Major traffic back-ups near Halifax Wednesday morning due to multiple collisions

Collisions on both bridges spanning the Halifax Harbour led to traffic troubles for commuters Wednesday morning.

Halifax Regional Fire & Emergency says there was a three-vehicle collision on the MacKay Bridge around 6:30 a.m.

Halifax Harbour Bridges says there were also two separate crashes on the Macdonald Bridge, plus a broken-down car.

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No injuries were reported in any of the incidents.

The incidents caused traffic to be significantly backed up in many parts of the city during the morning commute.

“It made no difference which way you went, everybody was in traffic trying to get on the bridges,” said motorist Ken Kelly.

Ammad Wasti agrees it didn’t matter from what angle you tried to enter the city; you were likely getting stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“I tried Magazine Hill and the 102 was jammed. Both the bridges were jammed, there were a couple of accidents there. It took me about an hour-and-a-half and it was only about a 15-to-20-minute drive,” said Wasti.

Asham Habib, a transportation professor at Dalhousie Univeristy, says it’s a problem that could get worse. They recently finished a study showing 16 per cent of people are still working from home and 35 per cent are working on a hybrid work schedule.

“We are now starting to approach return-to-office policies by multiple government, non-government agencies, so we’ll start feeling the effect,” said Habib.

Habib says with a growing population, mass rapid transit could help get more cars off the roads and help reduce traffic congestion, especially during rush hours.

Bottleneck traffic leading into Halifax slowly started clearing up around 8:30 am. on Wednesday.

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