Raise the Hammer

While I appreciate the differences between Hamilton and Halifax, I don't think they are explained by what the writer was describing. I live in Halifax during the school year while taking a degree. Principally, there is a cultural difference in the small, older neighbourhoods like downtown Halifax (and Dartmouth). I think this is true of a lot of smaller Canadian towns and older neighbourhoods of cities I have visited.

Firstly I will agree that Halifax drivers show great deference to pedestrians - if you're in the right places. Although I am no expert, I would guess that the cultural deference to pedestrians in downtown Halifax is gleaned from two things: older design for streets and their cultural pace of life. In South-End and downtown, on-street parking is everywhere, rarely is there more than two lanes of traffic going in a single direction, and the older street layout maintains tight turn radii for vehicles. Consequently, I really believe there is a learned behaviour of stopping for pedestrians simply because traffic speed is mitigated to a more reasonable pace. This has been buttressed by their adoption of pedestrian crossings everywhere which, as a result of their old street design, rarely requires enforcement. Drivers and pedestrians achieve an entirely different equilibrium due to coherence of design.

I have found the behaviour outside of Halifax's older South- and North-Ends to be very similar to the generic medium-to-large-sized Ontario city. If you venture further out in suburban Halifax or Dartmouth, you get the same multi-lane, quasi-highway typical of post-1970s development. In these places, crossing a multiple-lane road would not get you the same consideration for pedestrians that you would get in South-End, downtown Halifax.

South-End Halifax is great because a wide swath of its downtown streets are composed in this way, leading to a coherent expectation for pedestrian behaviour over a large area. Hamilton's neighbourhoods have been fragmented by four- and five-lane streets which eviscerate the consistency between neighbourhoods. It wrecks the cultural coherence toward pedestrianism we could develop in linking the great older neighbourhoods we have in the city. Think about the discord of walking on Locke Street and then turning onto Main.

While enforcement of Highway Traffic Acts is necessary, I don't think it is responsible for mass behavioural change. There is a structural difference in street design of Halifax and Hamilton that leads to a whole culture around pedestrian and vehicle interaction. There are not enough police in the whole city to deter drivers from using 60km highways through downtown neighbourhoods to their advantage. There is a cultivated expectation of speed through downtown Hamilton streets. These learned behaviours prevent our great walkable lower-city neighbourhoods from developing confidence as a unit. Our street design choices in Hamilton have resulted in a civic culture that does not lend itself to prioritizing pedestrians.