Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
Halifax is also I believe the only city in Canada except for Toronto to have an express-collector lane system on one of its freeways! Vindication!
|
The highways in metro Halifax are pretty gross but then again are an example of the kind of thing people don't tend to imagine when they try to extrapolate what the city is like based on other small cities in Canada. Halifax has a more developed highway system because the provincial highway converge there and because the geography and age of the city make it harder to build arterial roads.
Many of the other metro areas with a similar or smaller population in Canada (or even moreso in the US) are minor cities. In Halifax however a lot of the infrastructure is more characteristic of what you'd find in a medium-sized city. The airport's about the same size as Winnipeg's, the new convention centre that's being built is comparable to Ottawa's, etc. A lot of things are built for a region of 2 million people or a province of 1 million people, not a city with 400,000 people.
Another difference is that Halifax became a developed city much earlier than any other English-speaking town in Ontario and points west, and the Maritimes predate the existence of Canada as a country. Any attempt to approximate the city based on places in Ontario or Western Canada is going to be rough, at least if our concept of differences between cities is based on Canada. It is kind of a different animal.
The last interesting one that other Canadians tend not to realize is that NS and the Maritimes are somewhat densely populated. NS has under 1 million people, but about two thirds live within an hour's drive of Halifax. The central part of the region takes about 4 hours to drive around and has maybe 1.5 million people so. It's not like, say, Saskatchewan, even though the overall population looks similar. Nova Scotia is less than 1/10 the size of Saskatchewan and the population is unevenly distributed in a similar, though less dramatic, way.