Halifax. Not on four wheels? Enter at your own risk!
And it's not that great if you're driving either.
Nice bridge huh? True, as long as you have pocket full of spare change. If you want to cross one of the two big bridges between Halifax and Dartmouth you either throw coins in a basket, or have a little MacPass sticker on your windshield.
Credit Cards? Debit? Not on your life bubba!
That’s the beginning of how you can assess Halifax in terms of getting around the city. It’s always cars first, and even then it’s a battle.
The crazy thing is that compared to most cities in Canada Halifax actually has a really heavy and active pedestrian population, and a lot of cyclists. What surprises me is that the city by and large rejects those things in favour of big gas guzzling cars and trucks.
Sure there are scattered chunks of green painted bike lane, with those ever popular flexi-posts, but beyond that it’s really a town where walking or cycling is something that you take on entirely unaided. The way that streets, sidewalks, and random bike paths are laid out just makes it unpleasant for the non-automotive traveller.
After years of looking at how other places handle the shift from petrol to no-petrol travel, it feels kind of backwards and shocking. Thirty years ago Halifax impressed me most by being a place where if you were just idly standing on a sidewalk, chatting with a friend, cars would stop to let you cross the road, even though you weren’t even looking that way. It feels as if those days are long gone.
When I walk around the parts of Halifax with clubs and restaurants and such, my immediate thought is of towns in France, roughly the same size, that have taken the step of closing off their downtown cores to cars, and instead making them entirely pedestrian and bike friendly.
Incidentally, I can’t imagine trying to cycle across the Macdonald and Mackay bridges. They make the Lions’ Gate bridge in Vancouver look positively warm and inviting.
Actually, HHB, who run the bridges say:
The Macdonald Bridge features a sidewalk and dedicated bicycle lane to promote active transportation between Halifax and Dartmouth. The sidewalk is located on the south side of the bridge and the bicycle lane is on the north side. Both lanes are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and free of charge.
On the other hand, the MacKay bridge gets the short but sweet:
MacKay: There is no bicycle or pedestrian access on the MacKay Bridge.
What’s really frustrating is that despite having a real disdain for cyclists and pedestrians (and, I assume, transit users) Halifax is also a nightmare to drive in.
I’ve driven in small French towns with streets laid out three and four hundred years ago, and sometimes so narrow that you seriously worry if you’re going to lose a rear-view mirror. Somehow though it works, and it feels safe.
Halifax feels as if in the weeks following the Explosion people just scrabbled together little bits of random street in whatever direction seemed useful at the moment, and all of those random bits of pavement have become formalized and are now untouchable.
Usually in any reasonably large city there are some more or less straight and direct streets to get from A to B. In Halifax that just doesn’t seem to be the case. You turn left, you turn right, you turn right again… and then go around a totally mangled traffic circle. There’s nothing intuitive or natural about driving in Halifax. All that you can do is trust in Google, and hope you don’t miss a prompt.
We’ve spent time in Halifax in our car, and on foot, and despite many visits we still lack any sense of how the city is laid out, or how different parts are connected. What with water on two sides, and hills, and some pretty specific things like The Citadel, it should be easy to understand this town.
Perhaps it just takes more digging, more visiting, more time spent places other than Ikea. We shall see.
Regarding raccoons Barry, the only way I found to deter them is to get feeding system from Wild Birds while you’re in Halifax. Even BC raccoons find them tough to scale. And if they do destroy one , Wild Birds repairs or replaced for free.
I’m really enjoying your life blogs Barry.
Anne