Council Update: Bike Lane Battle

Bike Lanes:
The big drama at Council was the Mayor’s motion to “temporarily pause” all of HRM’s bike projects. When the news broke on Friday I fired off a quick note to help raise the alarm that you can read here. Council received a ton of feedback, mostly strongly against the Mayor’s proposed motion. During debate, even Councillors in HRM’s more rural districts indicated receiving mostly negative feedback from their constituents. In District 5, what came into me was overwhelmingly opposed to the Mayor’s motion by a very wide margin. That combined with the fact that finishing the Regional Centre Bike Network was a core promise I made as part of my 2024 platform meant there was no way I was going to let this go without a fight.

Bike Lanes and Congestion
The first problem was how the Mayor framed the why of his motion, particularly his suggestion that bike lanes are causing congestion. This is verifiably false. Anyone in the planning world will tell you that bike lanes don’t cause congestion, they actually improve things by providing people with an attractive alternative mode of transportation, while reducing potential points of conflict. Research from elsewhere has shown this time and time again. Here’s a CBC article that cites a bunch of the research on the topic from around the world.

Bike lanes don’t cause congestion. That’s a simple fact and the Mayor’s unwillingness to admit that reality is deeply problematic. Local data nerd, Kevin from HRM By Bike, did a fantastic video of what HRM has built so far that very much dispenses with the congestion red herring in our very own HRM context.

None of this is to say we don’t have a congestion problem, we do, but the source of that problem is a city that has grown by over 100,000 in just 8 years and hasn’t done the hard work to provide alternatives to car travel. The Mayor’s motion was blaming one of the solutions to the problem he was citing! It was all so very disappointing.

When a Pause isn’t Just a Pause
If you discount the flawed starting premise around congestion, the Mayor’s motion to pause and reexamine HRM’s active transportation plans might seem reasonable. How can a pause to make sure you’re on the right track be bad? Isn’t that just prudent good governance? Unfortunately, the reality is much more complicated and the Mayor’s seemingly innocuous “it’s just a pause” was full of real multi-year consequences.

During the debate, staff indicated that it would take four months to come back with a response to the Mayor’s motion, meaning that the whole 2025 construction season of projects would be lost. This would affect nine projects. HRM is literally closing on a tender for Brunswick Street today! Retendering projects next year after another year of inflation and with all the newly added political risk around bidding on an HRM bike lane project would mean increased costs. What contractor wouldn’t pad their bid if there is the possibility of the whole thing being cancelled on a political whim at the last moment? Delaying in 2025 means paying more in 2026. Losing the 2025 construction season would also mean that HRM would miss it’s already revised 2028 deadline for finishing the overall bike network.

So a pause on current year work means the whole overall project ends up delayed, and HRM pays even more. A pause isn’t free. This would have impacted projects in Dartmouth that have been planned for years including the Sawmill River Trail, the Harbour Trail (if we finally get the CN agreement), and phase one of the Dartmouth North project on Farrell Street. None of these three will impact any traffic whatsoever, but they were in the pause basket anyway. Council approved all of the 2025 active transportation projects just two months ago as part of the capital budget. The Mayor raised no objections to any of them then. Doing so now, just two months later in the middle of the construction season would need some sort of extraordinary justification, something more than falsely attributed traffic congestion. The capital budget debate in January was the moment to revise this year’s work, not June with a tender closing the very next day! If the Mayor wants to reexamine the bike program, the way to do that would be to ask for a report on future years, not create chaos in the current construction season

Garbage in Garbage Out
So what was the Mayor actually looking for in pausing the work? The Mayor wanted a report that would identify any projects that might impact vehicle capacity, or presumably given the tone of discussions, even be perceived to impact vehicle capacity. He wanted a list so that Council could then cancel or seek a redesign for any projects that might impact drivers. The problem is the information he was looking for doesn’t exist in any kind of useful way. Here’s why

When the bike network was proposed as part of the Integrated Mobility Plan back in 2018, it was mostly just lines on the map. There was no detailed design work to figure out what each specific section would actually look like. That detailed work occurs on a project by project basis with staff doing technical studies and public engagement to finally make a recommendation to Council. What that means is for projects not yet designed, there is no way to truly know what the potential impacts will be. The Dartmouth North project that is scheduled to start construction this year isn’t even using all of the streets that were suggested in the initial plan! That’s how much change can happen in the process of design and public engagement and, incidentally, is also part of why costs are much more than estimated! Staff would have done their best to bring back a response to the Mayor’s motion, but it is a garbage in garbage out sort of situation. The info the mayor wanted doesn’t exist in a meaningful way to make decisions off of.

The sort of good news for the Mayor, but also why his motion was really even further redundant, is that all projects come to Council for approval. All of them. Any future project that might propose to take out a traffic lane or something like that would be a decision made by Council as a whole. The Mayor will have a chance to have his say at that moment. Pausing design work now would just put off the process of getting actual useful information on future projects.

So the Mayor’s motion was built on a verifiably false premise around congestion, would throw the current construction plan into chaos, would cost HRM more money to do the same work, should have been looked at during budget deliberations, and wouldn’t have added anything in the way of useful information since out year projects haven’t been designed yet and the normal process is all projects come to Council for approval anyway. Council soundly defeated the Mayor’s motion 5-12.

Having lost at attempt number 1, the Mayor’s fallback position was to try and pause two specific projects: Morris Street and Brunswick Street. Morris Street’s conceptual design was approved in 2024 and is in this year’s budget for detailed design while Brunswick Street is out to tender right now (closing today!). Council voted on pausing work on the two separately.

Brunswick Street
The plan for Brunswick Street is to upgrade the existing bike lanes to protected bike lanes, add a plaza entrance for Citadel Hill at Brunswick and Sackville, add trees to the street, make some pedestrian improvements (like at the pinch point opposite Cambridge Suites), and improve the entrance to Citadel Hill at the top of Carmichael Street. The Mayor indicated his concern was the loss of the slip lane from Brunswick to Sackville. The Sackville slip lane will instead be replaced with a right-hand turn lane.

Slip lanes are disappearing in places where there are lots of pedestrians because they’re dangerous. Cars don’t have to slow down to the same extent that they do when making a 90 degree turn at an intersection and pedestrians and cyclists in a slip lane have their back to that fast moving oncoming traffic. Here’s a video from San Diego that goes over the basics of why slip lanes are generally a terrible idea for city streets.

The slip lane being taken out at Brunswick and Sackville is in a Downtown setting next to a major tourist attractions where there are lots of vulnerable road-users. It’s about the most inappropriate place for one you could get. Converting it to a right-turn lane is an important road safety improvement. Here’s the interesting thing, in questioning what the impact of switching the right-hand slip lane to a right-hand turn lane would be on traffic, staff’s analysis indicates there will be zero impact. None. Zero. Zilch. The Mayor’s quest to save a slip lane was an answer to a problem that doesn’t exist! Pausing Brunswick Street would have cost HRM more and all to try and save a slip lane that is completely redundant and makes things more dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, while also sacrificing the opportunity to make a better space for Citadel Hill, one of HRM’s top tourist destinations. None of this makes any sense and so Council voted down pausing Brunswick Street by the same 5-12 margin.

Morris Street
Where Council did throw the Mayor a bone, was on Morris Street. Before the election, Council approved a bike lane design for Morris Street that will turn the street into a one-way. There isn’t the space on Morris Street to have two-way traffic, trees, a two-way bike lane, and parking. It’s an old street and it’s narrow and that’s just asking too much of a limited space. Something has to give. The one-way option makes it work, but like all problems where you can’t satisfy everyone, not everyone is satisfied. Morris Street isn’t a project that was heading for construction this year, it was going out for detailed design so a pause for a month or two here isn’t really that big a deal. Council voted 11-6 to review Morris Street and on this one I was in the minority.

I voted against pausing design work on Morris Street because I understand that there is no perfect solution here and because the area Councillor, Laura White, has met extensively with staff to press on the problem and really double check the work. She has done her homework and spoke convincingly at Council. I was very happy to follow her lead:

With no construction tender to disrupt Council was okay, however, taking another look at Morris Street. No real damage there yet. The battle of Morris Street’s future will resume in July when staff bring back a fresh report for Council to consider.

So a meeting that started with an existential threat to all bike projects became a 1-2 month pauses on a design tender for a single street. A decent outcome and I’m thankful for the wisdom of my colleagues in defeating the Mayor’s ill-advised main motion. I just wish that all of us: community, Council, and Mayor, didn’t have to go through this exhausting five days in the first place.

Other:

• Council gave first reading to the revised Regional Plan, which means a public hearing will follow starting on June 19
• Reviewed the surplus property report and scheduled a public hearing to consider officially closing Ryan’s Gate in Ocean Breeze
• Gave first reading to potential land-use bylaw amendments for a development at 174 Main Street
• Approved the award for the police armoured vehicle
• Extended the student transit pass program for 2025/2026 and directed staff to include home-schooled kids and engage with private schools on their potential participation in the program
• Revised the taxi and limousine rates
• Approved a staff report request from Councillor Steele on carbon monoxide concerns related to blasting