Mayor Failmore fails again
Empty words from an empty suit
By Matt Stickland
On Tuesday June 10, Halifax’s city council had one of the worst meetings they’ve ever had. Leading the charge against good governance was Halifax’s new mayor, Andy Fillmore.
Fillmore was elected last October.In his first interview at his victory party, Fillmore told the CBC’s Gareth Hampshire that this election was about how to make Halifax grow “more smartly.” He said people voted for the right mayor with the “right professional credentials, and in this case I’m talking about city planning.”
Anyone who voted for Fillmore for those city planning credentials has been failed twice in the seven months since his election. The first time was when Fillmore kept his promise to keep the property tax rate flat by raiding the Central Library’s rainy day fund. Last month, the Eastern Shore Community Centre needed an additional $10 million due to inflation. Since the $10 million from the library fund was spent to save you $29 on taxes last year, the city has borrowed $10 million, and now you get to pay back that $29 with interest.
The second time Fillmore failed you is when you voted for him in hopes that he would utilize his “professional credentials,” such as his Harvard urban planning education, to reduce congestion. Urban planning schools, like Harvard, teach that cars don’t scale as mass transit, so the only way to reduce congestion is to get rid of car traffic. The city of Halifax, when it studied this problem with things like the Integrated Mobility Plan, found exactly the same thing. After extensive public consultation and numerous staff reports, Halifax, in an effort to reduce congestion and save money, began building bike lanes.
In spite of all of Halifax’s evidence, promises to Haligonians, spending a decade of his life campaigning for bike lanes in Halifax, and in spite of an urban planning degree from Harvard, Fillmore is now trying to stop all pending bike lane construction to get bike riders back into their cars and further increase the city’s horrible congestion.
Fillmore’s motion to waste money and cause congestion failed. In a scrum after the meeting, Fillmore lamented his high-profile failure, saying he was just trying to do good governance and would have been able to, if it weren’t for “the internet” getting involved. One of the pillars of good governance is listening to the public when we organize and communicate what we want, even if we do it via “the internet.”
Not to be outdone, councillor for District 4, Trish Purdy, had two devastating plays last meeting. The first was when she said anecdotal stories from residents trump empirical evidence in her decision-making. Then she said that she was losing her “cotton-picking mind” about congestion during the debate. Back when Black human beings were kept as chattel slavery by white human beings, sometimes, the Black folks would chafe against being treated like animals and take back some agency. When that happened, the white folks said those field n_____s were out of their “cotton-picking minds.” Purdy should resign for laughing off such blatant casual racism. Instead, she says she apologized during the meeting but the cameras were off. Purdy did apologize in writing to the city’s African Decent Advisory Committee on June 12. She was asked not to attend the meeting. During the meeting, councillor John Young said it’s unfair for the city’s two Black councillors to bear the responsibility of policing white colleagues. He did not want to be the “angry black man on council” and needs to maintain working relationships with his peers.
The place to call for Purdy’s resignation due to her casual racism is on newspaper pages, in her inbox, and thanks to new provincial legislation the city can formally investigate any complaints about Purdy’s conduct if you contact clerks@halifax.ca.
And finally, rounding out the worst meeting of council in recent history, council passed first reading of phase 4 of the Regional Plan Review. Councillor Laura White put forward a motion asking staff to plan to decrease car trips with every new development.
Rural councillors immediately pushed back, saying that even though they wanted more transit, it was unrealistic for people in their rural districts to take the bus, because there is no bus. They argued that because their residents have to drive, the city should not try and reduce the number of car trips and congestion. Confusingly, they argued that the city should instead work toward their modal shift goals of getting people out of cars and into buses, which sounds like the same thing, because it is.
Even though rural councillors argued in favour of White’s motion, they voted against it because they didn’t seem to understand that if someone is on the bus, they can’t also be driving a car at the same time, due to physics.
Cybertrucks may pay more for parking
By Matt Stickland
It may cost a bit more to park your big ol’ truck downtown if Halifax’s Transportation Standing Committee has its way.
Councillor Shawn Cleary wants to make roads safer and lower your taxes, so he proposed that the HRM start charging heavier vehicles more for street parking permits. In the report, staff explain that charging more for heavy vehicles will make roads (slightly) more sustainable and (slightly) raise municipal revenues while having the long-term impact of making parking easier to find downtown and Halifax’s air quality better.
This motion was deferred by the committee a few months ago, because councillors like Patty Cuttell were worried since EVs are heavier than normal cars, this may inadvertently punish people for buying an electric vehicle. Ultimately, even if EV cars are greener than the internal controlled explosion of pollution car, the damage done to HRM roads by the weight of the vehicle isn’t affected by lower tailpipe emissions.
Councillors decided that charging people more money to park would help offset the cost of road maintenance, decrease congestion, and increase road safety by encouraging people to buy lighter, less deadly, less antisocial vehicles.
Additionally, increasing available street parking would be beneficial to the city and its businesses. This is why the Transportation Standing Committee decided to approve this motion and recommend council also approve and adopt this change in legislation.
It was a real Animal Farm moment for EV buyers who learned that four-wheel EVs are good, but two-wheel EVs are better. It was a real 1984 moment for councillor Trish Purdy, who often argues that she wants less congestion, good fiscal management, and lower taxes. However, Purdy was the lone vote against decreasing your property taxes by charging Joakley wrap-around shades guy in the 3,999kg Dodge Dually or the Cybertruck, $56-$131 more annually for parking.
Planning to kill: HRM’s road safety failure
By Matt Stickland
Last year, Halifax updated its Road Safety Strategy in a vain effort to make the city’s streets safer for all residents. Although it was passed with much fanfare, the new plan is in reality designed to kill Haligonians.
At the core of the city’s “evidence-based” strategy is the definition of a clear problem: about 25% of incidents on Halifax’s roads are caused by aggressive drivers. The city’s engineers, who are not psychologists or experts in human behaviour, claim the anger is caused by drivers experiencing frustration. To mitigate this anger, the city’s traffic engineers/street safety “experts” have decided to try and make driver trips more convenient. The policy choice to appease drivers in the new road safety framework actually makes our roads more dangerous in a few ways.
The first is that when the city tries to make driving easier by adding turn lanes for drivers, turning drivers tend to pay less attention to people walking or cycling across the roads. A 2019 study from the University of Toronto, which tracked drivers’ eye movements while turning, found that over 50% of drivers don’t look for pedestrians before turning, even though the drivers in this study were selected for being in a low-crash-risk demographic.
More concerning is when the city tries to make driving more frictionless to reduce frustration, it encourages more people to drive. Since people driving cars cause the vast majority of injuries and deaths on HRM roads, more drivers means more collisions and more collisions mean more injuries and deaths.
This is because, according to psychologists who study anger, driving itself, not congestion, is what causes anger.
Because driving is so inefficient with space, whenever a few people are trying to get to the same place, they are guaranteed to get in each other’s way and cause congestion. But since other drivers are inside a car, when we drive we’re not getting mad at other people, we’re getting mad at cars, so it’s acceptable to indulge our anger while driving.
In practice, if a driver wants to obey the law by doing things like driving the speed limit or yielding to a pedestrian in a crosswalk, almost every other driver, conditioned to believe their convenience is other’s safety thanks to the city’s traffic engineers, will immediately fly into a rage at the law-abiding driver.
Don’t believe me? Drive the speed limit and watch the anger in your rearview mirror. That’s the anger being encouraged by our new road safety framework.
The other stuff:
There was no regular podcast last week, and this week’s will be late if it happens at all, I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to look back at next week as this week’s meetings are also coming thick and fast. It’d be a lot easier to do the podcast and the other more indepth midweek stuff if I can afford to pay other people to write for this paper. As of right now, thanks to people subscribing, I can afford to pay a freelancer for 3 out of every 4 issues. I’d encourage you to subscribe if you haven’t already.
Here’s last week’s episode of the podcast, which may not be as timely, but is still as relevant. Noodle on that paradox while ya listen.
Doing the crossword at home? Here’s the pdf.
Need the answers to last week’s crossword?