Halifax traffic is more congested than before the pandemic — and things could get worse
Traffic patterns have shifted and we now have more days of bad congestion
Halifax traffic has become a nightmare for Cole Harbour resident Laquisha Wolfe to navigate.
A recent drive from Cole Harbour to Clayton Park during evening rush hour took Wolfe an hour and a half. Five years ago, she said, the journey would've taken 45 minutes at most.
At times, Wolfe and her husband have tried to direct each other to better routes using traffic maps. "We call it MapQuest," she said.
"It works one per cent of the time," Wolfe added with a laugh. "All the routes are usually blocked because everybody's looking at the same thing you are."
Data obtained by CBC News from map technology company TomTom confirms what Wolfe and others know from experience: congestion in Halifax is now worse than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.
TomTom measures congestion as the average additional percentage of time commuters lose to traffic compared to free-flow conditions when they're able to smoothly drive through their route.
According to the data, half the days between August and October in 2019 had an average congestion level of 29.5 per cent or higher. In 2024, that rose to a congestion level of 32 per cent.
Since 2020, congestion has mostly been climbing, with 2024 being the first year it has surpassed pre-pandemic levels.
A big reason for this could be the city's rapid population growth, said Mike Connors, transportation planning manager with Halifax Regional Municipality.
Growth is "great for the city, it's great for the economy, but it is a challenge for infrastructure," he said.
Weekly traffic patterns have also shifted, with more congestion on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays compared to before the pandemic.
This could be because many people who have been working from home are shifting back to the office or to a hybrid work arrangement, Connors said.
He pointed to results from an HRM transportation survey of about 3,500 residents that closed in August. Forty per cent of respondents indicated they worked from home at least some of the time.
"We've seen that Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the most heavily used days to come into the office," Connors said.
The number of days federal public servants have to be in office increased to three days a week from two starting Sept. 9.
Provincially, nearly 3,500 non-unionized Nova Scotia government employees who had been allowed to work from home were mandated to return to the office full time starting Oct. 15.
"We are … enacting all those return-to-office policies without properly giving thoughts about how teleworking can be a part of travel demand management," said Ahsan Habib, a Dalhousie University professor who studies transportation and travel behaviour.
Other provinces like Ontario and British Columbia have kept some form of hybrid work arrangement for their public servants. HRM has maintained a flexible work program for eligible employees since 2021.
A growing city also means more construction, which Connors pointed to as another cause of congestion.
The TomTom data also shows Halifax now has more days with the worst-case congestion.
Between August and October in 2019, just six days had an average congestion level between 41 and 50 per cent.
That ballooned to 28 days during those three months in 2024, meaning more days like Oct. 30, when three collisions during the morning rush hour ground Halifax to a halt.
About three-quarters of the time in Halifax, people are using cars to get where they need to go, Habib said. He called that an "unhealthy" proportion.
Investments in public transportation have also not kept up with Halifax's growth, Habib said.
"We do not see our transit travel time is competitive" with cars, he said.
"If they're not competitive … people will not take public transit."
It's been more than four years since HRM council endorsed two rapid transit projects aimed at keeping Haligonians moving efficiently. The bus project would include four routes operating at 10-minute intervals with dedicated bus lanes in some areas.
But progress has stalled because the provincial and federal governments have not announced any funding for it. Without that money, the city can't move forward with rapid bus transit.
In March, the provincial and federal governments did announce funding for a new Bedford commuter ferry, which is part of the rapid transit plan.
"We're kind of reaching a tipping point where … rapid transit, we think, is really going to be necessary to keep a city of our size moving with the amount of growth that we're seeing," said Connors, the HRM transportation planning manager.
Adjusting transit schedules to match the new traffic patterns could help as well, Habib said.
"We … shouldn't run each day a similar kind of transit schedules because we know [the] patterns" vary.
And as bad as things are with traffic in Halifax, Habib rates the current level of congestion as "moderate."
With population growth and without rapid transit, if everyone who was working from home ended up back on the road, Habib said that would take congestion to "severe" levels.
"There is a housing crisis right now everybody is talking about, but at some point maybe we'll start talking about [a] mobility crisis because we don't have enough ways to move around."
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With files from Haley Ryan and Shaina Luck
