Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
Here's California Street in downtown SF, a pretty normal street in the central office district that also has street cars and surface parking: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.793315,-...KenOlLZs1-vtYsrm73fPQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
I would say that looks comparable to Hollis Street to me, but with bigger buildings. They also have BART, which is a subway in this part of the city.
San Francisco is interesting because its topography is similar to Halifax; there are lots of small hills and many people have to commute over the bridges. The Sunset Tunnel is one example where there's a surface train that runs under a hill for a bit: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7692272,...slbCcARTFMzrQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1
If you look on streetview, Boston's definitely got some narrow, winding streets downtown. They also have infrastructure related to the Big Dig which is not unlike what could be built on a smaller scale in Halifax when Cogswell comes down.
The Big Dig in Boston cost $22B US, and the Boston metropolitan area is about 11x the size of Halifax. Proportionately, that would be like Halifax spending $2B on a transportation project. I think this is the real reason why Halifax's transportation infrastructure isn't great and why traffic is poor; nobody's investing the money to fix it. The city doesn't really need exotic projects, it just needs a transportation authority with the budget to build real infrastructure. |
Yes, and we have to allocate the funding in a rational way that gives us the biggest bang for our buck. It seems like when it comes to transit projects - or any transportation projects other than for cars - you get people balking at the cost and saying that not enough people will use it and pointing to the low existing usage which is of course the way it is because we haven't invested enough in it to make it widely attractive. It's like an ice cream stand that offers vanilla ice cream immediately and chocolate with 10 minute wait. They complain about the cost of upgrading the chocolate machine to make it as fast as the vanilla because 80% of the customers order vanilla which is proof that it's their favourite. A saner person would conclude that it's necessary to upgrade the chocolate machine so that customers will have an equal opportunity to enjoy something other than vanilla.
In the case of transportation, even if we were to devote only 1/3 of the transportation budget to public transit, that 1/3 could serve 2/3 of the total trips because it's so much more efficient. Not that I expect our modal split to ever be that dramatic, but it wouldn't need to be in order for HRM mobility to be greatly improved.