By TOM PETERS
March 6, 2009
The Nova Scotia government has decided against pursuing a major gateway project because of high costs. Premier Rodney MacDonald had included the development of the CN rail cut into an integrated transportation corridor from the Halterm container terminal in the south end of Halifax to a major highway out of the city.
The premier had cited the project as one of his Nova Scotia gateway initiatives, but its cost has been pegged at more than $220 million, according to recently completed in-depth study.
Peter MacKay, minister responsible for the Atlantic Gateway initiative, had also thrown his support behind the idea.
One of the objectives of turning the rail cut into a more complex corridor was to get trucks that move to and from the Halterm terminal out of downtown Halifax.
“Using the existing corridor for commercial vehicles and public transit has been studied at a high level, but this was the first detailed study that looked at all aspects and provided a full costing of the project,” said Brooke Taylor, the province’s minister of transportation and infrastructure renewal. “This report gave us the valuable information needed to make the right decision about this proposal. We will continue to identify opportunities to improve the competitiveness of our province’s assets with Nova Scotia’s gateway partners.”
David Oxner, director of the province’s Atlantic Gateway initiative, said the study was done “hoping the benefits would be there to combine rail and truck traffic back and forth to Halterm, but the detailed study showed it wasn’t cost beneficial from a gateway perspective, and from that perspective it’s a disappointment,” he said, adding that it is only one of a number of gateway projects under consideration.
Peter Nelson, executive director of the Atlantic Provinces Trucking Association, which has a number of member companies that haul container cargo to and from Halterm, said the decision not to proceed is understandable.
He said it would be difficult to determine if using the corridor would have been more efficient for the trucking industry.
“We don’t really know because the project showed up on the radar screen so quickly and now it died just as quickly, so there was not a lot of time to spend in terms of impact on the industry,” he said.
The Halifax Port Authority said in a statement that the idea of the integrated transportation corridor was certainly worth a full study and that such port corridors do exist in other jurisdictions.
“The port appreciates having a complete review of the concept by the province and will continue working with government and the port community to evaluate other ideas to ensure our port’s competiveness and improve the efficiency of our transportation system,” said port authority spokeswoman Michele Peveril.
The study, prepared by McCormick Rankin Corporation at a cost of $289,000, noted in the feasibility of the project two key “showstopper” risk factors – a lack of political will at the municipal level and a change in political will at the provincial level.
It also noted in its benefit/cost analysis that “from a gateway perspective alone, the quantifiable benefits associated with the ITC (integrated transportation corridor) are significantly lower than the costs.”
Several municipal politicians in Halifax have been skeptical of the project for quite some time. There had been previous studies done in varying detail on using the rail cut for trucks as well as train, with the latest, about three years ago, indicating a cost of about $80 million. The consultants on that study indicated the benefits that would be derived weren’t worth the expenditure.