HRM Integrated Mobility Plan

[Keith P.]

https://www.halifax.ca/sites/default...171205cow3.pdf

This goes to Council on Tuesday.

Lots of words, lots of pictures and diagrams. Not too sure it amounts to very much though.

With the traffic debacles we now have on a near-daily basis, more sidewalks and bike lanes aren't going to do it. I get the feeling the majority of people are beginning to realize Council has sat on their collective behinds far too long and are going to demand much more effective actions than what we find here.

[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.

[Keith P.]

Can't disagree with anything in @someone123 's post. The term "boutique project" sums it up well. That's all HRM does. Build a roundabout here, a bike lane there. No big picture strategy. This document doesn't present one either. I do hope there is robust debate and discussion on this, not just a pile of platitudes. We need to talk to the people who sit in traffic everyday, not just the special interests and lobby groups.

I have vain hope, though, that there is a chance this will stop the ad-hoc-ery we have seen the last few years with building bike lanes willy-nilly without any consideration of how they affect the rest of the network and how streets get used, whether they should take priority over other things, or whether they are even needed.

[MonctonRad]

I actually browsed through the plan. It was included as a link on one of the posts on the Rail Transportation Thread by q12.

I thought it a well constructed and presented (albeit long winded) document. I agree with a lot of what someone123 said. The traffic situation in Halifax is reaching the point where "big fix" projects are needed to rectify the situation. One of these is commuter rail. It was interesting to see in the document mention of relocating HalTerm to Woodside thus eliminating truck traffic in the downtown and allowing the rail cut to be used for passenger rail only. I honestly do know someone on the Halifax Port Authority board of directors and they really are considering this as a possibility. This could be a major part of any final solution to the problem.

As much as I am a 60 year old male wedded to my internal combustion vehicle, even I know that private automobiles won't solve the situation. Access to the peninsula is limited to five points and that really isn't going to change, Active transportation however is only a "boutique solution" for some. Halifax is far too hilly, too rainy and too cold for it to really catch on. The solution therefore lies in mass transport. For some this will mean an expanded ferry service. For other it will mean commuter rail supplemented by streetcars/LRT. Unfortunately I don't think BRT is viable on many (non limited access) routes.

My solution therefore would be:
1)- relocate HalTerm
2)- go whole hog on commuter rail and streetcars.
3)- expand ferry service where viable.

[Nouvellecosse]

While I agree that BRT isn't a large scale option, money spent on simple bus lanes could probably get us a lot farther than the same money spent on LRT and streetcars. I'm a proponent of urban rail, but at this point we have some catching up to do to actually get to that point imo.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

While I agree that BRT isn't a large scale option, money spent on simple bus lanes could probably get us a lot farther than the same money spent on LRT and streetcars. I'm a proponent of urban rail, but at this point we have some catching up to do to actually get to that point imo.

It might be difficult politically but at this point it makes sense to try to build an automated rapid transit system, and an automated bus system running in dedicated lanes is possible. In a few years a fully-automated bus system running in mixed traffic will be possible. Given the speed of bureaucracy, this means that any major transit improvement in Halifax is going to happen well into the era of self-driving vehicles.

The advantage of trains on dedicated tracks will decline somewhat because that will not be the only kind of transit system that can be automated. It will also be more viable to have smaller transit vehicles because there won't be the fixed overhead of one human driver per vehicle.

Battery-powered buses already exist too, and aside from the more abstract environmental benefits they produce less noise and no emissions.

So maybe buses will actually be a good choice. But they need to be modern rather, and they will need to be separated from other traffic or they won't make much difference.

The city needs to sort out ride sharing too. As far as I can tell it's conspicuously absent from the document but it is a huge improvement over the antiquated taxi system in cities that allow companies like Uber and Lyft to operate.

[OldDartmouthMark]

Many good points made. A few thoughts:

(1) The current commuter rail idea may not be a be-all end-all, but it is a start. A good one, actually, and much more than we've had for many years.

(2) One of the reasons I like commuter rail on dedicated tracks is that it adds additional capacity for commuters. Dedicated bus lanes are fine, but given our older roadway infrastructure, which is already over capacity, taking whole lanes away from motorists seems counterproductive, IMHO.

(3) A reliable crystal ball would be a wonderful tool to be able to predict the future, but since we don't have one I'd be cautious about focusing our planning around the possibility of autonomous vehicles being our main mode of transportation in the future. There has been a lot of research and development dedicated towards autonomous vehicle in the past few years, but it is by no means guaranteed that it will happen, despite the fact that the topic is a media darling at the moment. Therefore we still have to keep our options open, IMHO.

(4) I do support bicycle lanes, but I really don't think it will ever catch on to be the main means of transportation for the masses. It is a healthy and virtuous form of transportation, but I can't imagine the majority of citizens being willing and able to commute through all the snowstorms and other bad weather that we have. Yeah, Europeans, etc., but I really don't see it here, as anecdotally I haven't really observed much of an increase in bicycles on our roads over the past 10 years or so, despite the increase in bicycle-focused infrastructure. We do need to support it to a certain extent to open the door for those so inclined, but I think it would be a mistake to prioritize it as a main transportation form for the population masses.

[Colin May]

We need to get more office workers off the peninsula and sent to Dartmouth and Bedford.
According to the recent census most people who commute to work take 29-45 minutes. No big deal really. My wife worked with someone who drove from Sheet Harbour to Lower Sackville every day, and in all types of weather !

[englishmanabroad]

Originally Posted by Colin May

We need to get more office workers off the peninsula and sent to Dartmouth and Bedford.
According to the recent census most people who commute to work take 29-45 minutes. No big deal really. My wife worked with someone who drove from Sheet Harbour to Lower Sackville every day, and in all types of weather !

In terms of furthering economic development in those communities I couldn't agree more, however I believe taking jobs from the peninsula would be the wrong move. Instead we need to focus on encouraging more complete communities where by which people who choose to live in Dartmouth and Bedford have the opportunity to also to work in those areas, reducing commute times. Instead of the peninsula perhaps focusing on discouraging central services and businesses moving to places such as bayers lake and moving them to areas that have low business activity such as Dartmouth downtown would help revitalise those areas.