Quote:
Originally Posted by portapetey
I'm with transit, and not just buses. Something innovative or at least different from the same old stuck-in-traffic buses. If rail is the answer, then rail, but something reasonable and useful - two or three short corridors.
|
I was back in Portland again and again was struck by how nice the streetcars are (in a bunch of qualitative ways) and how compatible they seem like they would be with Halifax.
Portland, OR is a much larger city but its scale is for the most part pretty comparable to Halifax. Many of the corridors there have a similar vibe in terms of the amount of people and how built up they are (actually highrise apartments and the like may be more popular in Halifax). It is not like, say, NYC, where there are huge throngs of people and completely different transportation solutions are needed. The Portland streetcars themselves are often just in one direction along a single street. There are two-lane streets that have been converted over to one lane for streetcars and one lane for other traffic. This type of setup is affordable, and for bottlenecks you can use a mix of signal priority, elevated sections, and tunnels. Streetcars could go over the bridges too, while larger vehicles probably could not.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.52526...!6m1!1e1?hl=en
The streetcars could connect up with the ferries and MetroLink at a real downtown multi-modal terminal. They could also link up to terminals like Mumford or Lacewood which could be the start of BRT routes for the suburbs. Streets like Barrington and Spring Garden, assuming streetscaping and a switch from buses to streetcars, would be dramatically nicer places to walk around and shop.