Post Panamax ships to call to Halifax

[Keith P.]

Ziobrop weighs in today in the Herald:

https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/business/shipping-news-fillmore-ignores-port-expansion-249711/

Good "Fillmore Ignores Port Expansion" headline, and I love the opening line "Halifax MP Andy Fillmore appears more interested in upholding his professional planning dogma then he is in supporting the Port of Halifax and good jobs for Haligonians."

The port appears to have suffered a dogma bite.

[OldDartmouthMark]

From the Chronicle Herald: ANDY FILLMORE: Future of Cogswell, Halterm belongs in hands of Haligonians

https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/opinio...-belongs-in-hands-of-haligonians-250966/

[Keith P.]

The problem with what Fillmore espouses in that piece is that some things are simply "show consultation" - i.e. the library was going on that site come hell or high water regardless of what the consultation said. And then once it was determined formally, then a massive wish list by people who largely had no clue got pretty much adopted en masse, leading to the extravagantly expensive facility we now have.

Whenever consultation is done here, the usual suspects typically dominate the proceedings. So in this case the expected result would be "get the trucks out of downtown", but then nothing would be done for decades to provide any alternative. Result: the port withers and dies.

One must wonder if Fillmore was whispering sweet nothings along the lines of this article into the ears of his Liberal colleagues in Ottawa, leading to their making this decision. It would be fascinating to find that out.

[someone123]

Let's assume the consultation would be completely genuine. Will members of the public appreciate the constraints of the shipping industry or appreciate its positive economic impact? How will the timelines work out? Cogswell has been in planning stages since the late 1990's, and public input did not alter that plan or HRM by Design to anywhere near the degree Andy Fillmore is proposing for the Port of Halifax.

If the port runs on a 6-20 year consultation timeline I'm not sure consultation will be needed because it will be outcompeted by every other port. Industry and business are fundamentally different from consultation about how to arrange nonessential public amenities like libraries and parks. The hospital will be different too. Or at least I hope we won't see the hospital expansion designed by Heritage Trust folks in a charrette.

Also the containers that are being transported by truck should be transported by rail through the rail cut. Halterm's problems are fixable at a lower cost than the proposed alternatives, like building new container ports.

It's all pretty depressing.

[IanWatson]

Originally Posted by someone123

Will members of the public appreciate the constraints of the shipping industry or appreciate its positive economic impact?

Yeah, that was kind of my first thought too. I consider myself a pretty informed person, but I have zero concept of how the port functions or what its needs would be. Basically the only thing I could honestly say at any consultation would be, "I'd like the trucks off Hollis, and it would be kind of cool if we could move the port and free up that land for expanding the downtown."

I have zero concept of the impact of the port, economically, compared to other big employers. I don't know how integral (or not) it is to making Halifax Halifax. It seems to me like this is one of those cases where public consultation is actually a really bad idea.

[q12]

Here you go... It's kinda important.

FACT SHEET

About

The Port of Halifax is a major contributor to the economy of Nova Scotia and is a national asset connecting importers and exporters with global markets.

Direct and spin-off impacts of port-related activities include 12,400 jobs and $1.7 billion in gross output.

Jobs and Salaries

The Port creates approximately 12,400 direct and indirect full-time equivalent jobs. Wages and salaries resulting from port activity exceed $500 million annually and the average wage for direct and spin-off jobs is $45,100, which is 29% above the provincial average.

Rail and Trucking

CN and related rail service providers contribute $170 million to economic output annually, with long-haul and local trucking activity contributing $160 million.

Cruise Industry

Annually, economic impact from cruise operations is approximately $123 million from passenger, crew and cruise line expenditures, and vessel provisioning.

Contributions to Government Tax Revenues

Port related employment provides the province with over $76 million in personal income and consumption taxes. Annual payments to Halifax Regional Municipality exceed $1 million.

Canada’s Atlantic Gateway to the World

• Diverse cargo and cruise port
• Provides connections with 150 countries for cargo imports & exports
• One of the deepest and largest natural, ice-free harbours in the world
• Ice-free year-round and minimal tides
• Strategically located on the Great Circle Route
• Most easterly North American full-service container port
• First inbound, last outbound port to North America from Europe and the Med./Suez
• Serving major lines on transatlantic, Suez and pendulum routings including: Europe, Middle East, Southeast Asia/Indian Subcontinent and the Far East
• Capacity to accommodate the world’s largest vessels
• Two modern container terminals & two breakbulk terminals
• CN provides daily double-stack train departures to Montreal, Toronto and Chicago
• Only major seaport in Canada with on-dock policing services

Port of Halifax Firsts
1752 – North America’s oldest operating salt water ferry service began service
1758 – North America’s first naval dockyard opened
1837 – North America’s first yacht squadron opened – The Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron
1970 – Halifax’s South End Container Terminal opened – Canada’s first common-user container terminal
1998 – Halifax was the first east coast North American port to welcome a post-Panamax vessel, the Regina Maersk
2007 – First port in Canada to achieve investment grade credit rating from Standard & Poor’s
2007 – First port in Canada to achieve ISO 14001 certification for Environmental Management System
2011 – Joined Green Marine, a North American environmental certification program that stems from a voluntary initiative by the maritime industry to exceed regulatory requirements.
2014 – Richmond Multipurpose Terminals expansion project complete. First shipment arrived October 14.
2013 – Received first vessel over 7,500 TEU on July 16, the Hapag-Lloyd Berlin Express, 7,506 TEU, at Fairview Cove Container Terminal operated by Ceres-Halifax.
2014 – Became the first port on the East Coast of North America to provide shore power to cruise vessels.
2015 – Named as the 2015 Port of the Year by the International Seafarers’ Welfare and Assistance Network (ISWAN).
2015 – Received first vessel over 8,000 TEU on August 3, the CMA CGM Vivaldi, 8,478 TEU, at South End Container Terminal operated by Halterm.
2015 – Received first vessel over 8,500 TEU on August 7, the Hapag-Lloyd Budapest Express, 8,749 TEU, at Fairview Cove Container Terminal operated by Ceres-Halifax.
2016 – Received largest cruise vessel call at the Port of Halifax, the Royal Caribbean International Anthem of the Seas on September 1.
2017 – Received first vessel over 10,000 TEU, the Zim Antwerp, 10,062 TEU, on June 29 at South End Container Terminal operated by Halterm.

https://www.portofhalifax.ca/about-us/resources/fact-sheet/

[someone123]

Originally Posted by IanWatson

"I'd like the trucks off Hollis, and it would be kind of cool if we could move the port and free up that land for expanding the downtown."

The problem with this view is that it does not take costs into account. Public consultation is good for identifying the value that members of the public assign to different amenities but it does not provide a complete basis for making economic decisions.

Relocating Halterm would be very expensive. That land is not "free" or surplus, and who knows what kind of remediation it will need? Looking at some other container terminal projects, it seems like it would cost around $200-400M. I doubt many people truly want the city, province, or country to raise hundreds of millions in taxes so that mixed use development can go onto the Halterm land instead of on all the other opportunity sites on the peninsula and elsewhere.

If anything in Halifax there seems to be a problem with follow-through on the development on these sites. How's Shannon Park? St. Pat's? Bloomfield? Cogswell? The big block of underused seaport land near Halterm? Why are we still excited about adding more brownfield sites to the sad pile? And so excited that some people seem to want to kill industries so that we can have more brownfield land?

[Keith P.]

The other thing about the Halterm site is that it is all fill, and continues to settle even now. Not such a big problem for an asphalted-over container storage site, but perhaps more concerning if you wanted condos and apartments there. Then there would be the question of roadway access. Point Pleasant Drive is not suited to high traffic volumes, and I suspect Marginal Road would not be particularly good for residential traffic either.

[scryer]

More trucks on the road means that there's more encouragement to get driver's off the road too. Moving your products from point A to Point B can be done more efficiently if less people were driving; hence the introduction of rapid transit system.

[ScovaNotian]

I don't know how those figures are calculated, but $1.7 billion and 12,400 jobs sounds impressive, no? Dal a couple of years ago had its GDP impact calculated at $1 billion a year, and they employ far fewer than 12,400 people.

[terrynorthend]

Originally Posted by ScovaNotian

I don't know how those figures are calculated, but $1.7 billion and 12,400 jobs sounds impressive, no? Dal a couple of years ago had its GDP impact calculated at $1 billion a year, and they employ far fewer than 12,400 people.

Dal employs over 6000 faculty and staff, so at $1 billion vs. 1.7, they are in a similar ballpark. But yes, the port is an impressive and important part of the Halifax economy and should be supported by our federal MP's.

[IanWatson]

Originally Posted by someone123

The problem with this view is that it does not take costs into account. Public consultation is good for identifying the value that members of the public assign to different amenities but it does not provide a complete basis for making economic decisions.

Yeah, I guess that's exactly my point. As an uninformed member of the public, I can only tell you that it would be great to move the port. I have no concept of what that involves in terms of cost or effort, and I don't think that's something that can ever be effectively communicated in a public consultation event; consultation would be meaningless because it's not based on any tangible reality.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by IanWatson

Yeah, I guess that's exactly my point. As an uninformed member of the public, I can only tell you that it would be great to move the port. I have no concept of what that involves in terms of cost or effort, and I don't think that's something that can ever be effectively communicated in a public consultation event; consultation would be meaningless because it's not based on any tangible reality.

Fillmore posted his Herald piece on Facebook (for some reason I cannot link to it here so you will have to look it up) and the comments are exactly like you describe, mostly uninformed and totally not based in reality. "Get the trucks out of downtown", "More cruise ships, less container ships!", "Make them use electric trucks instead!", "Get rid of the container trucks so we can use the Hollis bike lane!", "Move the container pier to Dartmouth!", etc etc. It is really very discouraging.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark

From the Chronicle Herald: ANDY FILLMORE: Future of Cogswell, Halterm belongs in hands of Haligonians

https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/opinio...-belongs-in-hands-of-haligonians-250966/

And today we receive a counterpoint from someone who actually knows what he's talking about:

https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/opinio...ax-needs-progress-not-pie-in-sky-251909/

I like the "pie in the sky" reference.

[someone123]

It reminds me of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Planners operate up around the municipal equivalent of levels 3-5 (love/belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization in humans), the top of the pyramid. For Halifax, the port is somewhere around level 1 at the base (physiological).

Andy Fillmore is doing the equivalent of proposing an inversion of the pyramid, and is trying to favour the less essential stuff by sacrificing the more essential stuff. It is like telling a starving person that he needs psychotherapy when he actually would be better off eating a hamburger and then worrying about his higher order health issues later.

If the port is healthy and doing well then the city can contemplate nicer streets and public buildings, bike lanes, etc. If the city loses its economic base then all of the nice stuff disappears. A good example of what happens when the economic base disappears exists about 4 hours to the northeast of Halifax. Why haven't urban planners flocked there to solve those problems? They are not solvable by urban planners.

[Ziobrop]

truck mitigation is actually pretty simple. - look to Vancouver.

relocating the port to Dartmouth would be 2-3 billion dollars.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Ziobrop

truck mitigation is actually pretty simple. - look to Vancouver.

relocating the port to Dartmouth would be 2-3 billion dollars.

You also have to wonder if the federal government would actually fund that project, to say nothing of opportunity costs.

I think a Northwest Arm bridge would be a good project for the region. Many people think that it is impossible due to NIMBYism but I believe this is defeatist and untrue. A Northwest Arm bridge could do all sorts of nice things, including providing a better connection to the new wilderness park for peninsula residents. It is at least worth studying.

Halifax is growing at around 2% a year. It will soon have 2x the population that it did back when the MacKay bridge was built. Eventually it will need some substantial new infrastructure.

[Ziobrop]

Originally Posted by someone123

You also have to wonder if the federal government would actually fund that project, to say nothing of opportunity costs.

I think a Northwest Arm bridge would be a good project for the region. Many people think that it is impossible due to NIMBYism but I believe this is defeatist and untrue. A Northwest Arm bridge could do all sorts of nice things, including providing a better connection to the new wilderness park for peninsula residents. It is at least worth studying.

Halifax is growing at around 2% a year. It will soon have 2x the population that it did back when the MacKay bridge was built. Eventually it will need some substantial new infrastructure.

the arm bridge was actually a condition of Halifax council of the Day supporting the construction of the Mackay. HHB is empowered to construct it.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Ziobrop

the arm bridge was actually a condition of Halifax council of the Day supporting the construction of the Mackay. HHB is empowered to construct it.

That is an interesting bit of historical information. Thanks. I don't think I've ever heard that before.

I feel like there is a lack of leadership when it comes to many of these projects. Instead of city hall communicating the opportunities available, the conversation tends to be dominated by negative folklore ("new roads just bring more traffic" fits into this category; it is not a useful planning principle). I could be missing similar ads in Halifax but here in metro Vancouver there are TransLink ads (and all kinds of related materials) communicating the message that X more people will live in the region 10-20 years from now, and now is the time to pick the best infrastructure projects to accommodate the additional demand in order to maintain the city's quality of life. There is always a list of major projects that are 5 years out. Vancouver has not done a perfect job of this and has its own problems but it does a much better job than Halifax at building new infrastructure. Both cities are growing at the same rate right now.

In the same way that people in Halifax didn't have a good appreciation of modern architecture before the library was built, I feel like the city's inhabitants have a poor appreciation of what well-designed infrastructure can be like. When they think of new transportation infrastructure they imagine overburdened and crumbling projects that were built 40 or 50 years ago.

A Northwest Arm bridge could be an ugly traffic sewer, sure. But it could also be beautiful, it could integrate well into the surrounding urban fabric, and it could be built for many different modes of transport and users.

Your post about noise mitigation around the Port of Vancouver also shows how much of a difference incremental improvements can make. Traffic doesn't have to be an evil thing and new transportation infrastructure definitely is not.

[Keith P.]

If 2 or 3 billion dollars of fed money is on the table I would much rather have that spent on a third harbour bridge or tunnel to Woodside. That would have the added side benefit of instantly fixing the Halterm traffic issues downtown.

I find Fillmore's position on this quite bizarre for the MP representing Halifax. It is as if he is putting his own personal professional interests ahead of those whom he represents. This will make good ammo for political opponents to use against him in the next election. I'm sure the ILA members will be mobilizing their forces against him.