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Originally Posted by counterfactual
No more apples to oranges than comparing Halifax to, say, Winnipeg or London, neither of which have a compact land form like we do on the peninsula, which may lead to more walking over cars, as Dry points out.
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I'm not sure what you mean. Winnipeg and London both have areas of their inner cities with population and building densities similar to what you'd see on the peninsula. They just also have wider and straighter roads that don't all dead-end arbitrarily. This might make driving less unattractive but it also cuts down on walking distances for pedestrians. They are both also extremely flat which theoretically would make cycling a more attractive option, though in practice I don't know if it's any more popular in those cities (Winnipeg, particularly, I wouldn't want to bike in during the winter).
I don't think the geographic constraints of the Peninsula inherently encourage walking; I'd say the opposite is more likely. For example if I could walk "directly" from my house in Armdale to my school/workplace downtown (ie. if the Northwest Arm wasn't there), it would be about a 25 minute walk. But because I have to go around the Arm, it actually takes over an hour (so I usually take the bus, or catch a ride with someone else). If what you mean is that people are more likely to walk
within the Peninsula because everything is relatively close together, then I agree, and in practice this definitely seems to be true.
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Also, I think the absence of subways or commuter rails doesn't obviate comparisons; I think this is also suggestive of a stronger car culture.
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It is, sort of, but it's not really that simple. Halifax doesn't have a subway, but it also doesn't have the 401 (or the other mega-highways of the GTA). Also, a LOT of people drive to GO stations in the GTA. So saying that Halifax has "a stronger car culture" than Toronto because Toronto has a subway and GO trains is only looking at half the picture. I'm less familiar with Montreal.
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We've talked for years about commuter rail in Halifax, usually hand wringing about the costs, and it never happens. Meanwhile, we earmark about many times more the estimated cost of an LRT for massive road projects like Bayers Road widening.
You may not find that noteworthy, but I think you're wrong.
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There has never, to my knowledge, been an "estimated cost of an LRT" for Halifax because there has never been a study on actual LRT for the region. It's not the same thing as commuter rail.
I agree that there is a disproportionate amount of money (and particularly focus/attention) spent on road projects, but Bayers Road for example is a major route not just for commuters but for anyone using the 102, which includes transport trucks and a very large share of people driving into the city from elsewhere. Widening Bayers Road isn't something I'm necessarily against, especially if it includes upgrades for transit.
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And just to pre-empt the expected reply that Halifax is too "small" to support commuter rail
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I literally wrote a thesis arguing that a hybrid commuter rail/LRT system could work in Halifax if planners and engineers were willing to think outside the box (or at least outside of the North American box). The problem is that historically they haven't. Basically every proposal for commuter rail in Halifax since at least the 1970s has only looked at using the CN ROW (which is only available "in theory" and is only a semi-convenient routing), and obsolete vehicles that require very long distances to accelerate/decelerate. I'm not convinced that the vehicles in the proposed Halifax system would ever reach their optimal operating speed.
It's really no surprise when such proposals are considered to be a poor investment, because the end goal is always a system with obvious flaws - it wouldn't be particularly convenient for many residents, it would be slow, it would not be usable for people going against the flow of traffic or traveling outside of peak hours, and its endpoint on the peninsula wouldn't be particularly convenient for downtown workers. Despite all of these problems, it could still cost as much, or more, than an equally-or-more effective system. Honestly, if Bayers Road is going to be widened anyway, using the 102 for BRT would probably be much more effective than anything proposed for the CN ROW. And that's not to say that I don't think Halifax could or should have an urban rail network of some sort, just that the proposals so far have tended to set themselves up for failure by only considering what is basically the least useful option.
I looked at the list and I don't see any "much smaller" urban centres in North America with commuter rail systems currently operating. Ann Arbor is
slightly smaller than Halifax. All of the other systems seem to be within metro areas that have well over a million people. I'm not saying that a million is "the magic number", just that I fail to see what your point was here.
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Taking subways/sky trains out of the equation is not a valid way to crunch the numbers. As I said above, lack of investment in mass transit is arguably an indication of car culture. If you don't build it, you don't get the windfall it offers in terms of reducing car culture and commute times. Spend the money and you do. Removing significant non-automobile based transit from an equation meant to measure car culture turns this exercise on its head.
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All that I meant was that there's more than one way to look at the data. To you, that graph means that Halifax loves cars. To me, it means that we are very good at using what is currently available to us. In reality, both are true only to some extent.
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Not really. It can explain some of the cities, but not all that beat Halifax on commute times. Moreover, all of these explanations equally apply to cities who we *best* on commute times, which are far bigger than us. So, perhaps, when we take those considerations into account, we may not fair better than even bigger cities.
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Commute times are affected by a large number of factors, "how much we love our cars" is only one of them, and arguably not the biggest. The fact that so much employment is concentrated downtown and in adjacent parts of the Peninsula is part of it - the choke points, the narrow, one-way streets, the short blocks which necessitate more frequent stops, the fact that you often can't reach, let alone exceed 50km/h on much of the Peninsula (compare that to cities where 10+ over the speed limit on arterials is the norm)... Then there is the non-peninsular road network, which lacks anything resembling a coherent grid (the exceptions being Fairview/Fairmount and central Dartmouth), the fact that most off-peninsula arterials are very meandering (which adds time/distance) and many are one lane in each direction.
Then you also have to factor in the number of people who use transit or active transport/walking. It's no secret that the bus is rarely the fastest way to get somewhere in Halifax, and just because someone walks to work doesn't mean that they do it in 20 minutes or less. All of these people are generally counted as commuters, not just drivers.
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Quebec City is a nice comparator to Halifax, in that it has a very compact and historic downtown ("Old Quebec") with very tight road grids but then, a large mass of sprawl building out from that. Downtown is also on a peninsula, with the Riviere Saint-Charles and the Saint Lawrence, bordering it on two sides. Quebec also doesn't have city transit.
So with comparable land forms and 530,000 in the city of Quebec, and 700,000+ metro, we should be easily beat them on commute times, based on sheer smaller population numbers alone.
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This isn't really how this works though. It's like saying that downtown Quebec City should have twice as many office towers as downtown Halifax because numbers! Of course, if Quebec City had significantly more office towers downtown, maybe the average commute would be longer.
There's a certain irony to the fact that if
more office development was concentrated in places like Bayers Lake and Lower Sackville, average commute times could drop significantly because employment would suddenly be a lot closer for some people and the traffic would not all be going in the same direction or using the same roads. Of course, that's theoretical. If people are living in Cole Harbour but working in Bayer's Lake, that's gonna be a long commute no longer what. But if people living in Clayton Park West or Timberlea are working in Bayer's Lake, that's a significantly shorter commute than downtown and takes commuters off peninsular streets, lowering commute times for people who do work downtown.
Edit: What do you mean Quebec doesn't have city transit?
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We don't. Why? Because we looooooove our cars, Hali.  (See Figure 1).
FIGURE 1: MORE EVIDENCE - TYPICAL HRM DRIVER BEFORE HEADING INTO MORNING COMMUTE
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Whatever. At least she's got a nice smile.
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