HRM may reduce patio fees

Durty Nelly’s patio early on a cloudy Friday morning. Photo by Gabrielle Drapeau

Patios an “important economic tool” says mayor

by Gabrielle Drapeau

cSunshine, a nice breeze, cold drinks, and infinite instagrammable moments. What’s not to love about patio season?

It’s no secret that people like patios, and a motion from mayor Andy Fillmore aims to capitalize on that.

During a council meeting on May 12, Fillmore raised the idea of lowering, or even removing, the fee restaurants have to pay in order to have a sidewalk patio.
Fillmore’s motion, which passed unanimously, has staff working on a report detailing patio fees in Halifax and the feasibility of cutting them from the revenue stream.

Once the report is complete, council will vote on whether to reduce the fees for the 2027/28 budget.

The proposal came as somewhat of a surprise to council after the particularly gruelling budget that was only recently approved.

“When I saw this motion I immediately thought of our request for staff to increase fees,” said councillor Janet Steele of District 12. “I think this kind of flies in the face of that.”

Deputy mayor Patty Cuttell pointed out that the fees, which can range from $350 to $1, 270, were originally designed to cover the costs of inspections and administration. “My concern,” said Cuttell, “would be that we’re putting the costs that are incurred on businesses onto the general rate payer, and I don’t think that that is right.”

The idea is causing mixed feelings outside of the council chambers too.
Paul MacKinnon, CEO of the Downtown Halifax Business Commission, called the proposal a “pleasant surprise.”

MacKinnon said this sends a message to business owners from the city that “This is something that we want to see in Halifax, we want to see more of them, we’re going to take away one of the barriers you’re experiencing with the cost.”
MacKinnon added that the more successful downtown businesses are, the more tax revenue is generated, which is beneficial for all of HRM.

The city collected $70,000 in patio fees last year.

Some Haligonians would rather see that money collected and put to use in the city. “In the grander scheme of things,” said Brendan Doherty, owner of The Old Triangle, “ I think it’s a rather short-sighted decision. The city’s in such a financial crunch right now.”

Doherty said that, while $1,000 sounds like a lot, it’s less than a day of sales, and that it’s not so unreasonable considering Halifax is the biggest city east of Montreal.
He said there’s a cost to being the “hub of the Atlantic.”

“If I had to complain about the costs of doing business, I think the thousand dollars in patio fees each year is pretty low on the list. I mean, I pay over three times that in property tax each month.”

In an effort to keep residential property taxes low council has shifted the tax burden onto commercial properties. But in doing so council makes local small businesses pay proportionally more taxes than large corporations.

Last year the Costco in Dartmouth Crossing paid $1.11 per square foot in property taxes compared to Durty Nelly’s $22.55.

Doherty said a better way for the city to help businesses is to sort out their finances, and work on improving transportation into downtown that isn’t dependent on cars.

“We’ve lost a number of staff this year because they haven’t been able to stay living downtown, and now they’re getting jobs close to where they live because transit is so poor. [...] Having better ways to move is our biggest bottleneck right now.”

Joe McGuinness, owner of Durty Nelly’s, also said property taxes are a big hit every month.

“It’s something that we’ve got zero control over. [...] When the landlord gets the tax bill, he just passes it straight on to the commercial customer. We don’t even have the opportunity to see the bill or contest the bill.”

McGuinness said that, when it comes to government reducing costs, “every little bit counts.”

“Insurance, rent, property taxes, labour, food, beverage — it’s right across the board. There’s been an increase in pricing.”

McGuinness said not having a patio can significantly affect a business. “Once the sun comes out, Canadians, specifically Haligonians, it doesn’t matter, it can be 13 degrees, if it’s sunny outside in April and there’s a patio, they’ll put a jacket on and they’ll sit outside. So the public wants those outside patio spaces.”

Fillmore also proposed a staff report on creating a “red tape” feedback portal, which would, in theory, act as a hotline businesses could use to direct the city’s attention to red tape, or unnecessary barriers for conducting business.
MacKinnon hopes the portal could lead to fast-tracking things like event permits from the city, which they regularly apply for.

As for Doherty, he’s not so certain.

“I’m not actually convinced that adding another layer of bureaucracy is the solution.”

Fatal flaw in Road Safety Strategy is killing Haligonians

by Matt Stickland

In 2024 the city of Halifax passed a new Road Safety Strategy to much fanfare. It was an evolution of the 2018 Road Safety Framework and Haligonians were assured by councillors and city staff that this new plan was better than the last and would make roads safer.

City staff like to say it’s a systems-level approach to road safety, which is technically correct. The plan aims to identify dangerous behaviours and eliminate them from the public right of way. Halifax’s new strategy says people who drive aggressively, drunk, distracted, or too fast are dangerous, but the goal is to get drivers to follow the rules so they can become “safe road users.” But according to the city’s data, since 2018, “safe road users” have killed 47 people.

Although the plan is a systems level approach to road safety, it’s not an plan that will actually make roads safer.

There are a few issues with the assumptions in the road safety strategy which expose the fatal flaw in the city’s new strategy. For example, in the 2025 Road Safety Update, staff note that only 31% of drivers on arterial and collector roads were obeying speed laws. This means that without factoring in distracted, aggressive, or drunk driving, only 31% of drivers on collector or arterial roads in the HRM would be considered “safe road users” by the city.

On Jan. 1, 2018, the city started collecting crash data and the open data set goes up to April 30, 2026. And the data set captures reportable collisions, or crashes that result in injury or death or damage over $2,000 worth of property. The city’s data set has 45,504 reportable crashes, roughly 20 crashes a day. Speed is not listed as a crash factor in the data, but after removing the distracted, drunk, and aggressive drivers of those 45,899 driver crashes, 29,081 crashes involved drivers the city’s road safety strategy would call “safe road users.” Of those “safe road user” crashes, 47 were fatal.

The (so far) 47 times fatal flaw in HRM’s systems-level strategy to road safety is that it ignores the systems-level risk posed by safe drivers: the fact that driving itself is inherently dangerous. And as any good engineer should know, when people are exposed to something inherently dangerous it becomes more probable that they face danger. The more exposure people have to drivers, the more likely they are to be hit by one.

This is likely why dangerous drivers have only killed 15 more people than “safe road users” since Jan 2018.

This is backed up by a recent study in the Injury Prevention journal, titled “Rethinking traffic safety: the case for reducing kinetic energy exposure, not just speed.”

In the study, authors Ferenchak et al. note that even though a lot of time is spent trying to make interactions with drivers safer (e.g. the “safe speeds” and “safe vehicles” section of Halifax’s Road Safety Strategy), “far less attention has traditionally been paid to reducing baseline exposure to automobiles by building places that help shorten driving distances, reduce time spent in the transportation system and/or reduce the number of driving trips via mode substitution.”

For example, there is no mention in Halifax’s Road Safety Strategy about the risks of being exposed to driving, nevermind mitigating the danger of tonnes of metal and plastic being propelled by powerful internal combustion engines and electric motors.

The study’s authors came to their conclusions by calculating to what extent exposure to drivers led to more deaths. They found that “overall, measures of auto-dominance – particularly automobile mode share and VMT [Vehicle Miles Travelled] – are most strongly associated with higher fatality rates.”
The more people walk or ride a bike in places designed for cars, the more they are exposed to the full and gruesome extent of automotive violence.

Most damning for the city of Halifax is that the same can be found in the city’s crash data. Even though “safe” drivers are half as likely to kill other road users, 0.16% of “safe road user” crashes kill someone compared to 0.37% for dangerous drivers. And even though “safe” drivers are half as likely to injure someone as dangerous drivers (12.75% vs 21.1%) this is likely only due to the fact that while cars are likely to injure or kill anyone they hit, they also provide some protection for the occupants of the car.

This likely explains why, according to the city of Halifax’s data, the people most exposed to the dangers of driving, like pedestrians and bike riders, are almost as likely to be injured by a “safe” driver (70.3% chance of injury) as opposed to a “dangerous” one (77.2%).

And 1.2% of the time when a “safe” or unsafe driver hits a pedestrian or a bike rider, the person outside of the car dies.

Halifax’s systems-level approach to road safety is failing because it deliberately ignores the only systemic risk in our transportation system: the inherent danger of driving.

The Other stuff

As promised the next book club meeting has a date and time! We will be meeting on Sunday, July 12, at MacDonald House in Lawrencetown, which is (more or less) accessible by bike along the Salt Marsh Trail.

Did you know there is a podcast? This week is a short but loud one. Enjoy(?)