Quote:
Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker
EDIT: I realize I may seem to react disproportionately to suburban sprawl but... we were, by North American standards, an exceptionally densely-populated small city. We boomed at a time when people already knew better than to construct what we now have in Mount Pearl, Paradise, and elsewhere. We squandered a chance to build a truly world-class small city, to put even Scandinavian planners to shame, and decided instead to erect the same shit mainland cities have been trying to CORRECT for two decades already. Instead of leading, we're still building, in 2013, what, when completed, will set us 20 years behind. It's an absolute disgrace. It's one of the biggest wasted opportunities in our island's history. I mean, our council still can't decide if new developments should be forced to have any ****ing trees. Come on, b'ys... pathetic.
|
I can agree with most of this except for mentioning Mount Pearl. If Mount Pearl were nowhere near St. John's it'd actually almost be a perfect city. It's very dense, has several commercial districts that aren't too far from a majority of the residential areas, and overall the road layout is much nicer than St. John's. There's a healthy High-Tech and scientific Industry that can most definitely be expanded upon. Its main fault is that it hinges on St. John's and hence becomes reliant. Take St. John's out of existence and then Mount Pearl becomes the almost ideal city. They'd have to build their own hospital and develop their own public transit (but can you imagine that public transit? It'd probably be heavenly!)
Paradise isn't even close to achieving this. There's some of that same high-tech industry, but not nearly the same amount. Paradise is pretty much all residential, with crumby road systems that were built for a town of 2000 people, not pushing 20,000.