Media Clipping — Friday March 20, 2008, The Chronicle Herald

Traffic Tieups Costing Millions

By Amy Pugsley Fraser

Halifax's traffic jams aren't just costing drivers precious minutes on their way into town each day.

They're also costing millions, a new report released Wednesday suggests.

Traffic congestion costs Halifax residents and businesses at least $7 million a year, says a report by GPI Atlantic, a non-profit research group based in Halifax.

That big expense surprised even the city's manager of traffic and transportation services.

"We've never generated that data before and it's certainly interesting," Dave McCusker said in an interview. "It's more than I would have guessed."

More than 90 per cent of the $7 million, according to the report, reflects the time motorists waste in traffic, while about seven per cent represents fuel spent while idling or crawling along at a snail's pace.

Those numbers could actually be higher, the executive director of GPI Atlantic says.

That's because in cost calculations, GPI always tries to be as conservative as possible, Ron Colman said Wednesday.

The $7-million estimate only considers traffic congestion at lower than half the posted speed limit during the two peak travel times on arterials - not side streets - and only includes recurrent or regular congestion, he said.

It doesn't include other causes of congestion like storms, stalled vehicles, accidents, freight traffic or roadwork, nor does it calculate psychological or stress-related health costs, he said.

If all of that were included in the calculations, the financial impact of congestion "could well be two to three times that number," he said.

And even those costs represent just a fraction of the full $2.7-billion annual cost of driving in the municipality, says the report.

Haligonians directly spend 12.4 per cent of their household budgets - an average of $3,327 a year per person - to own, operate and park their vehicles, including money they shell out for gas, registration, insurance, repairs and car payments.

But they incur an additional $3,790 per person in indirect and hidden transport-related costs that are included in property and income taxes that pay for roads, traffic patrols and accidents, and that result from greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and other environmental effects.

The Halifax-specific study was undertaken after GPI Atlantic released a report on sustainable transportation in Nova Scotia in 2006 and is meant to provide measures of progress for Halifax's new municipal planning strategy.

"It's helpful to have a yardstick by which to measure progress with the regional plan and some of the transportation initiatives underway in association with that," Mr. McCusker said of the study, which was partially funded by the city.

"Part of what we'd wanted to do in the regional plan is to attribute more of the cost to the person making that decision (to drive) as one of the ways of helping to influence better choices in commuting and transportation," he said.

It's hoped that more people will walk, bicycle, carpool or use MetroLink, he said, referring to the city's new commuter bus service that has a rural component on the way in the fall.

As well, a high-speed ferry is part of the municipality's plan to promote higher transit ridership, he said.

"Ultimately, (we want) to reduce our need to provide roadways and facilities for cars," Mr. McCusker said.

He's hopeful the newer elements - like expanding harbour ferry service or adding more commuter bus service - will unfold over the next few years, budgets permitting.

The GPI study calls the city's present transportation system "unsustainable," but praises the "smart-growth" approach to planning in Halifax's new municipal planning strategy as having the potential to reverse the trends of the past.

Mr. McCusker says that means Halifax commuters can't keep going down the same old roads.

"From our perspective, that unsustainability means that we can't continue to build more and more road capacity to handle future growth if the choices in travelling are the same."

The controversial Chebucto Road widening project - which residents oppose - is a good example of that, he said.

"But if, in the future, people continue to make the same choices in how they want to get to where they need to go, and those choices are still cars, then there have to be more and more projects like Chebucto Road."

Copyright © 2008, The Chronicle Herald