SAINT JOHN - What does car dependency look like? Travel Saint John’s MacKay Highway during rush hour and you’ll see. Every rush-hour, thousands of commuters pack the MacKay Highway, sometimes causing several kilometers of stop and go traffic. The four-lane, divided Highway connects the suburbs of Rothesay and Quispamsis to the city of Saint John. The Provincial government has promised to add two lanes, one in each direction, to ease traffic, increase safety and to speed the movement of commercial trucks travelling to and through Saint John; the MacKay Highway is part of Route 1, which connects New Brunswick to the Canadian-American border. There are many reasons why adding lanes to the Highway is a bad idea. For me, three related issues stand out: induced traffic, the positive feedback loop that exists between road capacity and car dependency, and the suburbanization that results from highway expansion. First issue: increasing road capacity increases traffic, a phenomenon known as induced traffic. Let’s consider traffic to be the absolute number of cars on the road and congestion to be the delays caused by all that traffic. Congestion happens when roadways begin to reach capacity. Heavily congested roadways encourage people to change their travel patterns to avoid delays — most people hate sitting in traffic. Drivers might change modes (walk, bike or take transit), they might choose a different route, change the time of their trip, or opt not make the trip. Regardless, there is a limit to the amount of traffic one road can handle. Increasing road capacity temporarily relieves congestion, making it faster and easier to drive. But over time, people change their habits and the result is more driving — more traffic.

HALIFAX - Last week HRM Council appeared to approve two high-rise developments on Barrington Street – a 17 storey building on the site of the Roy Building and a 20 storey tower to be built on top of the Discovery Centre. Sound familiar? Confusingly, Council seems to have approved the same two towers in April of 2009. Adding to the confusion, both towers are within the Barrington Street Heritage Conservation District, and appear to violate the new downtown plan approved through HRMbyDesign. What exactly is happening with these two proposals? First, neither project has been granted final approval. Although the Roy Centre project was announced in the summer of 2008, and the Discovery Centre proposal submitted in February 2009, Council has to date only decided what rules the projects will be reviewed under. In March 2009 Council voted to review these projects under the existing Municipal Planning Strategy (MPS) instead of the new downtown plan, which was still being developed through HRMbyDesign. Both proposals are taller than the height limits for Barrington Street that were ultimately set by HRMbyDesign. Consequently, Council felt it would be unfair to review (and ultimately reject) these developments based on the HRMbyDesign standards, which had not been finalized when the tower applications were submitted to the Municipality. The Council vote, which happened last week, was needed to amend the Heritage By-law — a step that was missed in 2009.