[Radio: It seems to me that the city should be designed
for the people and not for the automobile.]
This is Halifax, a charming little oceanside city on the east coast of Canada.
(Sorry, Vancouverites, Montreal is not east coast and Toronto is definitely not east coast.)
When I moved to Halifax almost 15 years ago for university, I brought a bike with the intention
of using it to commute. I wasn’t a bike enthusiast or anything, just someone who saw what I thought
was a very practical opportunity. Getting to my university was 30 minutes by foot, 20 minutes
on a crowded bus, or a very easy 10 minute bike ride. But despite this commute being perfect for
cycling on paper, I only actually did it by bike a handful of times. The reason was simple: Halifax
had little-to-no dedicated bike infrastructure and I didn’t feel safe or comfortable sharing the road
with cars or illegally taking the sidewalk with pedestrians. I didn’t even really know what bike
infrastructure was at the time, I just knew that city biking — as I experienced it — wasn’t for me.
I had a similar experience in another smaller city, London,
Ontario (ever heard of it?) in university. I would bike onto and through campus and
take the multi-use paths along the river occasionally, but I wouldn’t
have even considered biking downtown, it just wasn’t something I was aware of anyone doing.
Urbanist ideas like cycling for transportation, public transit,
density, and mixed-use development tend to get coded as “big city things” for “big
city lifestyles” but we think that’s a big mistake. Nearly every urbanist
concept or design that we talk about on this channel is also relevant in smaller cities.
Halifax has a population of about 350,000 people in the built-up urban and suburban
parts of the city. That makes it much smaller than Toronto, Montreal, and even Ottawa,
the cities we’ve covered the most on this channel. But my difficulties trying to bike in Halifax had
nothing to do with the city’s population or even density. Cycling was already practical
in theory — every single one of my routine needs was available within practical cycling
distance on the peninsula, the urban core of the city. What was lacking were streets that I felt
safe and comfortable biking on to get to those destinations. Halifax has made improvements in the
decade since I moved away with some key protected bike lanes downtown, but the rest of the peninsula
is still woefully underserved. If the city took this seriously then the peninsula could absolutely
be a powerhouse of urban cycling like the Plateau and surrounding neighbourhoods in Montreal.
What’s interesting about Halifax is that, cycling aside, it’s already pretty strong in
a lot of areas that urbanists emphasize. Halifax has one of the highest rates in Canada of people
walking to work and pretty high transit use for a city that doesn’t have any urban rail system.
The downtown core is relatively dense and very lively with high-quality pedestrian-oriented
public spaces like the waterfront, Grand Parade Square, the Halifax Citadel, Argyle Street, and
the Public Gardens. Our footage comes from a trip over Thanksgiving when the city was quieter than
normal but in general these urban destinations are bustling with families, the city’s big student
population, and the large volumes of tourists that the city gets, especially in cruise ship season.
The urbanism of Halifax has a lot to do with it being a relatively old city. The Public Gardens
date to 1867; if they were born in 1967, they might have been half parking. Halifax’s
newer neighbourhoods off the peninsula are correspondingly much more car-centric and
less human-scale. But that was a choice to drop pedestrian- and transit-focused neighbourhood
design to fully embrace the automobile. It wasn’t some inevitable property of being a small city,
because the city was even smaller in population when it developed around its old tram lines.
Fortunately Halifax avoided some mistakes in its suburbanization too. After opposition,
the city abandoned its monstrous plan to demolish much of the historic downtown waterfront area
to build Harbour Drive, a six-lane elevated highway like the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto.
[Radio: This morning we seek your opinions on whether we as citizens should fight the
encroachment of the automobile on our lives and our society through
expressways and interchanges that will slice up our city and will in the process destroy
many of our old historic buildings on the Halifax waterfront in particular.]
The overbuilt interchange constructed at the north entrance of downtown was
eventually recognized as a mistake too and they’re now tearing it down.
Urban highways are an enormous quality-of-life subsidy to the suburbs,
demolishing large parts of the central city in order to facilitate car traffic from far away.
Harbour Drive was championed by a newly-built downtown mall — looking at you, Scotia Square.
We’re not saying the size of a city doesn’t matter, only that bigger and smaller cities
aren’t fundamentally that different. Smaller cities can’t support the same high-capacity
metros and far-reaching commuter rail networks that you see in bigger centres, but they can still
have good transit. Halifax’s new bus lanes and planned ferry expansion are a good start but urban
rail transit could potentially be feasible too. European cities roughly as big as Halifax have
trams and even light metro systems and Halifax itself used to have trams when it was smaller.
Kitchener-Waterloo got a 19 kilometre light rail line recently and while that city has
a higher population, Halifax’s relatively high transit use means that it actually has
more transit riders than Kitchener. Halifax’s geography (limited space on the peninsula with
lots of bottlenecks and bodies of water) makes it extra important to invest in higher capacity,
more space-efficient ways of getting people around, like walking, cycling, and public transit.
On top of better transit, Halifax definitely isn’t too small to implement safer street designs with
strategies like raised crosswalks to prioritize pedestrians at crossings,
narrower lanes to slow cars, or modal filtering to reduce car traffic. A kid shouldn’t have to live
in a mega-metropolis to deserve to be able to walk or bike to school safely. While Halifax has a long
way to go on traffic calming, on our recent trip we noticed some modal filtering as well as a ton
of places with curb extensions, which feel like a major reclaiming of public space for pedestrians.
Unfortunately in some areas the city’s hands are tied — Halifax is legally unable to post
speed limits below 50 km/h on its streets without special permission from the province.
One real difference between smaller and bigger cities is density.
All else being equal, smaller cities will naturally tend to be less dense because there’s
more incentive to use land efficiently in a major metropolis where millions of people and businesses
want to live or do business. That’s why you tend to get bigger skyscrapers in bigger cities.
But skyscrapers and super high densities aren’t actually needed for things like
walkability or bike infrastructure. The Halifax peninsula in particular
is already dense enough that almost everyone is within a 10 minute bike ride of a grocery
store. What’s lacking isn’t density so much as safe and comfortable bike infrastructure.
And even in places where density is lacking,
it doesn’t have to be! Most North American cities, big and small, have spent decades
using policies like zoning to discourage denser housing and pedestrian-focused stores.
For example, Halifax’s own Master Plan of 1945 identified a “low density of population” as
a standard requirement for a desirable neighbourhood and called for apartments
to be segregated from single-family homes. Cities might consider… No longer doing this.
Credit to Halifax for its recent Centre Plan that increases height limits on key corridors,
legalizes secondary suites everywhere, and tries to set simpler and more predictable rules for
development, but we’d obviously like to see them go further and also just legalize small apartments
everywhere. According to one councilor, the goal of the Centre Plan was still to “put development
where it [makes] sense, on busy corridors” while protecting the “character” of the lower-density
residential neighbourhoods. This feels a lot like the Toronto approach of concentrating
development into hyper-dense clusters on traffic-choked arterials while leaving
(quote-unquote) “established neighbourhoods” exempt from most types of housing. We have
nothing against taller buildings themselves, but this unbalanced approach results in development
patterns that are, honestly, weird, lopsided, and artificial. After having lived in Montreal,
we think it’s wild that four-storey apartments aren’t legal to build literally everywhere.
Setting aside questions of how cities densify, it’s clear that all of the economic,
environmental, and health benefits of denser, more compact development patterns
still apply to smaller cities too. Halifax itself commissioned a study finding that
concentrating more development in the central city could save $700 million dollars by 2031.
Road construction and maintenance, wastewater, fire and emergency,
police — most services are cheaper to provide to a less spread out population.
The study also found health and lifestyle benefits: more free time, more transportation
options, more physical activity, and obviously decreased pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
We were going to end this video by talking about how urbanist ideas might be a tougher sell in
smaller cities if these places see more people visiting or moving from surrounding rural areas,
where people don’t have as much exposure to things like denser housing or public transit. This might
still be true but the evidence we looked into didn’t actually support it in the case of Halifax.
One poll found that Haligonians — yes, that’s what people from Halifax are called — are actually very
supportive of protected bike infrastructure, more so than in many bigger cities. And we were going
to talk about Halifax’s attempt at a transit-only corridor on Spring Garden Road this summer that
was canceled after just a few days because drivers kept driving on the street anyway, but that’s been
a major problem on Toronto’s King Street Transit Priority Corridor too. It goes to show that
bigger and smaller cities aren’t as different as we think.
Thanks for watching through to the end of the video. Don’t forget to bike and subscribe,
and a special thanks to our supporters on Patreon.