Besides me, many others in my circle have voiced similar thoughts on the absolute stupidity of these so-called "active transportation" lanes. The activities I've noted do NOT involve anything on two wheels moving within those barriers. They involve road crews holding up traffic to install or maintain these monstrosities and the activity of hands rubbing together in glee as construction company owners count their current and future profits. Oh, and let's not forget the snow removal teams who have to carefully run the green & white gauntlets. And the safety of our bus, cab drivers, and passengers. Or the regular folks, like you and me, who now frustratingly navigate even narrower streets and have lost innumerable parking spots given over to virtually non-existent bicyclists. And then there are the small business owners who continue to lose customers that gave up even attempting to visit the downtown. Please, let's stop this madness!
The profound stupidity is shocking. $100M on bike paths for a city that is bitterly cold for half the year, and prone to ice and snow for ⅓? Now Halifax has the fifth worst traffic in North America. Leftists destroy every city they touch, from Portland to Vancouver to now Halifax.
Thanks for this JWC. I was a recreational bicyclist for many years in Halifax. The single thing that put an end to most of my trips was the construction...block after block it was necessary to dismount, walk for a block or two and then figure out if it was safe/possible to get peddling again. Having said that though, I think one of the problems with the current bike lane problem is that they don't seem any safer than the pre-lane cycling experience. Cyclists are part of the problem...few pay much attention to safety and the dis jointed layout...hard to figure out what they had in mind in many cases. And at the moment, of course, the inane idea that cutting down trees, demolishing houses, to create a bike land on Robie is the limit.
You know, I’m just paranoid enough to wonder if city staff wanted the bike lanes to fail—or at least didn’t care whether they did. There’s a part of me that suspects the whole thing was set in motion with full knowledge that it would collapse under its own absurdity.
It reminds me of the board game Mousetrap—that chaotic tangle of pulleys, marbles, and swinging boots based on the cartoons of Rube Goldberg. A contraption built to do something simple in the most complicated, failure-prone way imaginable. One part triggers the next, each more ridiculous than the last, until the whole mess falls apart and misses its mark completely. Sound familiar?
Or maybe it's more of a municipal Catch-22. After being hounded for years by the bicycle lobby, the quiet cynics in the back rooms of city hall finally saw their chance for revenge: Give them everything they want. Build it all—lavishly, blindly, unreasonably. And in doing so, turn the city against them forever.
It’s not planning. It’s punishment.
It’s not policy. It’s wrath—biblical in scale and slow-burning in effect.
Since our previous South end councillor (WM) proclaimed that the area south of the Rail cut desperately needed separated bike paths, Council spent a fortune on designs for a foot - cycle bridge to be built across the railway near St Mary's U. to near the Bible College on Franklyn so as to 'link' with Point Pleasant Park. This new 'greyway' - if the built portion of the cyclepath along Beaufort actually built at great cost is any guide, would have been as little used as its connection. The Beaufort portion usage in summer cannot currently number more than a couple of score users (any traffic count ever done?) yet this warranted planning at great cost on more losses of mature trees and suburban boulevards. The plan appears with its multi-million dollar bridge to have been quietly dropped from the map supplied - though not from the large public noticeboard at the SW corner of South Street and Beaufort!
V🪓ccine$ ☠️ make this bike problem almost something to ignore. What’s IN those Big pHARM-US-see$’ vaXXscheme$ ?
$$$$$$$$$$$$$ for those ‘trusted’ Gov’t-operatoring, non-representative deceivers in the world … while they exempt themselves and ‘critical’ staff … and fight against religious exemption that thumbs their noses toward “anything-God.” Perhaps population reduction is why there are less healthy-happy bike riders.
AMEN!! We've been fighting the university Avenue portion for so long the mayor is not listening the Counsellor is not listening. They're ripping down so many trees, they're messing up the traffic flow, they have not provided a single shred of data to justify this. I travel beside the bike lanes and I never see anyone in them. Where is the business case? This is an absolute travesty! Stop it now take the loss leave the rest of the city alone. Repair what you've broken. How did city counsellors get this kind of power? The power not to listen to the majority of their constituents!
When we talk about Halifax City Council, it's tempting to cast councillors as the architects of policy. But that gives them far too much credit. In truth, they’re more often the victims than the villains—caught in a system that rewards compliance, punishes independence, and treats elected office not as leadership but as well-managed representation of staff interests to the public.
Think of them less as politicians and more as shop stewards for the bureaucracy—managing complaints, smoothing over disruptions, and defending the departments that actually write the rule books and call the shots.
By the time most bureaucrats and councilors arrive at City Hall, they’ve already been ideologically housebroken—indoctrinated in universities, trained to speak the language of equity frameworks and carbon reduction targets, fluent in the bureaucratic dialect of vision statements and stakeholder engagement. Then, once in office, they’re shipped off to conferences where consultants peddle this year’s urban planning gospel like a TED Talk crossed with a cult retreat.
They come home glowing with certainty, armed with PowerPoints and pilot projects, eager to implement the latest “international best practice” on a city that never asked for it and doesn’t understand why its streets suddenly don’t work anymore.
And crucially, the councillors don’t run the show. They are briefed, managed, and controlled by “staff”— not a person but a dense, entrenched bureaucracy that holds the keys to language, process, and precedent. Every ambitious idea is met with a wall of red tape unless it aligns with the staff’s existing ideological posture. In that way, councillors become mouthpieces—not of the people who elected them, but of the departments and directors who pre-digest every option they’re allowed to consider.
This isn’t corruption. It’s capture. Not by big money or lobbyists—but by the slow, soft totalitarianism of permanent government.
And the tragedy is this: most councillors don’t even know it’s happening. They genuinely believe they’re leading.
They’re not.
They’re front-of-house for a machinery that no longer serves the public—it serves itself.
Besides me, many others in my circle have voiced similar thoughts on the absolute stupidity of these so-called "active transportation" lanes. The activities I've noted do NOT involve anything on two wheels moving within those barriers. They involve road crews holding up traffic to install or maintain these monstrosities and the activity of hands rubbing together in glee as construction company owners count their current and future profits. Oh, and let's not forget the snow removal teams who have to carefully run the green & white gauntlets. And the safety of our bus, cab drivers, and passengers. Or the regular folks, like you and me, who now frustratingly navigate even narrower streets and have lost innumerable parking spots given over to virtually non-existent bicyclists. And then there are the small business owners who continue to lose customers that gave up even attempting to visit the downtown. Please, let's stop this madness!
The profound stupidity is shocking. $100M on bike paths for a city that is bitterly cold for half the year, and prone to ice and snow for ⅓? Now Halifax has the fifth worst traffic in North America. Leftists destroy every city they touch, from Portland to Vancouver to now Halifax.
Thanks for this JWC. I was a recreational bicyclist for many years in Halifax. The single thing that put an end to most of my trips was the construction...block after block it was necessary to dismount, walk for a block or two and then figure out if it was safe/possible to get peddling again. Having said that though, I think one of the problems with the current bike lane problem is that they don't seem any safer than the pre-lane cycling experience. Cyclists are part of the problem...few pay much attention to safety and the dis jointed layout...hard to figure out what they had in mind in many cases. And at the moment, of course, the inane idea that cutting down trees, demolishing houses, to create a bike land on Robie is the limit.
Agreed, with all that.
You know, I’m just paranoid enough to wonder if city staff wanted the bike lanes to fail—or at least didn’t care whether they did. There’s a part of me that suspects the whole thing was set in motion with full knowledge that it would collapse under its own absurdity.
It reminds me of the board game Mousetrap—that chaotic tangle of pulleys, marbles, and swinging boots based on the cartoons of Rube Goldberg. A contraption built to do something simple in the most complicated, failure-prone way imaginable. One part triggers the next, each more ridiculous than the last, until the whole mess falls apart and misses its mark completely. Sound familiar?
Or maybe it's more of a municipal Catch-22. After being hounded for years by the bicycle lobby, the quiet cynics in the back rooms of city hall finally saw their chance for revenge: Give them everything they want. Build it all—lavishly, blindly, unreasonably. And in doing so, turn the city against them forever.
It’s not planning. It’s punishment.
It’s not policy. It’s wrath—biblical in scale and slow-burning in effect.
And in the end, nobody enjoys the ride.
Since our previous South end councillor (WM) proclaimed that the area south of the Rail cut desperately needed separated bike paths, Council spent a fortune on designs for a foot - cycle bridge to be built across the railway near St Mary's U. to near the Bible College on Franklyn so as to 'link' with Point Pleasant Park. This new 'greyway' - if the built portion of the cyclepath along Beaufort actually built at great cost is any guide, would have been as little used as its connection. The Beaufort portion usage in summer cannot currently number more than a couple of score users (any traffic count ever done?) yet this warranted planning at great cost on more losses of mature trees and suburban boulevards. The plan appears with its multi-million dollar bridge to have been quietly dropped from the map supplied - though not from the large public noticeboard at the SW corner of South Street and Beaufort!
V🪓ccine$ ☠️ make this bike problem almost something to ignore. What’s IN those Big pHARM-US-see$’ vaXXscheme$ ?
$$$$$$$$$$$$$ for those ‘trusted’ Gov’t-operatoring, non-representative deceivers in the world … while they exempt themselves and ‘critical’ staff … and fight against religious exemption that thumbs their noses toward “anything-God.” Perhaps population reduction is why there are less healthy-happy bike riders.
AMEN!! We've been fighting the university Avenue portion for so long the mayor is not listening the Counsellor is not listening. They're ripping down so many trees, they're messing up the traffic flow, they have not provided a single shred of data to justify this. I travel beside the bike lanes and I never see anyone in them. Where is the business case? This is an absolute travesty! Stop it now take the loss leave the rest of the city alone. Repair what you've broken. How did city counsellors get this kind of power? The power not to listen to the majority of their constituents!
When we talk about Halifax City Council, it's tempting to cast councillors as the architects of policy. But that gives them far too much credit. In truth, they’re more often the victims than the villains—caught in a system that rewards compliance, punishes independence, and treats elected office not as leadership but as well-managed representation of staff interests to the public.
Think of them less as politicians and more as shop stewards for the bureaucracy—managing complaints, smoothing over disruptions, and defending the departments that actually write the rule books and call the shots.
By the time most bureaucrats and councilors arrive at City Hall, they’ve already been ideologically housebroken—indoctrinated in universities, trained to speak the language of equity frameworks and carbon reduction targets, fluent in the bureaucratic dialect of vision statements and stakeholder engagement. Then, once in office, they’re shipped off to conferences where consultants peddle this year’s urban planning gospel like a TED Talk crossed with a cult retreat.
They come home glowing with certainty, armed with PowerPoints and pilot projects, eager to implement the latest “international best practice” on a city that never asked for it and doesn’t understand why its streets suddenly don’t work anymore.
And crucially, the councillors don’t run the show. They are briefed, managed, and controlled by “staff”— not a person but a dense, entrenched bureaucracy that holds the keys to language, process, and precedent. Every ambitious idea is met with a wall of red tape unless it aligns with the staff’s existing ideological posture. In that way, councillors become mouthpieces—not of the people who elected them, but of the departments and directors who pre-digest every option they’re allowed to consider.
This isn’t corruption. It’s capture. Not by big money or lobbyists—but by the slow, soft totalitarianism of permanent government.
And the tragedy is this: most councillors don’t even know it’s happening. They genuinely believe they’re leading.
They’re not.
They’re front-of-house for a machinery that no longer serves the public—it serves itself.
Wow that's a lot to think about thank you!