every time I've been there, I suspect that we're not the only ones who feel that way.