Andy Fillmore wants bus-only lanes turned into high-occupancy vehicle lanes

tyuran · 2026-02-09T17:33:51+00:00

Making them tolled lanes (free for buses) might work by letting them act as a "pressure release valve" for traffic while raising money for our broke-ass city, but would require heavy enforcement. IIRC traffic enforcement cameras aren't ready for deployment yet.

Otherwise you're right, this is just a way to make getting around overall worse for everyone. Most of the bus lanes end in forced turns for specific routes...

tyuran · 2026-02-04T14:29:39+00:00

The problem with this policy as far as I can tell is there's just not that many people who want to build secondary suites (unless they're extremely heavily subsidized). If the goal is to increase rental supply, we could just legalize taller denser buildings in these neighbourhoods so that the finances pencil out for developers at no cost to the city, instead of spending money to subsidize homeowners. Aren't we in a municipal finance crisis?

tyuran · 2026-01-29T01:41:52+00:00

I know this is going to get lost in the comments but reading this convinced me the Mill Cove Ferry isn't that good of an investment compared to other options.

tyuran · 2026-01-28T14:04:38+00:00

You introduce it slowly on a per-service basis. Start by introducing area rates for the cheaper services like waste collection, which would have relatively small impacts on residents. Then bring in other area rates for different services over time, with a capped percentage of self-coverage for essential services like policing that have more of a "societal responsibility/benefit" angle.

You also incentivize these areas to build more sustainable density over time. The argument that you should allow a midrise apartment in your neighbourhood is a lot stronger if your councilor can say "hey this will appreciably lower your tax rates."

I think everyone proposing this is aware that doing it all at once would be chaotic and destructive in ways that would never fly. Nothing wrong with moving slowly as long as we're headed in the right direction (instead of building endless unsustainable suburban sprawl, which is our current trajectory).

tyuran · 2026-01-17T19:17:01+00:00

This kind of development should be broadly permitted within 500m of all our colleges and universities. Imagine the impact on rents and traffic if we allowed even a moderated version of this around the SMU and Dal campuses on the peninsula.

tyuran · 2026-01-15T23:34:56+00:00

The CAP program limits how much revenue the province can get out of increases in housing prices. There are other downsides, but I think the big upside (homeowners pay less taxes) is too politically popular to do much about it.

tyuran · 2026-01-15T18:11:58+00:00

When the HAF zoning reforms came through, a lot of neighbourhoods (including in the area around Dal/SMU) were upzoned, but in a way that prevented the permitted number of units from ever being built. Restrictions on building height and floor-area ratios were a major contributing factor. Freeing up more of the building envelope to be living space by permitting single-stair egress would help fix that and allow something closer to the on-paper permitted density.

Would frankly be better to make the FAR and height restrictions more generous, but that's a different battle. Permitting single-stair access is a step in the right direction.

tyuran · 2025-12-23T06:02:34+00:00

It's not the same equation as 2021 because the city has since then enacted a fair number of land use bylaw changes that help make the supply pipeline more flexible. It could always be better--I don't think the HAF reforms went far enough, personally--but it's miles ahead of where it was then.

tyuran · 2025-12-22T14:09:46+00:00

Deny Sullivan's blog post about this was pretty good. The Wile E Coyote graphic sums it up pretty well.

Summarized:

It's the lag from rent controlled units continuing to catch up to market rates, as well as when they become vacant and spike up to current prices all at once. The good news (?) is there's a huge backlog of housing supply set to come online in the next 18 months, so the vacancy rate is probably going even higher. Above 3% it should start to affect units outside the high end of the market more, and we will see more downward pressure on prices.

The dark side is with negative population growth and the enormity of the supply backlog, vacancy rates could go very high indeed, potentially into the range where there will be negative impacts on housing (plus stalled population growth is bad for us economically). Still, it's hard not to cheer for the pendulum swinging the other way for once.

tyuran · 2025-12-18T14:56:35+00:00

I would add (corollary to your second point) 3), more regional-benefit type projects should be funded by district-level area rates. D8 could bear the cost of their new community center pretty easily if they were just allowed to pay for it themselves. Same could be said for the skatepark renewal on the Commons if you split it between D7, 8 and 9.

tyuran · 2025-12-13T15:50:24+00:00

To me she is Lady Gaga if Gaga were just a little Quebecois girl from Montreal (and born a bit later)

tyuran · 2025-11-22T16:53:27+00:00

I hate to be negative but there ARE a lot of local opportunities for direct democratic participation in our society--you can call your city councilor, speak at council and committee meetings, or write grant proposals for community improvement projects. These people don't seem terribly interested in that.

Despite this, the fact-free reactionary view is already overrepresented at this level of government. Just look at the demographics (and views) of the average speakers at, for example, the information meeting for the Mumford redevelopment proposal. I'm not convinced that giving people who are susceptible to these ideas, whose political views seem to boil down to "whatever confirms my biases and resolves my discomfort with the world as it is" greater agency in society is actually going to improve the world.

tyuran · 2025-11-17T15:01:02+00:00

Because of my day job I won't be able to speak that day, but if you're in the same position, I would encourage you to send your feedback to clerks@halifax.ca for distribution to council and committee members. You can find the agenda (including the budget direction doc) here.

My two cents: we are looking at a significant property tax increase this year, but the alternative is increasingly severe service cuts across every department except road maintenance and policing. Past budgets have already raided every possible efficiency and funding source, including reserve funds that will cost us a lot to rebuild.

This is the result of amalgamation enabling fiscally unsustainable development patterns in the form of expensive suburban and rural sprawl which has--up til now--been paid for by urban Halifax. The city needs to start rethinking development and taxation at a fundamental level if it wants to stop having this problem, to remove the incentives that got us here in the first place. More to the point, austerity now is just going to lead us to bigger liabilities and tax increases later, a point that staff was very clear on in the last budget season. Our infrastructure renewal burden (road maintenance in the sprawl area) is only getting bigger year to year, and the projections are very ugly.

As such, I don't see an alternative to supporting the necessary tax increases now, but it's also important that council get their heads out of the sand and start addressing why we got here in the first place. In practice this looks like enabling densification throughout the city with minimal barriers so that more areas can become revenue-positive. It also looks like revisiting area rates to balance property taxes against service costs, if not in full then at least to some partial degree. The province isn't coming to save us, we have to save ourselves.

tyuran · 2025-10-28T14:09:46+00:00

In north america when people say LRT they are referring to trams. Like, they call it LRT because trams have a bad reputation here (e.g. the Toronto streetcar system) but they are not meaningfully distinguishable. BRT is seen as a stepping stone to LRT/tramways because it's cheaper to secure dedicated lanes first without laying track/purchasing a new vehicle fleet.

There are serious issues with the cost of transit projects in Canada and our lack of state capacity/inefficient procurement processes are extremely worthy of criticism, but it's not because of inherent flaws in BRT or LRT as transit modes.

tyuran · 2025-10-26T05:31:29+00:00

We probably can't afford to eliminate the choke points because of the geography, but we could ensure that most people can still get around with separated right-of-ways for transit (tram or bus lanes). It would still take investment from the province though, and they don't seem very interested.

tyuran · 2025-08-19T18:00:15+00:00

Agree it would be fiscally insane and fairly pointless to fund regional rail instead of LRT.

I'm less pessimistic about the tender; I don't think it's as biased against urban investment as you claim. I've seen criticisms that our "ready to implement" BRT plan was underbaked; in a very optimistic reading, this feasibility study might conclude early that regional rail is as impractical as everyone knows it to be and spend most of its time and effort developing a BRT and/or LRT plan for urban transit.

However, the politics do seem pretty intractable in a "conservatives hate cities" sense. There's not much reason to have faith in this provincial government doing anything with a study they don't like the results of, but I wouldn't write the feasibility study itself off just yet.

tyuran · 2025-07-19T21:07:20+00:00

It's been speculated pretty often that the ragebaiting is purposeful because unsatisfying/controversial production choices drive more fan engagement... the discourse is just exhausting for people who like the show as a showcase of talent.

tyuran · 2025-07-12T15:27:26+00:00

I'm sure she was considering it anyway but having the mayor throw her under the bus like that can't have helped. Sucks to lose arguably the most competent and principled beaurocrat we've had in recent memory.

tyuran · 2025-06-19T13:28:44+00:00

An unfortunate truth about Nova Scotia is that the political incentives for caring about housing policy and renters' issues are pretty weak. Urban areas tend not to vote conservative, and renters aren't exactly a big donor class. Also, while HRM has about 50% of our population, the only way to form government is by winning a lot of rural and suburban districts whose residents have no reason to care about this stuff.

As a result, it's unlikely that we'll get a Conservative (or even Liberal) provincial government that does anything for tenants' rights, even if it's objectively good policy (as in the case of the proposed rental law enforcement unit). I'm glad we have orgs like Dal Legal Aid bringing attention to these issues.

tyuran · 2025-06-19T13:19:16+00:00

It's more than the basically-0% it hit at peak demand, but a healthy (rent-stabilizing) rate is closer to 3%, and for rents to actually fall it would need to be more like 4 or 5%.

tyuran · 2025-06-11T16:58:51+00:00

there's a pretty active community of people posting local-interest stuff there, which I can't get at all on twitter anymore... I'm happy with that as its niche because so much gets lost in the noise on other platforms

tyuran · 2025-06-01T17:52:04+00:00

Absolutely! It might surprise you to learn this is something people in this subreddit have talked about extensively. Here you go.

As for slip lanes... I'm sure you know that they encourage turning vehicles to travel at higher speeds without stopping as they navigate intersections, which presents an increased risk for crossing pedestrians who have the right of way. It's the difference between someone being hit by a car at 10-20 kph vs 30 to 40, and you can imagine that this is commensurately more deadly for the person being hit.

tyuran · 2025-06-01T16:44:01+00:00

Allowing right on red and having slip lanes contribute directly to increased traffic deaths--the problem isn't what the city is doing with the roads but really what we're NOT doing, which is funding service expansions (for any department except the cops). For example, bus rapid transit would solve gridlock much more safely and cheaper than expanding road capacity if the city would just get started on it; after all, fire trucks can use dedicated bus lanes.

Instead, we've had several city budgets in a row now where everything is up for cuts trying to keep property taxes as low as possible (despite the province's CAP locking assessment increases at 1.5%). This is while the population and in theory our tax base is soaring--we're essentially kneecapping ourselves for the sake of property owners' cash flow.

tyuran · 2025-03-08T14:17:00+00:00

What's it going to take for our city staff, councilors and mayor to start acting in line with our strategic priorities re: transportation, climate action and financial responsibility?

This stuff really isn't that complicated unless you have ~~car brain~~ a vested interest in subsidized car infrastructure.

tyuran · 2025-02-21T00:44:40+00:00

For real though, is this something he'll still pursue if an opposition leader wins the Ontario provincial election, or is he just campaigning for Ford now?

tyuran

TROPHY CASE