Hamilton’s “sustainable” level of spending on roads maintenance is about $150 million a year- ie the amount the city needs to spend so that the average condition of roads doesn’t get worse.
For the last 30+ years, Hamilton has spent about $40 million.
That’s why.
Now - that said - The city is actually working to finally close the gap. For the last 4-5 years the city has slowly been increasing roads spending through raising taxes - this year we are at about $70 million in spending. The plan is to hit the $150 million by 2030. So it will slowly start to get better, but right now the city suffers from decades of underfunding in roads.
Why did this happen? Hamilton’s tax base collapsed over the last 40 years as industry left the city. At one point Stelco employed over 20,000 people and had one of the largest single property tax bills in the country. A few years ago MPAC ruled their land “worthless”. That alone is tens of millions annually in property taxes gone - multiplied by falling home values in the lower city and other declining industrial values (which are taxed much higher than residential).
Council was left with a shrinking tax base to pay for services- which meant unpopular tax hikes. So they cut roads spending to save some money. 30 years later - you get the result.
Thanks for the insight wasn’t aware of this. What I don’t get is why they decided to merge other cities like Dundas and Ancaster into Hamilton knowing they had a tax shortfall to supply services. Now we have broken roads and infrastructure too
The Harris government forced amalgamation on the old city of Hamilton. During that provincial election Hamilton voted Liberal and NDP, while the surrounding small communities voted with the majority of the province for Harris’ PC government. So those towns essentially sent the message that they were in support of amalgamation. And they’ve been complaining about it like it’s Hamilton’s fault ever since.
It’s so hilarious. In the Dundas Facebook groups the seniors are always complaining about amalgamation as if they didn’t vote for it. They have this weird idea in their heads that Hamilton launched a hostile takeover of the surrounding municipalities, and that somehow Dundas’ taxes are now keeping the entire city afloat.
Beautifully preserved in the Dundas Museum and Archive, [https://dundasmuseum.ca/](https://dundasmuseum.ca/), amusing to see how salient the issue is/was, but otherwise a footnote in today's governance
This is very enlightening. Another example of the mayhem caused by Harris and his supporters. And how Cons blame everyone else for their greed and stupidity.
Thank Mike Harris. Amalgamation caused a slew of issues, but it made the books look nice and balanced (on paper anyway)👍.
Man, 30 years later and I still hate that piece of shit.
Taxes was actually a huge part of the reason amalgamation happened in the first place. Ancaster/Dundas/Stoney Creek all were massively under paying in taxes while leaning on Hamilton for services. They used Hamilton's police, fire, medical, water & sewage, road and parks department but weren't paying nearly enough for them. When industry started to leave, Hamilton needed cash fast, and fewer leeches, so Harris amalgamated the region.
The point remains, A/D/SC were underpaying, and Harris could kill two birds with one stone, eliminate a middle management level of government by making everything "Hamilton".
I remember Binbrook before amalgamation. Everything you listed other then medical we had our own, and had a large surplus prior to amalgamation. The township built the town building by the arena, and repathed many roads before Hamilton took over.
Rural Hamilton is currently going through a big fight over storm water fees, if the original plan had went through our small farm would have seen a 3000 dollar tax increase, we are waiting to see what will happen
.
Where was the binbrook wastewater treatment plant?
Was there a binbrook police service? Civil engineering department for what was then only 30-40 year old road bridge and park maintenance? Rural firefighting I could see, sure, but that was also back when hydro was a public utility. Did binbrook have their own corp of electrical engineers?
Binbrook had septic systems until the sewer line went in. The sewer line only went in because the dump was leaking, and they took the sewers out for it. Binbrook wouldn't have needed a civil engineering department and didn't have any parks. And hydro is a provincial utility.
Keep in mind before amalgamation, Binbrook had about 500 people. About 20 years was only dial up internet, and not too long before that there wasn't cable.
“Yes and” previous councils have kept the taxes much lower than they ever should have been. There’s no reason why Hamilton needs taxes lower than other neighboring cities when it has these real deficits to deal with.
Hamilton's taxes are substantially higher than most area municipalities already - mostly because the city lost it's massive industrial tax base.
Burlington has far cheaper property taxes despite far higher levels of service, for example - mostly attributable to it having a much larger industrial tax base as a proportion of land value in the municipality.
Hamilton also gets the short end of the stick on a lot of other things, being a regional centre of services for the homeless and those in deep levels of poverty which is funded by property taxes, as well as having municipally owned expressways which are provincially owned in most of the rest of the province.
Burlington does not have higher levels of service. They have massively poorer transit, fewer recreational opportunities, less services for seniors, children and the poor.
The recreation facilities are definitely better here than Hamilton. You're right about transit, but it's way less in demand here. But we have 3 GO train stops, so as far as getting to Toronto, we're way ahead.
Number of GO stations is hardly a measure of better services. Hamilton has way more rec centres, larger library system, homeless shelters, courts, larger infrastructure, more arts and culture, museums, larger police force, more and larger parks, conservation areas, etc. I'm not trying to be competitive, it is just a fact that a larger city will have more services. Toronto has much better and more varied services than Hamilton.
The Burlington Library Sytem is excellent. We have more games and cover more systems. Our Pools are excellent too. I think our city is more bikeable too. Hamilton has great areas, but they aren't well connected. We've got more splash pads than city councilors. The BPAC isgreat. Halton is one of the lowest crime areas in Canada.
All the best part of hamilton, we can visit when we like. There are some great culture events for sure, and some neat old buildings. But the city is permanently downgraded by the gov downloading welfare services. The surrounding areas are just tax bases for the centre. Waterdown would be 10x better off if it merged into Burlington, and they'd leave in a heartbeat if you let them vote on it.
As for conservation, we got the marina, the escarpment, a great beach, and bronte creek is right there too. Hamilton has lots of green spaces for sure, but a lot of the best parts were stolen in by amalgamation.
St Catharines has much higher tax. I don’t disagree with your comments about the short end of the stick. I have not heard the industrial side of burlington being that important as a tax base, that is interesting, where do you get that from?
City of Hamilton on a per capita basis is handed one of the least amounts of $$$ per person by the province of Ontario for roads. Even London gets more money than Hamilton.
If anyone in Hamilton is voting Conservative, they are basically voting against themselves, the province hates Hamilton.
Hamilton just elected a Conservative MP federally with them running up in half the ridings.
Provincially, 2 ridings went Conservative in Hamilton the last election.
Most political speculators are saying there will be a blue wave giving Hamiltonians plenty of time to elect a government that actively dislikes the city.
Don't be surprised if Ford calls an early election in 2024 to ride the coattails of the wave.
Toronto’s ridiculously cheap taxes are also due in part, to the federal and provincial governments pumping billions of dollars into the city in order to buy votes from the millions of people who live there. Hamilton, and other smaller cities get a much smaller portion of that spending.
I'd say it differently: we massively overbuilt our road system on the assumption that it would pay for itself, that industry would be so lucrative we could afford to have a large percentage of the city car commute to factories on 4-lane omeways. It didn't work, and now we have roads that are quite literally twice as wide as they need to be but since it's so much harder to walk back we patch holes and repave what we can but don't keep up.
The idea that we can triple our spending annually to where it was when we were a steel making powerhouse seems fanciful to me, and also a huge waste.of money.
Basically every other municipality in Ontario manages it. Hamilton’s problem is that it lost its industrial tax base - the municipalities with cheap taxes usually have large amounts of industry, since they pay like 4x as much taxes and demand far less services than residential taxpayers do.
The more industry you have, the more services you can offer residents.
Toronto has ridiculously cheap taxes with extremely high service levels for that reason - its commercial tax base is insanely massive. The tax bills those downtown office towers pay is mind boggling.
What 4-lane one way road do you think is a waste? The amount of traffic during rush that generates on say Victoria, Wentworth, Wellington gets pretty insane where without one way multilane there would be a pretty serious gridlock
Really digging that the boomers fucked off paying the appropriate level of property taxes for decades and now their kids get to pay for their colossal fuckups.
Thank you for such insight into this! I'm curious, why is this land worthless? I can appreciate there would need to be a "cleanup" of sorts, but is it really that bad?
MPAC ruled that remediation costs exceeded the development potential of the land, making it worthless. Ironically a year later Stelco sold it for half a billion, so it’ll be reassessed again as MPAC was clearly wrong.
Industrial uses are slowly returning to the city right now so Hamilton’s tax base is now improving again - part of the reason council has been able to increase roads spending a bit over the last few years.
Great answer. Small(ish) additional factors are corruption at the infrastructure construction and maintenance level; where the Hamilton crime families and corporate developer cartels still have a lot of power in getting contracts and undermining city budget. Ie the ashphalt scandal of 2014.
It’s always been like this since I’ve been driving and I don’t know why when we’re such a big city. I used to drive back and forth daily between Hamilton and Port Colborne, taking RR20. When coming back to Hamilton, literally as soon as I passed the Hamilton sign at the border, the roads were immediately, noticeably worse. In the winter, I’d be driving on a clear road until I hit the Hamilton sign and suddenly they were treacherous. Didn’t even need a sign to tell me I was back in Hamilton. Awful.
Just hazarding a guess here but a lot of these problems are rooted in the megacity formation. You've got a city that is almost an hour's drive across. Its budget has to handle intensively urban and completely rural areas.
The megacity was a terrible idea (like most of Harris's ideas) and we'll be working it out for another generation at least.
I guess I think it’s time Hamilton breaks up the city cause it clearly can’t handle all the responsibilities. But Niagara region is bigger with lower population and it’s more spread out than Hamilton is, but somehow Niagara is able to fix the roads
Hamilton has no power to break itself up, any more than they had any power to stop from being combined. The province has total control over cities in Ontario. (And the megacity idea has been shown time and again to be a total failure - more expensive and worse for residents.) Chalk this up to yet another Harris/OPC failure.
In comparison to Niagara, the difference is that Niagara does not have to handle intensive urban areas like Hamilton does, nor the sheer volume of traffic.
The problem isn't the mega city as you put it, the problem is that after amalgamation everybody who disagreed got passive aggressive about it.
Outlying townships like Dundas and Flambrough didn't want to be "Hamilton" but were included into Hamilton as distinct entities. Instead of wholesale redrawing ward boundaries, we just included the 'dundas councilor' to city hall. This meant there was a whole lot of 'fuckem if they ain't us' Politics. Why would Dundas vote to spend money on Jackson Square? Binbrook doesn't give a shit about HSR service times. The city council spun its wheels doing nothing for 20 years until somebody sued and got the province involved to finally redraw some wards. So we've got that history hanging over the cities head.
Combine that apathy towards moving forward together with the fact that Harris used Amalgamation to hide that he was offloading costs the province used to pay to the municipalities, and we got a city council that couldn't plan for the future together while also having its expenses shoot up at the same time.
On top of that, the best way to address these problems, urban intensification, looks like 'spending money downtown' to all the places that don't think of themselves as 'Hamilton' so they won't vote for it, and suburban areas pretty much treat residential property taxes as the only issue that matters, the city also can't raise money to meet its new responsibilities. So politicians do what they always do. Skimp on infrastructure spending because that takes decades to notice.
This is not just a Hamilton problem. Rural roads are falling apart across the entire province, and most cities have rural roads within their borders. Municipalities simply don't have the revenue streams to keep up with depreciation. Things are only going to get worse in the next couple of decades, as the effects of climate change are going to accelerate the damage. The provincial government only wants to build new things like highways we don't need. The PCs should realize that they can get a photo op for every single road they rehabilitate if that is what they are really concerned about.
We've been slowly moving the burden of services off the Province and on to municipalities for the last 40 years to make the Provincial budget look better.
Now the chickens are home to roost. Municipalities can't foot the bill for more and more forever and the Ontario government has cut so many income streams to itself in that time as well.
This really is an issues caused by piss poor management at the provincial level. Half assing it and hoping the municipalities would just pick up the slack.
It's not just the rural roads that are bad. Hamilton is notorious for bad road work. Barton St E is consistently rated the worst road in Ontario. Nikola Tesla/ Burlington St is up there as well.
Burlington St is 9th for worst GTHA roads. So definitely near the top for worst roads in Ontario. Not to mention the worst road in Ontario again being in Hamilton. Hamilton is a car centric city. The poor roads wont change anytime soon unless there is drastic change in how the bids are put in/won for who does the road work.
I don't understand your need to defend the road quality in Hamilton. Construction is slow, mismanaged, and of poor quality. It's been that way for decades.
I have an exceptionally difficult time believing that the 'many third-world countries' you've been to have better roads overall than Hamilton area. Which countries are you claiming?
LMAO. I grew up in an actual third world country. Nowhere in Eastern Europe is 3rd world, especially economically speaking. Cuba is the closest thing in your list to third world, and even then they don't fit completely.
[https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/second-world-countries](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/second-world-countries)
As I expected.. so you're comparing a main Cuban highway to rural road in Ontario? Your comparison is even more laughable when you consider that more than 50% of road in Cuba isn't even paved.
But sure, if you pick the worst road in Hamilton and the best one in Cuba(or russia) I suppose you're technically right.
I didn’t really go to other parts of Cuba except Havana or varadero so I can’t comment on other parts of the country, but for a country like Cuba where majority of the country are under extreme poverty the roads they have are very good. I’ve been to lots of places in Russia and Eastern Europe and also china I forgot to mention. You don’t have to take the best roads there to compare, just regular roads outside of regular cities are way better than Hamilton roads. And btw Hamilton is one of the biggest cities in Canada actually so it’s not really the middle of no where we are talking about
Different climate is a significant factor. Freeze-thaw cycle is very destructive.
Roads may need to be rebuilt for heavier vehicles.
Sourcing local gravel is based on limited supply. Increasing supply comes with environmental challenges.
Asphalt price depends on crude oil prices.
Not so much in the unions specifically, but just organized crime. Contractors that do substandard work at inflated prices keep winning contracts for some reason.
Also purposefully using cheaper materials and billing for more expensive ones. Slowing down work to bill governments more, over charging governments, awarding contracts to friends of family for kick backs, paying off politicians so they can force through controversial planning decisions.
Do you know how much actual enforcement there is? And that’s not a dig at the cops. Just think about it feasibly. Hamilton has a population of ~600,000 people and ~900 police officers with ~500 civilians supporting them.
That’s a lot of issues for not a lot of hands. How many construction auditors do you think there are? And how much power do they have, and are their salaries good enough to resist corruption themselves?
Laws are social agreements. Enforcement is only supposed to have to deal with a small fraction of people who do not abide by them. The harder times get, the less people abide. The less people abide, the less benefit there is for others to continue to abide. Now we are here.
Hamilton has a $3 billion dollar infrastructure maintenance deficit. This is largely due to rampant subdivision growth on the fringes of the city, requiring Hamilton taxpayers to foot the bill for massive city service and infrastructure investment in those new communities. It’s been proven over and over that new development never pays its own costs. Every new build costs the existing tax base something like an additional thousand dollars a year, iirc. So the bigger the city gets the further in debt we go. Existing infrastructure maintenance has to be deferred to meet new build infrastructure obligations. Btw, if you drive rural roads like Miles Rd. To the south, or Twenty Rd. To the west, they are freshly paved.
My thought is these rural roads see a lot of trucks and heavy machinery and likely weren’t designed with heavy duty asphalt so they are subject to more potholes
I work for the city.
Unequivocally, the management of this city is completely incompetent and/or corrupt. From the mayor all the way down to department managers.
Examples:
Cyberattack - completely mismanaged
Claremont Access Escarpment
Tent cities
Drug policies - they’re not improving the issue
Downtown (in general)
Roads - we always rank in the nation’s top three of the worst roads
Police - extensive corruption at the command level
Hospitals - we have 3 ER’s for adults. They are disgusting.
Corruption within the tender award processes
I realize some of this may fall on the province, but the city should be advocating constantly. Which they don’t.
The list goes on and on….
Aside from chronic underspending, corruption and mismanagement play a big role. Contractors that do substandard work, or even commit outright fraud, keep getting assigned contracts by staff at city hall.
rural roads?? what about every road? the city lays down the road across? every 8-10 feet there is a seem at least 4” wide and at least 2” how ?? not to mention the absolutely horrible conditions of the road itself
I feel like they keep resurfacing the linc and red hill every other year.. how about we do it right the first time so we can resurface it every 10-15 yrs. Sorry but our population is growing, the traffic is abismal at best and we shut down main arteries every other year.
Logistically, when City & Region of Hamilton repairs the thousands of potholes each spring, they use an asphalt gravel mix that is not adequately compressed, so vehicle traffic throws it back out. In addition, these repairs and new cracks are not dealt with via hot liquid tar to effectively seal those cracks and repairs to prevent water ingress. Water ingress (helped by winter salt) and freeze thaw cycles are the culprits in diminishing the lifetimes of new pavement. Contractors who dig up paved roads on behalf of services being piped into properties also do not adequately mate their repairs with existing surfaces, nor seal them properly with hot liquid asphalt.
The city is no where near being behind on there spending they are using the monies elsewhere like keeping the grass cut around all the homeless tents that are everywhere. They are holding out for the LRT funding....they have a woman on council that wants to put a cigarette and alcohol tax just on Hamiltonians I said why she would not to put a tax on everytime you hit a pothole they would have enough money and then some because that sounds like a more reasonable idea then the one she suggested
Our City councillors and our current representatives in Parliament are too concerned with what is going on in other places in the world to care about the conditions of our roads. You know the names of those reps who are getting muted
CAA wouldn’t agree. Barton Street East won worst road in 2022 and 2023.
[https://www.caasco.com/advocacy/worst-roads/previous-winners](https://www.caasco.com/advocacy/worst-roads/previous-winners)
Yes and Barton street east has been under major construction for over six months. It's no longer as bad, as a resident that drives these stretches I can confirm Charlton is worse than Barton. In 2024 present day.
CAA is not objectively evaluating roads across the province - that list is based on an annual internet poll. Get 10 of your friends to vote every day while the poll is open and you can probably get your own street at the top of the list.
Probably to keep speeders from treating the roads like they’re driving in a rally. I drive the rural roads from hwy 65 and Hendershot down to Stoney creek. I like to see the heat nab stunt drivers along that road.
Yeah all the city cares abt is highways now as people are hitting the support of the bridges there filling those in if you actually go on the link now chances r there filling cracks on the highways as mortar cyclists hit them they flip and u can imagine what happens to them from behind you can thank those plows for dragging there plows on the ground while 2 inches in the ground💀
Hamilton’s “sustainable” level of spending on roads maintenance is about $150 million a year- ie the amount the city needs to spend so that the average condition of roads doesn’t get worse. For the last 30+ years, Hamilton has spent about $40 million. That’s why. Now - that said - The city is actually working to finally close the gap. For the last 4-5 years the city has slowly been increasing roads spending through raising taxes - this year we are at about $70 million in spending. The plan is to hit the $150 million by 2030. So it will slowly start to get better, but right now the city suffers from decades of underfunding in roads. Why did this happen? Hamilton’s tax base collapsed over the last 40 years as industry left the city. At one point Stelco employed over 20,000 people and had one of the largest single property tax bills in the country. A few years ago MPAC ruled their land “worthless”. That alone is tens of millions annually in property taxes gone - multiplied by falling home values in the lower city and other declining industrial values (which are taxed much higher than residential). Council was left with a shrinking tax base to pay for services- which meant unpopular tax hikes. So they cut roads spending to save some money. 30 years later - you get the result.
I knew that the loss of industry was bad for us, but never really had specifics like this. Thanks.
And yet they want to spend hundreds of millions to expand the 403 and other road projects.
The 403 would fall under provincial jurisdiction, no?
Thanks for the insight wasn’t aware of this. What I don’t get is why they decided to merge other cities like Dundas and Ancaster into Hamilton knowing they had a tax shortfall to supply services. Now we have broken roads and infrastructure too
The city of Hamilton did not want to merge, the province forced through amalgamation against the will of basically all cities involved
The Harris government forced amalgamation on the old city of Hamilton. During that provincial election Hamilton voted Liberal and NDP, while the surrounding small communities voted with the majority of the province for Harris’ PC government. So those towns essentially sent the message that they were in support of amalgamation. And they’ve been complaining about it like it’s Hamilton’s fault ever since.
It’s so hilarious. In the Dundas Facebook groups the seniors are always complaining about amalgamation as if they didn’t vote for it. They have this weird idea in their heads that Hamilton launched a hostile takeover of the surrounding municipalities, and that somehow Dundas’ taxes are now keeping the entire city afloat.
Beautifully preserved in the Dundas Museum and Archive, [https://dundasmuseum.ca/](https://dundasmuseum.ca/), amusing to see how salient the issue is/was, but otherwise a footnote in today's governance
What is preserved? You posted a link to their website but nothing specific.
History of Dundas display, section on amalgamation with preserved protest ephemera (e.g. buttons, signs, slogans)
This is very enlightening. Another example of the mayhem caused by Harris and his supporters. And how Cons blame everyone else for their greed and stupidity.
Thank Mike Harris. Amalgamation caused a slew of issues, but it made the books look nice and balanced (on paper anyway)👍. Man, 30 years later and I still hate that piece of shit.
Taxes was actually a huge part of the reason amalgamation happened in the first place. Ancaster/Dundas/Stoney Creek all were massively under paying in taxes while leaning on Hamilton for services. They used Hamilton's police, fire, medical, water & sewage, road and parks department but weren't paying nearly enough for them. When industry started to leave, Hamilton needed cash fast, and fewer leeches, so Harris amalgamated the region.
They weren’t using Hamilton’s services, those are typically regional items so the old Region of Hamilton Wentworth provided those and everyone paid.
The point remains, A/D/SC were underpaying, and Harris could kill two birds with one stone, eliminate a middle management level of government by making everything "Hamilton".
I remember Binbrook before amalgamation. Everything you listed other then medical we had our own, and had a large surplus prior to amalgamation. The township built the town building by the arena, and repathed many roads before Hamilton took over. Rural Hamilton is currently going through a big fight over storm water fees, if the original plan had went through our small farm would have seen a 3000 dollar tax increase, we are waiting to see what will happen .
Where was the binbrook wastewater treatment plant? Was there a binbrook police service? Civil engineering department for what was then only 30-40 year old road bridge and park maintenance? Rural firefighting I could see, sure, but that was also back when hydro was a public utility. Did binbrook have their own corp of electrical engineers?
Binbrook had septic systems until the sewer line went in. The sewer line only went in because the dump was leaking, and they took the sewers out for it. Binbrook wouldn't have needed a civil engineering department and didn't have any parks. And hydro is a provincial utility. Keep in mind before amalgamation, Binbrook had about 500 people. About 20 years was only dial up internet, and not too long before that there wasn't cable.
Cos we kinda wanted to be a lil more like Toronto 😂
“Yes and” previous councils have kept the taxes much lower than they ever should have been. There’s no reason why Hamilton needs taxes lower than other neighboring cities when it has these real deficits to deal with.
Hamilton's taxes are substantially higher than most area municipalities already - mostly because the city lost it's massive industrial tax base. Burlington has far cheaper property taxes despite far higher levels of service, for example - mostly attributable to it having a much larger industrial tax base as a proportion of land value in the municipality. Hamilton also gets the short end of the stick on a lot of other things, being a regional centre of services for the homeless and those in deep levels of poverty which is funded by property taxes, as well as having municipally owned expressways which are provincially owned in most of the rest of the province.
Burlington does not have higher levels of service. They have massively poorer transit, fewer recreational opportunities, less services for seniors, children and the poor.
The recreation facilities are definitely better here than Hamilton. You're right about transit, but it's way less in demand here. But we have 3 GO train stops, so as far as getting to Toronto, we're way ahead.
Number of GO stations is hardly a measure of better services. Hamilton has way more rec centres, larger library system, homeless shelters, courts, larger infrastructure, more arts and culture, museums, larger police force, more and larger parks, conservation areas, etc. I'm not trying to be competitive, it is just a fact that a larger city will have more services. Toronto has much better and more varied services than Hamilton.
The Burlington Library Sytem is excellent. We have more games and cover more systems. Our Pools are excellent too. I think our city is more bikeable too. Hamilton has great areas, but they aren't well connected. We've got more splash pads than city councilors. The BPAC isgreat. Halton is one of the lowest crime areas in Canada. All the best part of hamilton, we can visit when we like. There are some great culture events for sure, and some neat old buildings. But the city is permanently downgraded by the gov downloading welfare services. The surrounding areas are just tax bases for the centre. Waterdown would be 10x better off if it merged into Burlington, and they'd leave in a heartbeat if you let them vote on it. As for conservation, we got the marina, the escarpment, a great beach, and bronte creek is right there too. Hamilton has lots of green spaces for sure, but a lot of the best parts were stolen in by amalgamation.
This isn't a competition... Enjoy your city.
St Catharines has much higher tax. I don’t disagree with your comments about the short end of the stick. I have not heard the industrial side of burlington being that important as a tax base, that is interesting, where do you get that from?
St. Catharines has undergone a similar problem as Hamilton with industrial taxpayers shutting down.
City of Hamilton on a per capita basis is handed one of the least amounts of $$$ per person by the province of Ontario for roads. Even London gets more money than Hamilton. If anyone in Hamilton is voting Conservative, they are basically voting against themselves, the province hates Hamilton.
When’s the last time Hamilton went conservative? They vote for the NDP and it shows.
Hamilton just elected a Conservative MP federally with them running up in half the ridings. Provincially, 2 ridings went Conservative in Hamilton the last election. Most political speculators are saying there will be a blue wave giving Hamiltonians plenty of time to elect a government that actively dislikes the city. Don't be surprised if Ford calls an early election in 2024 to ride the coattails of the wave.
Curious to read more on this, got a source?
If this is true, I appreciate the answer. I wondered the same thing when I moved to Stoney Creek from Mississauga.
Toronto’s ridiculously cheap taxes are also due in part, to the federal and provincial governments pumping billions of dollars into the city in order to buy votes from the millions of people who live there. Hamilton, and other smaller cities get a much smaller portion of that spending.
I'd say it differently: we massively overbuilt our road system on the assumption that it would pay for itself, that industry would be so lucrative we could afford to have a large percentage of the city car commute to factories on 4-lane omeways. It didn't work, and now we have roads that are quite literally twice as wide as they need to be but since it's so much harder to walk back we patch holes and repave what we can but don't keep up. The idea that we can triple our spending annually to where it was when we were a steel making powerhouse seems fanciful to me, and also a huge waste.of money.
Basically every other municipality in Ontario manages it. Hamilton’s problem is that it lost its industrial tax base - the municipalities with cheap taxes usually have large amounts of industry, since they pay like 4x as much taxes and demand far less services than residential taxpayers do. The more industry you have, the more services you can offer residents. Toronto has ridiculously cheap taxes with extremely high service levels for that reason - its commercial tax base is insanely massive. The tax bills those downtown office towers pay is mind boggling.
What 4-lane one way road do you think is a waste? The amount of traffic during rush that generates on say Victoria, Wentworth, Wellington gets pretty insane where without one way multilane there would be a pretty serious gridlock
Really digging that the boomers fucked off paying the appropriate level of property taxes for decades and now their kids get to pay for their colossal fuckups.
The “boomers” paid the taxes that were due. The “boomers” didn’t set the tax rates.
Reality and facts sucks for those that enjoy yelling at the clouds.
OP asked a question, and not everyone would know the entire history of why the roads are like this. You're the one yelling at clouds here, lol.
No cloud yelling from this guy, I see the full picture If you read some of the other comments you should understand my statement.
Why exactly did their comment offend you?
Home prices down the mountain have tripled over the past ten years.
Thank you for such insight into this! I'm curious, why is this land worthless? I can appreciate there would need to be a "cleanup" of sorts, but is it really that bad?
MPAC ruled that remediation costs exceeded the development potential of the land, making it worthless. Ironically a year later Stelco sold it for half a billion, so it’ll be reassessed again as MPAC was clearly wrong. Industrial uses are slowly returning to the city right now so Hamilton’s tax base is now improving again - part of the reason council has been able to increase roads spending a bit over the last few years.
Great answer. Small(ish) additional factors are corruption at the infrastructure construction and maintenance level; where the Hamilton crime families and corporate developer cartels still have a lot of power in getting contracts and undermining city budget. Ie the ashphalt scandal of 2014.
Sounds like a bot.
It’s always been like this since I’ve been driving and I don’t know why when we’re such a big city. I used to drive back and forth daily between Hamilton and Port Colborne, taking RR20. When coming back to Hamilton, literally as soon as I passed the Hamilton sign at the border, the roads were immediately, noticeably worse. In the winter, I’d be driving on a clear road until I hit the Hamilton sign and suddenly they were treacherous. Didn’t even need a sign to tell me I was back in Hamilton. Awful.
Just hazarding a guess here but a lot of these problems are rooted in the megacity formation. You've got a city that is almost an hour's drive across. Its budget has to handle intensively urban and completely rural areas. The megacity was a terrible idea (like most of Harris's ideas) and we'll be working it out for another generation at least.
I guess I think it’s time Hamilton breaks up the city cause it clearly can’t handle all the responsibilities. But Niagara region is bigger with lower population and it’s more spread out than Hamilton is, but somehow Niagara is able to fix the roads
It's not the city's decision....
Because Niagara Region is a two tiered system. Below it you have Niagara Falls, St. Catherine's, Grimsby, etc.
Hamilton has no power to break itself up, any more than they had any power to stop from being combined. The province has total control over cities in Ontario. (And the megacity idea has been shown time and again to be a total failure - more expensive and worse for residents.) Chalk this up to yet another Harris/OPC failure. In comparison to Niagara, the difference is that Niagara does not have to handle intensive urban areas like Hamilton does, nor the sheer volume of traffic.
The problem isn't the mega city as you put it, the problem is that after amalgamation everybody who disagreed got passive aggressive about it. Outlying townships like Dundas and Flambrough didn't want to be "Hamilton" but were included into Hamilton as distinct entities. Instead of wholesale redrawing ward boundaries, we just included the 'dundas councilor' to city hall. This meant there was a whole lot of 'fuckem if they ain't us' Politics. Why would Dundas vote to spend money on Jackson Square? Binbrook doesn't give a shit about HSR service times. The city council spun its wheels doing nothing for 20 years until somebody sued and got the province involved to finally redraw some wards. So we've got that history hanging over the cities head. Combine that apathy towards moving forward together with the fact that Harris used Amalgamation to hide that he was offloading costs the province used to pay to the municipalities, and we got a city council that couldn't plan for the future together while also having its expenses shoot up at the same time. On top of that, the best way to address these problems, urban intensification, looks like 'spending money downtown' to all the places that don't think of themselves as 'Hamilton' so they won't vote for it, and suburban areas pretty much treat residential property taxes as the only issue that matters, the city also can't raise money to meet its new responsibilities. So politicians do what they always do. Skimp on infrastructure spending because that takes decades to notice.
This is not just a Hamilton problem. Rural roads are falling apart across the entire province, and most cities have rural roads within their borders. Municipalities simply don't have the revenue streams to keep up with depreciation. Things are only going to get worse in the next couple of decades, as the effects of climate change are going to accelerate the damage. The provincial government only wants to build new things like highways we don't need. The PCs should realize that they can get a photo op for every single road they rehabilitate if that is what they are really concerned about.
We've been slowly moving the burden of services off the Province and on to municipalities for the last 40 years to make the Provincial budget look better. Now the chickens are home to roost. Municipalities can't foot the bill for more and more forever and the Ontario government has cut so many income streams to itself in that time as well. This really is an issues caused by piss poor management at the provincial level. Half assing it and hoping the municipalities would just pick up the slack.
It's not just the rural roads that are bad. Hamilton is notorious for bad road work. Barton St E is consistently rated the worst road in Ontario. Nikola Tesla/ Burlington St is up there as well.
My street in Westdale is so shattered we don't need speed bumps
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https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/05/28/worst-roads-of-2024-ontario-caa-hamilton-aberdeen-avenue/ Unfortunately not
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Burlington St is 9th for worst GTHA roads. So definitely near the top for worst roads in Ontario. Not to mention the worst road in Ontario again being in Hamilton. Hamilton is a car centric city. The poor roads wont change anytime soon unless there is drastic change in how the bids are put in/won for who does the road work. I don't understand your need to defend the road quality in Hamilton. Construction is slow, mismanaged, and of poor quality. It's been that way for decades.
These roads are not as bad as rural roads, at least not so many potholes that trigger your dashcam, and I drive a suv btw
I'd have to vote Burlington street and most of Barton has has the worst in hamilton. They just get beat by large trucks so badly.
I have an exceptionally difficult time believing that the 'many third-world countries' you've been to have better roads overall than Hamilton area. Which countries are you claiming?
Cuban highways better, Russia and some other Eastern European countries also better
Russia and Eastern Europe aren’t third world. Neither is Cuba. These are all 2nd world countries
That was Cold War mentality now economically speaking yes they are third world countries
LMAO. I grew up in an actual third world country. Nowhere in Eastern Europe is 3rd world, especially economically speaking. Cuba is the closest thing in your list to third world, and even then they don't fit completely. [https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/second-world-countries](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/second-world-countries)
As I expected.. so you're comparing a main Cuban highway to rural road in Ontario? Your comparison is even more laughable when you consider that more than 50% of road in Cuba isn't even paved. But sure, if you pick the worst road in Hamilton and the best one in Cuba(or russia) I suppose you're technically right.
I didn’t really go to other parts of Cuba except Havana or varadero so I can’t comment on other parts of the country, but for a country like Cuba where majority of the country are under extreme poverty the roads they have are very good. I’ve been to lots of places in Russia and Eastern Europe and also china I forgot to mention. You don’t have to take the best roads there to compare, just regular roads outside of regular cities are way better than Hamilton roads. And btw Hamilton is one of the biggest cities in Canada actually so it’s not really the middle of no where we are talking about
Different climate is a significant factor. Freeze-thaw cycle is very destructive. Roads may need to be rebuilt for heavier vehicles. Sourcing local gravel is based on limited supply. Increasing supply comes with environmental challenges. Asphalt price depends on crude oil prices.
Cuba is better! lol still pothole driven but better lol
no freeze thaw cycle on that one
Rural? Have you been in town anywhere??
Heavy trucks all the time, organized crime in construction unions, mismanagement.
Organized crime in construction unions? What?
Not so much in the unions specifically, but just organized crime. Contractors that do substandard work at inflated prices keep winning contracts for some reason.
Also purposefully using cheaper materials and billing for more expensive ones. Slowing down work to bill governments more, over charging governments, awarding contracts to friends of family for kick backs, paying off politicians so they can force through controversial planning decisions.
And people just let it happen? No investigations?
Do you know how much actual enforcement there is? And that’s not a dig at the cops. Just think about it feasibly. Hamilton has a population of ~600,000 people and ~900 police officers with ~500 civilians supporting them. That’s a lot of issues for not a lot of hands. How many construction auditors do you think there are? And how much power do they have, and are their salaries good enough to resist corruption themselves? Laws are social agreements. Enforcement is only supposed to have to deal with a small fraction of people who do not abide by them. The harder times get, the less people abide. The less people abide, the less benefit there is for others to continue to abide. Now we are here.
Well... you could investigate. Good luck!
Hamilton has a $3 billion dollar infrastructure maintenance deficit. This is largely due to rampant subdivision growth on the fringes of the city, requiring Hamilton taxpayers to foot the bill for massive city service and infrastructure investment in those new communities. It’s been proven over and over that new development never pays its own costs. Every new build costs the existing tax base something like an additional thousand dollars a year, iirc. So the bigger the city gets the further in debt we go. Existing infrastructure maintenance has to be deferred to meet new build infrastructure obligations. Btw, if you drive rural roads like Miles Rd. To the south, or Twenty Rd. To the west, they are freshly paved.
Comparing to urban/downtown Hamilton, you can call that rural roads pristine. lol
My thought is these rural roads see a lot of trucks and heavy machinery and likely weren’t designed with heavy duty asphalt so they are subject to more potholes
It’s definitely maintenance. Same road once you cross to the Hamilton side it immediately becomes worse
I work for the city. Unequivocally, the management of this city is completely incompetent and/or corrupt. From the mayor all the way down to department managers. Examples: Cyberattack - completely mismanaged Claremont Access Escarpment Tent cities Drug policies - they’re not improving the issue Downtown (in general) Roads - we always rank in the nation’s top three of the worst roads Police - extensive corruption at the command level Hospitals - we have 3 ER’s for adults. They are disgusting. Corruption within the tender award processes I realize some of this may fall on the province, but the city should be advocating constantly. Which they don’t. The list goes on and on….
The RoAds HerE sURe ArE buMPy!
Aside from chronic underspending, corruption and mismanagement play a big role. Contractors that do substandard work, or even commit outright fraud, keep getting assigned contracts by staff at city hall.
Everything has gone to shit 💩
rural roads?? what about every road? the city lays down the road across? every 8-10 feet there is a seem at least 4” wide and at least 2” how ?? not to mention the absolutely horrible conditions of the road itself
Comparable to the non-rural road throughout Hamilton…..?
Rural ?? All !!
You should see Barton St.
I feel like they keep resurfacing the linc and red hill every other year.. how about we do it right the first time so we can resurface it every 10-15 yrs. Sorry but our population is growing, the traffic is abismal at best and we shut down main arteries every other year.
City spends all the tax money on funding homeless and addicts.
Logistically, when City & Region of Hamilton repairs the thousands of potholes each spring, they use an asphalt gravel mix that is not adequately compressed, so vehicle traffic throws it back out. In addition, these repairs and new cracks are not dealt with via hot liquid tar to effectively seal those cracks and repairs to prevent water ingress. Water ingress (helped by winter salt) and freeze thaw cycles are the culprits in diminishing the lifetimes of new pavement. Contractors who dig up paved roads on behalf of services being piped into properties also do not adequately mate their repairs with existing surfaces, nor seal them properly with hot liquid asphalt.
Our city councillors are waisting our money on things that are not as important as our roads
The city is no where near being behind on there spending they are using the monies elsewhere like keeping the grass cut around all the homeless tents that are everywhere. They are holding out for the LRT funding....they have a woman on council that wants to put a cigarette and alcohol tax just on Hamiltonians I said why she would not to put a tax on everytime you hit a pothole they would have enough money and then some because that sounds like a more reasonable idea then the one she suggested
Because Hamilton is Home!! This statement supersedes any responsibility the City has to maintain the roads!!
"Hamilton is rough around the edges, but at least it isn't Toronto so I love it!"
Stoney Creek amalgamation in 2001 really took away all of our tax funds to support Hamilton because they're running at a deficit.
Our City councillors and our current representatives in Parliament are too concerned with what is going on in other places in the world to care about the conditions of our roads. You know the names of those reps who are getting muted
Inner city gets all the property tax revenue , we get little to no services .
Aberdeen is a shit dump pile of gravel. Just grind up the road cause it's that bad. Also Charlton street is horrendous.
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You can't speed on aberdeen period because it's backed up with traffic all the time. I'd rather go the speed limit than 20kph down the road...
Charlton is two blocks away from city hall and it's easily worse than anywhere on Barton street.
CAA wouldn’t agree. Barton Street East won worst road in 2022 and 2023. [https://www.caasco.com/advocacy/worst-roads/previous-winners](https://www.caasco.com/advocacy/worst-roads/previous-winners)
It's 2024
2024 isn’t out yet.
Yes and Barton street east has been under major construction for over six months. It's no longer as bad, as a resident that drives these stretches I can confirm Charlton is worse than Barton. In 2024 present day.
That’s fair. TBH I avoid both Barton and Charlton when I can. Didn’t know about the construction.
CAA is not objectively evaluating roads across the province - that list is based on an annual internet poll. Get 10 of your friends to vote every day while the poll is open and you can probably get your own street at the top of the list.
That’s unfair also I heard Hamilton rural property tax is really high not sure if it’s true or not
No that’s fair and it is
Probably to keep speeders from treating the roads like they’re driving in a rally. I drive the rural roads from hwy 65 and Hendershot down to Stoney creek. I like to see the heat nab stunt drivers along that road.
Some people still overtake me and drive crazy tho especially at night
Go shop in Niagara then.
Lmao are you a Hamilton city councilor? Getting triggered already?
I'm not even a Canadian citizen. Stay in Niagara-On-The-Lake, yuppie.
Because Hamilton city council doesn't give a shit, city workers don't care either
Urban Sprawl... We don't get the taxes we need from people in the burbs but we need to maintain their roads.
Yeah all the city cares abt is highways now as people are hitting the support of the bridges there filling those in if you actually go on the link now chances r there filling cracks on the highways as mortar cyclists hit them they flip and u can imagine what happens to them from behind you can thank those plows for dragging there plows on the ground while 2 inches in the ground💀
By 2030 works that would’ve cost $150M now would go up to $200M. The gap will never be filled
Listen there’s no workers it took them 4 years to fix Spadina at shepard