A major collision involving the driver of a truck careening off an overpass in Halifax and onto a highway is highlighting the municipality’s weak spots when it comes to traffic and roadways.
There were no major injuries in Thursday afternoon’s crash. But it did leave parts of Highway 102 and 101 closed for hours near Lower Sackville.
“I think it shows where all the pinch points are and the fact that a major corridor or a major highway like the 102, if that is shut down, then all of the side roads are going to take that traffic,” said District 14 Coun. Lisa Blackburn, who represents the area. “And those are side roads that are not built to take that level of traffic.”
Blackburn herself was caught up in Thursday’s gridlock. She says, however, that collisions aren’t the only reason for congestion.
Summer construction is now in full effect. In addition, Halifax Regional Municipality’s population continues to grow, which means more vehicles on the road.
“We definitely realize that there’s going to be an infrastructure crunch. We can’t have this many people settling in our city and not have to adjust our infrastructure accordingly,” said Blackburn. “But that’s going to take all levels of government, all orders of government to do that, because HRM alone does not have the money to build connector roads or build new highways.”
And that’s where the provinces comes in. Megan Couture with the Joint Regional Transportation Agency — a provincial organization — says changes have to be made because government has set “some pretty aggressive population growth targets.”
“We are going to need additional infrastructure to do that to support the transportation system as we grow,” said Couture.
The agency exists to address the transportation issue in HRM by developing a regional transportation plan, which is expected to be complete in November.
“There are constraints, right? There are certain pinch points — getting on and off the peninsula especially is a real consideration,” said Courure. “We also see kind of a limited resiliency in the system. So when there is poor weather or there are accidents, there’s sort of this inability to recover quickly from that because there’s truly nowhere else for the traffic to go.”
While Couture says there is “no one solution” to fixing the congestion, increasing accessibility and appeal towards other modes of transportation can reduce dependency on single-occupancy vehicles.
“We want to set expectations realistically, but we can manage it.”
— with a file from Global News’ Rebecca Lau