🗞️ What good is Halifax's Integrated Mobility Plan?

Good morning!

Today is Purple Day in Nova Scotia and around the world—a global day of awareness for epilepsy that started right here in our province. Halifax’s Cassidy Megan kick-started the initiative as a 9-year-old in 2008, after she’d been diagnosed with the condition at age 7. She joined up with the Epilepsy Association of the Maritimes to get a day recognized in schools—and since then, it has spread to 85 countries.

Why purple? Because there are so many different shades of the colour, just as there are so many different types of seizures, Megan says.

– Martin

🌡️ Traffic & Weather

Today: 🌧️ 3°

Tomorrow: 🌧️ 10°

Next Day: 🌧️ 11°

7-day forecast

🚗 Driving, biking or busing today? Check out the current traffic conditions and ongoing road closures.

CITY HALL

The Grand Parade podcast: Why Halifax’s Integrated Mobility Plan is toothless

Take a bike ride along Dahlia Street in Dartmouth—the formally recognized “local street bikeway” linking Sullivan’s Pond Park with the Dartmouth Common and, through it, Wyse Road and the Macdonald Bridge—and you’ll notice something rather quickly: For a bike priority corridor, it sure doesn’t feel like bikes and other forms of active transportation are much of a priority. Stop signs interrupt the route on Pine, Maple and Crichton Streets, giving the right-of-way to cars at every turn.

The four-block corridor and its challenges are a nutshell of the issues hindering the HRM’s Integrated Mobility Plan across Halifax. At each turn, Coast reporters Matt Stickland and Martin Bauman argue, it feels like a patchwork network destined to fail.

So what’s stopping Halifax from its self-declared active transportation goals? Why can’t the city take a page from Paris, Montreal or even Edmonton in developing better ways for people getting around without cars? Stickland says a run-in with an HRM councillor has given him one theory.

ARTS & CULTURE

Matchstick Theatre’s Leaving Home is a fresh spin on a Canadian classic

Jake Planinc has been dreaming of this moment for 10 years. Ever since the Matchstick Theatre artistic director picked up David French’s Leaving Home as an undergrad at Mount Allison University, he’s thought of ways to stage it. How the lighting would look; how the script—which follows the Mercer family on one fateful day in Toronto—has held up since the play’s 1972 premiere; what his actors would wear.

“The play is so beautifully crafted,” Planinc says, speaking by phone with The Coast. “It’s really a work of art.”

What’s at the heart of the play, he adds, is “identity—how we are and are not our parents.”

From now until the end of March, Planinc and his Matchstick colleagues are running the Canadian family drama at Barrington Street’s Breaking Circus. And while the show run marks a long-awaited return to Halifax, The Coast’s Martin Bauman reports, it’s also staged like never before.

🗞️ In Other News

🍺 A number of Halifax’s craft brewers are calling on the province for tax support amid a spate of recent closures.

🇺🇦 As a Canadian emergency visa deadline approaches, Ukrainians fleeing Russian invasion arrive in Nova Scotia.

🌊 Flood risk mapping can help Nova Scotians prepare for the province’s future. So why are some Nova Scotians opposed to it? 

🏨 Nova Scotia’s $46M sale of its unfinished Hogan Court health facility to a private company marks the end of one saga—but also raises questions about private interests in a public-health system.

🏗️ The HRM is mulling a 3,500-unit housing development proposed near the Windsor Exchange.

🫱🏾‍🫲🏿 A not-for-profit-led community network is helping Black and Indigenous Nova Scotians train for jobs in the province’s clean energy sector.

⚽ The Halifax Wanderers have taken their pre-season soccer tour to Ontario for a series of matches ahead of the Canadian Premier League’s Apr. 13 kickoff.

🤔 Trivia Tuesday

⚓️ What’s In The Harbour

➡️ The CMA CGM Brazil and NYK Rigel container ships left Halifax in the wee hours of the night for New York City and Southampton, UK, respectively.

🚢 The 296-metre-long Atlantic Sea container ship is expected to arrive in Halifax from Liverpool, UK, between 4am and 5:20am. It departs Halifax for New York City at 5pm.

🚢 The 139,335-tonne ONE Ibis container ship is due from New York City around 6:45am. It’s expected to leave Halifax for Singapore at 6pm.

🚢 The Siem Cicero vehicle carrier is slated to berth at Eastern Passage’s Autoport around 8:25am. It arrives from Emden, Germany, and leaves Halifax for Davisville, RI, around 6pm.

➡️ The 229-metre-long Algoma Vision bulk carrier leaves Halifax for Tampa, FL, around 4pm.

➡️ The Algoscotia oil tanker is expected to leave Halifax for Saint John, NB, around 4pm.

➡️ The Guangzhou, China-built Tropic Lissette container ship is slated to leave Halifax for West Palm Beach, FL, around 6pm.

🚢 The 49,999-tonne Herolds Bay oil tanker arrives at Dartmouth’s Imperial Oil Terminal between 6pm and 7:15pm from Antwerp, Belgium.

👀 In Case You Missed It

🎵 The Coast hit up the JUNO Red Carpet for a dizzying evening that included wild outfits, out-of-place politicians and a run-in with a drug-sniffing dog.

🍁 Canada’s maple syrup reserves are dwindling as warmer winters interrupt the spring sap season. And that has harvesters in a tricky spot.

🍝 Quinpool’s restaurateurs are hailing the neighbourhood’s first Oodles of Noodles festival as a success—and the food reviews agree.

That’s it!

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