Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
I am not sure this is correct. Let's say you move a big business from downtown to Burnside:
- You now have people living in places like Clayton Park who have to cross most of the city to get to work. The fact is that, in the context of metro Halifax, the peninsula is the easiest spot for an average group of people to get to.
- They might have taken the bus before, but they probably won't now if they can avoid it; the office parks are hard to serve with transit and so they have horrible transit service.
- On top of all this the city has to take a financial hit to build a bunch of new infrastructure. Or they could pass this all on to developers and suddenly downtown would be a lot more popular.
- Also, the physical environment of the office parks sucks. You have to drive to get anywhere and there aren't good lunch places or places to go after work. This is fine for some people but a big negative for others. It's why tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft have started building office campuses in urban settings. That's what their employees want in SF/Seattle/Portland/Vancouver. Expect the same trend to come to Halifax in 5-10 years.
I would say that the city has tried out the office park model pretty thoroughly with Bayers Lake and Burnside and the results are less than stellar. They even suffer from traffic congestion.
It would be much better if Halifax just built a proper transit system. That alone would probably "solve" traffic problems in the sense that it would create a quick way for large numbers of people to get downtown. If the downtown really did get unsustainably busy (highly debatable in a town with under half a million people), there would then be opportunities to build up secondary employment centres on brownfield sites near train stations.
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Thanks for a very insightful answer. From observation, it seems that the business parks (at least Burnside) have created traffic problems of their own. I know Burnside was originally conceived and developed in the late sixties before Dartmouth was part of HRM, but it appears that little thought was given to future traffic patterns, as if somebody never imagined that people from Bedford, Sackville and outlying areas (fed from the 118) would have to pass by and through the park to get to Halifax. The area was much smaller then and the road system was less complex, but still with a little imagination you would have to think that someday it will be a problem.
I pretty much agree with the negative aspects of the parks as well, especially the lack of transit. Coverage is poor and in some cases people have to walk in dangerous areas (no sidewalks or crosswalks) to get to the bus stop!
The lunch situation (in Burnside) is much better now than it was, with the opening of many new restaurants, including Dartmouth Crossing, but you still have to drive to many of them (unless you can take a long lunch break to walk).
All that being said, even the commute you mentioned from Clayton Park to Burnside (I used to do that one about 15 years ago) wouldn't be all that bad (especially in terms of a Toronto suburb commute) as you are going against the main flow of traffic, so it still is only about a 20 minute commute. The worst one is still from the suburbs to downtown Halifax, but even then... 45 minutes? A dream for many Torontonians (not those living downtown), I think. Luckily, we are still small enough that there is time to correct the situation before it gets really bad.
For the future - transit! Build it and they will ride...