Halifax Transit embarrasses city, again

Transit staff have needed 14 years to implement tap pay.

by Matt Stickland

There are some constants in the universe. The sun rises in the east. What goes up must come down. Halifax Transit botches procurement.

“Tap to pay… this is a mess. Unbelievable. It’s embarrassing,” said the exasperated councillor Tony Mancini, as he shook his head.

During the past budget season, council ran into the uncomfortable reality that the HRM has been built out in a most expensive sprawl. And on top of being expensive, there aren’t enough taxpayers to sustainably, affordably, and reliably fund basic municipal services and maintain critical infrastructure, like public transit and well maintained roads.

To add insult to injury these expensive unsustainable communities we’ve built also suck as places to live. What is a new subdivision of fiscally unsustainable, monochrome grey and beige, cookie cutter houses if not content slop mills made real? Don’t forget to add on the premium subscriptions of gasoline, car payments, and insurance with added risk of dying in a wildfire.

All this means transit is getting worse because it can’t be properly funded because people don’t want to pay premium taxes for their slop subdivisions. (Which, yes, suburbs do actually require a premium subscription in property taxes to be properly funded. Even though no one wants to pay it.)

This has been going on for long enough that there is a word for people in Halifax who have to rely on Halifax Transit: Unemployable.

Most employers are loathe to hire people who can’t reliably get to work on time.

Council doesn’t want to make Halifax Transit better or cost effective; they’d be reallocating road space if they did. But council does want to make it easier to pay to ride the bus for an hour and a half for what would be a 15 minute drive. Council wants to make it easier for transit riders to pay for the bus because council doesn’t want to raise taxes and make drivers pay for services, like transit, that drivers also benefit from.

Mancini, dressed in a crisp white vest which highlights the fluorescent lighting of the room, continued, “I don’t know how many months or years we are overdue on this project.”

Tap pay is approximately 13 years, 7 months, 1 week, 3 days, 20 hours and 6 minutes overdue when this paper publishes digitally at 6:06 a.m.