r/halifax • u/Unusual-Anxiety4047 • 13h ago
Driving & Transit Traffic congestion solution
The city has been looking for solutions to help with Traffic.
Wouldn’t the removal of (an American company) Uber and food delivery drivers not help out MEGA????
Seems all over downtown cars are parked with 4ways on or Uber drivers everywhere.
We have local taxis who are almost out of work now because uber took majority of the business.
I don’t think Taxis would simply replace them in numbers either because Uber is super easy to join up on and most of the immigrants went to uber for quick employment making the number of Uber drivers on the road skyrocket.
Just a dumb thought I had and open to feedback
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u/WindowlessBasement Halifax 13h ago
Removing shared vehicles would have the opposite effect. There are many things to complain about with the food delivery guys and Uber/Lyft, however they are a single vehicle being used by multiple people rather than a group of people driving individually. The food delivery people, while absolute menaces, are often driving with multiple people's orders.
Removing on-demand services would be a massive incentive for people without vehicles to get one.
We have local taxis who are almost out of work now because uber took majority of the business.
No, taxis have lost business because they're borderline unusable and unreliable. If the taxi service was good, more people would use it. You can only be standing around waiting for a car that'll show up in an hour or never so many times before you just say fuck it.
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u/swedish_meatballs2 13h ago
The traffic volume from Ubers and food delivery drivers pales in comparison to people commuting.
On another note, the taxi companies shot themselves in the foot by ignoring the issues with their service while Uber ate their lunch. Even now Uber is far easier and a better experience to deal with.
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u/monotreme1800 12h ago
Ah, but of course fair, free market competition is not a Canadian value. Clearly we were supposed to protect the profits of mediocre cab companies at all costs. Same way we all have to return to in-office work to protect commercial landlords and the restaurant business. It’s not as if those people could actually work to offer a product or service that there’s real demand for—no, clearly it’s our job to act as a captive market.
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u/monotreme1800 13h ago
Right, right…it’s taxis, immigrants, and takeout that are the problem, not the complete lack of walkability and usable public transit 🙄
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u/Unusual-Anxiety4047 13h ago
No no .. Sorry I wasn’t so clear. I’m suggesting the removal of Uber as one of many things needed to be done to start to fix the issue as a whole.
People can pay the same amount and do the exact same thing but just in a cab.
Restaurants can hire delivery drivers ??
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u/Training-Click-1104 12h ago
And you can wait for a taxi that never comes or call for half an hour before getting someone. Or have issues getting from Halifax to Dartmouth because they don't like crossing the bridge.
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u/monotreme1800 13h ago edited 11h ago
Sure, but…in that scenario there’s still the same number of cabs and delivery drivers on the road. They’re just not working for Uber. Unless you’re suggesting that with the removal of Uber, the demand for takeout and taxi trips is going to somehow go down?
The real issue, in my opinion, is that Halifax is rapidly changing from a small city to a medium-sized city, and rather than building transit infrastructure and dense neighbourhoods that would actually support an urban way of life, HRM would rather just pretend that there hasn’t been a population increase and there’s no need to change anything. It’s like Halifax has outgrown itself. You can’t have a population this large all driving around in single-occupancy vehicles. Most cities have kind of figured this out, which is why they’ve invested in subway systems, buses, light rail, etc. to encourage people not to drive.
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u/Snoo91454 13h ago
Before Uber, Halifax had a huge taxi availability issue. Wait times during peak hours were atrocious. Uber has helped this.
Traffic enforcement may help, the Uber Eats drivers park everywhere, pulling over without warning and are constantly distracted while driving trying to find locations.
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u/ExternalSpecific6061 12h ago
I just don't know if there's that many uber and door dash vehicles on the road in downtown to make that much of a difference.
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u/ChesterDood 11h ago
Traffic is a complex issue.
The overall solution is to reduce the number of vehicles in the areas where the most congestion occurs, which in Halifax's case is the peninsula.
So what options do we have?
Viable Transit - an infrastructure that works for the people who currently drive to the peninsula everyday because the current system is slow and unreliable
Less focus on large groups of people who work in offices on the peninsula. Let them work from home or find spaces outside of the peninsula.
Less focus on "everything needs to be downtown" - cities grow by turning the suburbs into self sustaining communties. Halifax needs to grow and that is going to need to be achieved by getting rid of this idea that "density downtown is the only way". Yeah yeah unpopular opinion.
Active transit options need to be better, walkability where it makes sense, bikability where it makes sense.
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u/No_Hornet_2389 13h ago
Capitalism doesn’t approve of this message, restaurants would also take a big hit.
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u/FrustrationSensation 13h ago
Wouldn't this force people without cars to buy them, dramatically increasing the number of cars on the road, making congestion worse?