The Halifax Cycling Coalition has been pushing the Provincial Government to reform the Nova Scotia Motor Vehicle Act (MVA) along with our partners Bicycle Nova Scotia, the Ecology Action Centre, the Atlantic Active Alliance, and Walk N’ Roll Halifax. Our objectives are as follows:
Nova Scotia’s Motor Vehicle Act was last re-written in the 1920’s, and there were many changes to various sections since then. This resulted in a confusing piece of legislation that did not provide protection for vulnerable road users (ie: non-motorized road users, such as people walking, cycling, and rolling). In 2018 the Nova Scotia Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal began work on updating the MVA, now called the Traffic Safety Act (TSA). The new Traffic Safety Act has been fully re-written. The Act itself is a framework piece of legislation. The details will be found in the regulations connected to the TSA. The regulations are easier to change than the Act itself, making the laws more adaptable to new technologies and the changing needs of road users. Adaptability is important because the way that people travel is adapting all the time.
We have been actively working on reforming the Motor Vehicle Act since 2016. You will find a timeline of the process with more details below. Read on to learn where we are currently in the process.
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We co-hosted a community engagement session in January 2016. At the engagement session, we asked for the public’s input about changing the MVA to make it safer for people walking and wheeling (wheeling = cycling, skateboarding, using a wheelchair, using a mobility device, rollerblading, etc). There were 80 participants who came to the in-person event, and another 148 participants in our online survey. After gathering public feedback and doing our own policy research and analysis, we came up with a list of recommendations, which we shared with the provincial Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal.
The community’s top priorities from the session included: prohibit the right hook (the right hook is when a person cycling is going straight on the right side of a vehicle and a person driving turns right and hits the person cycling), prohibit dooring (dooring is when someone opens a car door into the path of a person riding a bike), allow bikes to ride through a crosswalk, passing on the right clarification, and allow a municipality to post speed limits below 50km/hour.
The coalition of groups followed up by presenting all 37 of the community recommendations to the province’s Road Safety Advisory Committee and the Deputy Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal.
Thanks to the support of our members, we were able to work on a formal process of realizing these important policy changes.
Our committee drafted a policy for the following MVA amendments based on the 2016 engagement session:
Addressing the systemic problems in the MVA can be a tedious process, but long-term will have a big impact on making the roads safer for people who cycle and shifting the culture of how we use streets.
The Nova Scotia Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal recognized the need for the MVA to be revamped. In the spring of 2018 they launched a public engagement process to collect feedback on how Nova Scotians would like to see the Act improved. The new Act will be called the Traffic Safety Act. To learn more about the province’s process, visit their website here.
In January 2017, our groups established an Active Transportation Subcommittee of the Road Safety Advisory Committee (we know, it’s a mouthful!) to work on the TSA. We began working through the formal process of drafting the new TSA with the province, Halifax Regional Municipality, police, and other stakeholders. The Act itself is a framework piece of legislation, which was introduced as Bill 80 in 2018. The details about how people can use public streets will be found in the regulations connected to the TSA. The province began seeking public input on the regulations in 2020. Our stakeholder groups have re-engaged the public to inform our feedback on the regulations and encourage others to submit their own feedback.
In December 2020 the Halifax Cycling Coalition, along with our partners Bicycle Nova Scotia, the Ecology Action Centre, the Atlantic Active Alliance, and Walk N’ Roll Halifax hosted two public engagement sessions to gather feedback about the TSA regulations that pertain to rules of the road. Several of our recommendations have been addressed in the new TSA regulations, several have not, and there are some things we still have questions about. You can read the draft Rules of the Road Regulations here. Please see below for an overview of what’s been included, what hasn’t, and what we are asking the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal for more information about.
We are working to summarize participant feedback from the public engagement sessions we held in December 2020. With our partners, we will then develop written feedback for the Nova Scotia Department of Infrastructure Renewal about the Using the Road Regulations. We encourage you to submit your own feedback to the province about the TSA Rules of the Road to tsa@novascotia.ca. Please cc us (contact@cyclehalifax.ca) on your e-mails so we can keep track of feedback being submitted. You can also cc your local MLA to let them know your concerns. You can look up your MLA and their contact information on the Province’s website.
The deadline to submit feedback has been extended to Friday, January 22, 2021.
Public support helps these amendments become enacted. Please take a moment to submit your feedback.
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