Quote:
Originally Posted by ILoveHalifax
I have a problem trying to understand how a stadium equates to a transit system. They are so different from each other.
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I'm not sure why the zero-sum false dilemma type thinking comes around so frequently with the stadium issue in particular. The city can afford transit and a stadium, and some of the funding for those projects might come from different sources. Federal infrastructure funding isn't necessarily available for a stadium, for example, while private donors might be less interested in transit.
It's not necessarily true that a stadium would be more affordable than rail transit. Subways cost billions of dollars but commuter rail and streetcar systems have been created with budgets below $100 million. In the case of Halifax I think commuter rail linked up with streetcars on the peninsula and some express buses would work well. A plan like that is actually pretty modest. Kitchener-Waterloo is marginally larger than Halifax and they are in the middle of building a $790M LRT project (which will be 1/3 provincial and 1/3 federal funding). Meanwhile, in Halifax, a public project with 1/4 of this budget is considered beyond the pale for some reason. It was pretty common for people to talk as if the Nova Centre would bankrupt the province, for example. The entire budget for the convention centre amounts to 0.4% of the province's economic output during one year.