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How are car parking, disease care and the climate crisis related? My wife and I tried to get out of Halifax late Friday afternoon. It took an hour on Bayers Road to get three kilometres — no crashes and fine weather. Most vehicles had single occupants who probably sit in traffic like that 10 times per week. Many were SUVs. Probably none of them were electric.

Meanwhile, there is a publicly funded, $2-billion reactive disease-care project at the QEII Health Sciences Centre that was quietly created. It seems the project planners are ignorant of the complex micro and macro ecosystems around it. The recently revealed proposal to blast and jackhammer down into bedrock and build up and out for a parking garage on the Halifax Commons is a very sad irony of the disease care industrial complex metastasizing into the central green space that cares for our health.

MLA Labi Kousolis said, “for me, hospitals trump everything.” Interesting that he evoked U.S. President Donald Trump, and sad that he is trapped in society’s narrative that we should ignore all sense and pour resources into the losing battle of acute care, instead of acknowledging and managing the parts of society that are making us sick in the first place.

The climate crisis requires everything we do and take for granted to be looked at and rethought. In this case, how can hospital employees get to/from work? Shift changes occur at a similar time for many. How about peripherally located parking and pick-up points with frequent, rapid mini-buses? Mandatory carpooling? More active transport lanes? Many patients from out of Halifax detest city driving — they can use the same lots just outside the city and rapid transport to clinic sites. In fact, we should be using far more virtual telemedicine for out-of-town patient visits that eliminates driving, time and cost away from home.

A massive parking mausoleum is a solution from 20 years ago for societal needs 20-50 years in the future. Current trends are less car ownership, more ride sharing, and near future self-driving vehicles. Furthermore, the greenhouse gases produced by the massive trucking, construction and cement use of the project have undoubtedly been left out of the total equation. In 2020, why are those externalities not included?

We are truly a doomed dinosaur species if our status quo behaviours are not profoundly challenged. Our vehicle use and parking entitlements are one critical example. If the project proceeds as planned, the Commons, our future health, and our hope to stop the climate crisis will be the losers.

Dr. John Ross, Halifax