City staff and the transportation mutiny

Hey Insiders 👋 

Welcome to the free version of the city hall insider newsletter that we send out to all our subscribers every 10th one or so to entice you to pay for local journalism. You can do so here! For those of you who don't follow me on social media, I have recently received my brand new truck! Since I refused to spend $70,000 (which is, let’s just say, a bit more than my annual salary) on a massive pickup truck with a bed too small to fit my bike. So, through a broker, I bought a Japanese minitruck at auction for ¥100,000 or about $875 (plus approximately $5,000 in importing and broker fees) and it arrived in town on the same day Snoop Dogg did. 

And, some of you may remember from a few newsletters ago that our other car got wrecked. The good news is it is fixable but due to the rise in collisions in recent years, the shop won’t be able to make the repairs for 2-3 months. In the meantime, we have a rental car. A 2024 SUV.  

Driving these two cars built 20 years apart has highlighted in extreme detail one of the many lies included as fact in Halifax’s new road “safety” 😉 framework. Specifically this one about safety features.

What I’ve learned more than anything else in driving cars built 20 years apart is that any “assistive safety technologies” are vastly outgunned by new cars’ “ease of violence technologies.” 

In the truck I need to apply force to the pedals to go and to stop, whereas in the rental SUV it is very hard not to speed. A flick of a toe is the difference between 5kph and 70kph. My driving instructor way back in the day told me that the yellow advisory speed signs were to warn that upcoming turns were dangerous at speeds higher than the yellow sign. He told me this was due to physics, and that cars could not easily handle the physics of a turn above the yellow posted speeds. 

Until I got my truck I had only ever driven modern cars, and I thought my instructor was lying. It feels unsafe to take turns at faster than the posted advisory speed in my truck. It feels fun to take turns at faster than regulatory speed in my 2024 rental. The engineering improvements to make driving easier have also made cars far more dangerous than any safety feature makes a car safe. 

This also ignores the reality that vehicles like Chevy trucks and Tesla cars can have Netflix in the driver’s integrated “infotainment” screen. It should be noted that this is in direct violation of Nova Scotia’s Motor Vehicle Act clause 184(7) which reads "no person shall drive on a highway a motor vehicle equipped with a television viewer, screen or other means of visually receiving a television broadcast that is located in the vehicle at a point forward of the back of the driver’s seat or that is visible to the driver while he is operating the vehicle."

A provincial spokesperson responded that “Under Nova Scotia’s Motor Vehicle Act, section 184(7) states that a driver watching television while operating a vehicle is subject to a fine, as it would be considered distracted driving.” Which you can read for yourself is just not true. When pressed to clarify the spokesperson responded, “Hi Mat[sic] we have nothing further to add on this subject.”

So while the HRM report is correct in saying that modern cars are designed for higher driver survivability and come with “safety” 😉 features like hands-free driving. Drivers also have phones in their hand and Netflix on their dash. What do we use to protect our gas pumps and drive-thru windows? Bollards.

And what do we do to “protect” 😉 our children from drivers watching Netflix while scrolling on their phone with no hands on the wheel? We install paint and lights.

I’ve written about the issues with this new road safety framework extensively, but it’s time for me to be a bit more direct. I’m asking for your help. This week on Wednesday, June 19 at 1:30pm at city hall, the Transportation Standing Committee will meet and consider adopting this new framework designed to generate public relations wins as transportation maimings and fatalities continue to mount. I would ask, that if you are able, please show up to the meeting and ask councillors to reinstate the 2018 strategic road framework as originally passed and direct staff to come up with solutions that will achieve the goals of that framework, even if it means gasp changing the status quo to make things better. If you can’t show up in person, we are now allowed to speak at meetings virtually, and you can sign up to do so by emailing the clerks at [email protected]. Written submissions to the committee can also be sent to the same address. Alternatively, you can email the members of the committee directly. But I would encourage you, if you are able, to show up in person. 

This new road violence comms strategy is a massive failure of both responsible and good governance. It needs to be stopped. Show up and demand that our politicians treat our lives as though our lives are as valuable to this city as a gas station pump or a drive-thru window.

Last week’s TLDR

Transportation and political failure

Finally accounting for the cost of roads

Staff kill BRT with Windsor Exchange plan

What happened last week

Tuesday, June 11

The Halifax and West Community Council was supposed to meet to have a public hearing but they did not get quorum so this meeting was cancelled. When they do meet again, if they have quorum, they’re likely going to approve turning 37 lots into housing, some of it single units, some of it more. The guiding planning document that is dictating what’s allowed on this land, the Municipal Planning Strategy (MPS), was written in 2001. The reason modern planning documents like the Integrated Mobility Plan are garbage is that they have no power over the older planning documents. So even though this will be a car-dependent housing development, it is in line with the IMP because the congestion it generates “will aid in increasing the priority of transit service in the Herring Cove community by increasing demand and ridership.” Also, there’s too much space given to cars so there’s no room for a sidewalk. Get bent anyone who wants to walk. In spite of this, staff are recommending that this development go ahead because “the applicant has designed a subdivision layout that is consistent with the MPS policies and will support the objectives of priorities plans such as the Halifax Green Network Plan and the Integrated Mobility Plan.” Which is not true. But we’ll have to wait to find out what they actually do.

Wednesday, June 12

The Special Events Advisory Committee meeting was cancelled. 

The Special Executive Standing Committee meeting was cancelled. 

The Harbour East-Marine Drive Community Council met and dealt with some old business after a slight delay. Councillor David Hendsbee got a staff report on responsible cat ownership cancelled. This was due to staff asking for it to be cancelled. Hendsbee said people should put a bell on their cats. They also considered the deferred business of nominating the Shubenacadie Waterway to the Canadian Heritage River System program. They started the process to get Shubie nominated, if successful the process will be complete by 2027. They gave first reading to a potential rezoning of 3 and 5 Bruce St. There was a development agreement to build a convenience store with a basement apartment, but now they want to build a seven-storey mixed-use apartment building. Councillor Tony Mancini will get a staff report on limiting building height and setback in R-1 and R-2 zones to align with the HAF b’ys (my new acronym for the Housing Accelerator Fund bylaw changes). Former alderman of Dartmouth Colin May spoke at the meeting and said that allowing bikes in the Dartmouth Commons is not allowed legislatively, and thanks to the proliferation of e-bikes, he no longer feels safe walking through the park. He says that if he gets hit by an e-bike going 20kph at his age (almost 80) he’s probably a goner. He’s not wrong, but our councillors don’t care. Don’t believe me? Re-read the intro.

Thursday, June 13

The Design Review Committee was cancelled. 

The Appeals Standing Committee met to hear one case. This committee is governed by the dangerous and unsightly premises bylaw that Mancini is trying to fix. I went to this meeting and witnessed in real time a wasteful use of municipal resources. 

The Environment and Sustainability Standing Committee met and got a presentation about a community solar project. This presentation resulted in the committee making a motion for a staff report to endorse this project. Because this motion is for a staff report councillors can shortcut the normal legislative process and at their agenda setting meeting they can get this put on tomorrow’s council meeting’s agenda. Well, well, well, it turns out our councillors do know how to leverage the power of bureaucratic processes to expedite their priorities, when they want to. Good to know. They also got an update on the solid waste strategy review, only major takeaway here is that we might get bins for our garbage instead of using bags. This will cost $14 million, which is the equivalent of paving 14km of road, but because it’s not a road this has a very high potential to be cut every year at budget time (unless the upcoming four-year budget process is as good as advertised). 

The African Descent Advisory Committee met to continue discussing their work plan and receive their monthly update from the African Nova Scotian Affairs Integration Office. This meeting was not televised and the minutes are not live. If you hear nothing further about this meeting please assume it was painfully routine. 

What’s happening this week

Monday, June 17

The Executive Standing Committee will be meeting and they have a super boring agenda, which means the city of Halifax is about to change drastically. In 2023 thanks to a motion from councillor Shawn Cleary the city started the process of reviewing its Advisory (committees), Boards and Committees, the ABC’s of good governance. Today this report is coming to the executive standing committee and they’ll consider starting phase 1 of this democratic reform, which includes dissolving some advisory committees, and restructuring others. Bill 137 is playing a role in some of these dissolutions, because the legislation passed by Tim Houston’s Tories silenced some advisory boards as a source of expertise for municipal policymaking. This has led to some very weird board meetings in recent years where HRM staff have been forced to use a loophole where they gave information presentations to the watershed advisory board of experts and then city staff told the experts of the committee that they couldn’t accept feedback. But the experts were free to contact the city with feedback, and mention when they did that they just happened to be on the city’s board of experts in the field 😉. The committee is likely going to mail out additional notifications of the upcoming municipal election in October. The city has changed how we manage emergencies with the creation of the new Department of Public Safety last year. This motion to update our emergency by-law is correcting the paperwork to reflect our new organizational structure. The same people are still doing the same work in what is essentially the same structure, and the only real difference is now their hats will say DPS instead of HRFE. The committee will also consider changing the terms and name of the Women’s Advisory Committee. Should these changes pass, the advisory committees will be empowered to start trying to make the city more equitable as we covered a few newsletters ago. If you are not normally a recipient of this newsletter (please consider it!) you may be surprised to learn this is not, strictly speaking, their current job.  

The Accessibility Advisory Committee will meet and talk about the proposed Slayter Street Bikeway project. 

The North West Community Council will be meeting to give a first reading to a proposed rezoning of 749 Windgate Dr. This mechanic shop wants to expand and needs industrial zoning to do so. 

1540 Prospect Rd. is likely to be rezoned to allow for a trucking and excavation company to expand its operations.

Tuesday, June 18: Council day!

Deferred from last meeting the emergency management documentation review will be debated and very likely passed. 

1735 Henry St. is likely to become a heritage property after a public hearing at 1pm.

The city has two new Planner IIs but in order for new hires Aaron Bliss and Michael Hart to be able to do their jobs effectively they need to be officially anointed as development officers. This is likely to pass.

Ditto Aaron Murnaghan, but as a heritage officer.

For those who are new to their fandom of city politics (or are getting this newsletter for free) right now Halifax has a Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) who seems to be a low key equivalent to Sidney Crosby or Connor McDavid if those two gentlemen were good at bureaucracy instead of hockey. Essentially, one of the marquee changes that happened at Halifax Water when she was in positions of leadership was that they changed infrastructure management to practices to ensure that they could maintain the infrastructure they built with the revenue they had. Halifax does not do this. Not even a little bit. It’s why the city is perpetually on the verge of financial collapse. But at Tuesday’s council meeting deputy mayor Cathy Deagle Gammon will ask the CAO to come up with a plan for sustainable infrastructure in the HRM. I don’t mean to get anyone too excited because reality is way more boring than this metaphor, but this is a lot like 2010 and Deagle Gammon is Jarome Iginla. We all know what can happen next.

There’s no safe or legal way for people who live in the Sackville Manor Mobile Home Park to walk or bike to the transit terminal on the other side of highway 101. Even though our traffic engineers like to pretend otherwise, safety or legality obviously doesn’t stop people from taking the path of least resistance, which in this case is crossing a highway on foot. Councillor Paul Russell wants a bridge built over the 101 and this motion, if passed, will ask the province for money to do so, and put it in next year’s capital budget. 

Speaking of the capital budget, the Windsor Street exchange's new plan is back for council’s consideration. The report can be found here and the technical attachments can be found here. On page 14 of the report staff explain why they are doing their best to kill council’s Bus Rapid Transit plan when they write that due to space constraints (and being unwilling to remove space from car traffic), the proposed design configuration does not incorporate dedicated transit lanes through the study area, which would be ideal for reducing delay for buses and accommodating future transit service including the BRT. Pretty neat that staff have decided to not follow the will of council and sabotage the long-term success of council’s BRT to instead prioritize car traffic!

The more I read this plan the worse it becomes! One of the reasons staff are recommending this design—which I can’t stress enough will actively sabotage four of council’s strategic plans—is because there is some federal money on the table to the tune of $35 million. While that’s not nothing, it’s only about a third of the cost of the project, and the proposed car-centric design will cost us taxpayers a lot more than the $35 million saved in the short term.

Halifax Cycling Coalition is also coming out against this design and has issued a call to action because staff have “ignored our multiple representations to incorporate separated infrastructure for walking, rolling and cycling, dedicated priority bus lanes and lower design speeds to make the entire area safer for all road users.

In short, they have developed a design that is rooted in the 20th century when car is king and failed to design something which will encourage and support the only climate-friendly, scalable, and affordable mobility options. The proposed design dooms Halifax to gridlock in the coming decades.”

They’ve written a letter that goes into greater detail, and helpfully, have provided this link so you can take that letter and send it to your councillor. Tell your councillors to take back our ship! The transportation planners are doing a mutiny!

Lockview high school is likely going to get an all-weather track field at some point Soon™. 

The bylaw tweaks to crack down on litterbugs coming from the Environment and Sustainability Standing Committee is coming in front of council to get approval. For more details on this you can read my coverage from that committee meeting here:

Councillor Sam Austin is trying to stop the infilling of Dartmouth Cove and has a motion to do that. 

Because councillors keep taxes low, parks staff can’t maintain trails to an adequate standard. So now councillor Patty Cuttell wants staff to figure out how to mitigate council’s decision to starve parks of the funding it needs to maintain HRM’s trails.  

And some in-camera stuff too.

Wednesday, June 19

The Audit and Finance Standing committee will be meeting to get an update on the city’s investment activities. They’re doing pretty good actually, almost double what staff predicted. Our investments grew by $4.6 million instead of the expected $2.4. They’ll also recommend that council spend $54,500 to upgrade the technology that allows people to hear council meetings if they, like me, spent too long living in a metal tube with diesel engines and have a hard time hearing anything above the persistent ringing. 

The Transportation Standing Committee will be meeting to consider passing the new Road “Safety” 😉 Framework. After receiving feedback that this new plan is objectively worse than the 2018 plan and that this new plan is not one that values human life above quick car commutes, staff have added a new “Safe speeds” section which states that this plan will not actually make the city build streets that are safe, but instead “continue to support and advocate for safer speeds.” And in order to explain yet another reason why this new strategic plan is so bad we need to take a field trip into the weeds, but in case you get lost, just know that at its core this plan demonstrates that in the HRM, in transportation planning, staff wilfully undermine the will of council and replace it with their own. 

Make sure your weed whacker is charged because we need to plow through some lessons in the practical application of municipal governance. The city is given its power by the province in a piece of legislation known as the HRM charter. The charter lays out what is municipal jurisdiction. So when councillors say they have no power over housing, they are making that claim based on the powers (not) granted to them in the charter. If you go over to section 318 of the charter you will see that the province has given the HRM “absolute” power over what HRM’s streets look like. To be clear, there are some design limitations, but they’re limited to things like having to use the yellow stacked traffic lights instead of Quebec’s weird black sideways ones. But if the HRM wanted to put a Nova Scotia approved stop sign every 10 metres, regardless of whether or not there was an intersection, that is completely within their right to do so. And, what will become relevant shortly, HRM’s power applies to things like changing street classifications.  

Since 2018 the people we have elected have implemented a bunch of strategic plans. In 2017 council passed the “let’s diversify our transportation portfolio” Integrated Mobility Plan. In 2018 they passed the “let’s not kill anyone with public infrastructure” Strategic Road Safety Plan. In 2020 council passed the “let’s stop destroying our space ship’s life support systems” HalifACT, the HRM’s “most ambitious” climate action plan. In civics terms these can all be interpreted as the will of council, meaning that these plans are what staff are mandated to follow, once the acts come into power. All of these plans are now in force, and should be changing the way staff work problems, specifically when it comes to transportation. Council has power to change the way our streets are used and has instructed staff to start using streets differently, so why aren’t staff doing it? 

The answer, as it turns out, is in the new safe speed section added by staff to the new road safety framework. Specifically the phrase “based on the intended road function” in the following sentence:

> New roads will incorporate reduced design speeds based on the intended road function, and speed calming countermeasures will be installed on existing roads where speed is identified as a safety concern.

There are a few problems with design speeds being based on the intended road function. For example, due to physics it is impossible, in a lot of cases, for some road functions to be safe as demanded by the 2018 Road Safety Plan. When presented with this reality in 2023, staff recommended we lower our safety standards instead of changing our road designations, or prioritizing safety of all road users over the desired volume of car traffic in our road design. Both of which are also in council’s power to do. 

But more seriously than that when it comes to our governance, three council-endorsed strategic plans are being ignored in favour of achieving staff goals that have not been endorsed by council. Halifax’s road functions are decided based on a process explained in the HRM’s red book. And an integral part of determining a street’s function is its classification. All of the streets in Halifax are helpfully classified in Figure 11 of Halifax’s Integrated Mobility Plan. Road classifications in technical terms are things like “collector” and “arterial” and designate the desired volume of car traffic on HRM roads. This is a problem for two reasons, all three of the big strategic plans (the not killing one, the more bikes and buses one and the stop destroying the planet one) all require removing car traffic from roads, but having these classifications ensures car traffic is systemically prioritized in phase 1 of the HRM’s road function processes. 

The second reason this is very bad is because unlike those big three strategic plans, the HRM’s road classifications have not been “officially adopted by council.”

What this all means in layman’s terms is that staff have inserted a plan that has not been endorsed by council into a plan that has been endorsed by council with the end result of deliberately, if not intentionally, sabotaging the will of council in favour of a plan of their own. Council has instructed staff to come up with a plan that won’t kill anyone, and staff have responded with a solid ‘nah, we think maintaining car traffic is more important.’ 

The committee will also get a presentation from Martyn Williams who will also (politely) lambaste the new road “safety” 😉 plan. Councillor Trish Purdy will also bring forward an information item about the islands on Colby Drive. People hate them so staff are recommending some options, add speed tables, remove the islands and replace them with speed tables or remove all traffic calming. Even though adding protected bike lanes is a proven way to slow speeds and make roads safer for everyone and even though Colby Drive is the best bike connection between the Salt Marsh trail network and the Portland Hills trail network and the Caldwell and Forest Hills mixed used pathways, did staff recommend a bike lane? Don’t be daft, our staff can only conceive of and plan for car traffic, council’s strategic directions be damned. This committee will also recommend that council improve the 10 worst intersections in the HRM. 

The Heritage Advisory Committee will meet and likely recommend starting the process that will see 2537 Agricola St. become a heritage property.

Thursday, June 20

The Community Planning and Economic Development Standing Committee will meet and they’ll get a presentation from the Halifax Rugby Football Club who’d like to be involved in the planning for Gorsbrook Park because they play there. They’re also going to send the Indigo Shores Park plan to council for approval. Highlights include an off leash dog park. 

The Active Transportation Advisory Committee will meet and get an update on the Slayter Street bikeway project and an update from Anika Riopel of the Ecology Action Centre. As a bit of an aside Riopel is registered as a candidate for District 8. 

The Women’s Advisory Committee will meet and get an update on the motion of theirs to create a plan to combat Islamophobia, the update is that it’s been approved and work will start. And hopefully the name of the committee will be changed thanks to Monday and Tuesday’s meetings and then this committee will finish off their work plan debate and start getting to their freshly defined work. 

And finally, the Youth Advisory Committee is also meeting and they’re going to talk about the upcoming municipal elections and the 2024 Youth Advisory Committee Forum.

Gov’t tendies

Our weekly list of all the city’s tenders that are new, still kickin’, and fulfilled will return next week. This newsletter is way too long and took way too long to write.

That’s it! Since you made it to the end, I’ve got to ask:

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