Quote:
Originally Posted by Hali87
Granville Street in Vancouver is an example of a good one, and is pretty similar to Spring Garden in terms of uses and built form.
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I liked the Granville overhaul but that street is conspicuously run down compared to other parts of downtown Vancouver. Partly that's because of the sort of businesses there, the old hotels, the panhandlers, etc., but its nature as a transit corridor might have hurt too. The buses attract a lot of people who just want to get somewhere, not necessarily hang out around the stops. They are pretty loud and they displace other forms of traffic.
Spring Garden Road is more like Robson around Thurlow and Bute. They even have significant overlap as far as the exact stores that they have. Robson is very shopping oriented and busy, but has a mix of midrange and upper-midrange stores. One block over, Alberni has some higher end stores that don't have counterparts in Halifax.
It would be unfortunate if there were too much focus on increasing throughput of buses through Spring Garden Road and that disrupted all the good stuff that is happening with urban retail there. It's a bit of a golden goose for the city that in my opinion is under rated. It would be very easy for Halifax not to have any suitable nicer urban shopping area. The city doesn't really seem to be doing much to grow the main SGR strip.
Something like a transit tunnel downtown would take a lot of pressure off of streets like Spring Garden and Barrington. It seems far-fetched today but it's the kind of thing that "doesn't happen until it does"; it would become possible with a small shift in transportation planning in the city. It is not unrealistic economically or technologically.