03/20/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18Ut9w2RHg/
The Nova Scotia Government released a request for proposals Monday seeking a consultant to assess potential environmental impacts from a five-kilometre 4-lane highway to link Hammonds Plains Road to Highway 101, and pass directly through sensitive lands and waters just west of Sandy Lake. Given the extreme shortcomings of the Stantec Environmental Studies about the Sandy Lake housing SPA, it is hard to have faith that these studies will be any different.
Existing studies that were ignored, not included, in the Stantec Report already show that the development and highway will not only increase damage to Sandy Lake Park and the Sackville River. But also, more roads means more traffic according to the ‘Law of Induced Demand’. That is from long-known research that adding lanes and roads doesn't reduce traffic, it just causes people to drive more. Traffic eventually returns to what it was, or worse.
This road was a sudden election promise in October 2024 to get votes from those of us who suffer from road congestion on Hammonds Plains Road. New road announcements are often election promises based on the knowledge that most voters don’t know about the Law of Induced Demand, otherwise known as “Build it and they (more cars) will come”.
With no government transparency, we can’t see the government’s studies justifying this choice of location. We have seen no evidence that this road will actually do much more than get PC votes and get road access to more of the undeveloped land west of Sandy Lake so that even more houses can be built.
This supports the government’s ‘housing at all costs’ goals. – further risking the park’s and Sackville River’s assets. “There is so much ‘unused land’ there! Let’s fill it up with houses!”
And we still hear the claims from PC MLAs asserting, “Don’t worry, we know how to build large numbers of homes and tall apartment buildings plus a 4-lane highway beside Sandy Lake without harming the lakes, rivers, and park.” Really.
That is just another way of saying “Our blinders are firmly on. We only want houses.”
According to CityLab: “Induced demand is a catch-all term used for a variety of interconnected effects that cause new roads to quickly fill to capacity. In rapidly growing areas where roads were not designed for the current population, there may be significant latent demand for new road capacity, which causes a flood of new drivers to immediately take to the freeway once the new lanes are open, quickly congesting them again.”
We can put housing elsewhere. Please speak up loudly for Sandy Lake Park and the Sackville River. They have lived for millennia but are now at serious and imminent risk from a “clinical” government’s cold decisions.
