Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith P.
It would be easy to create a waterfront area that is attractive and welcoming and hopefully much less Disneyfied than what is now there. Whatever alignment of the roadway was chosen there would be ways to move pedestrians over or under it.
|
This hasn't been the typical experience in other North American cities with waterfront expressways. There are lots of examples of cities that built what was planning in Halifax, created a dead zone on the other side of downtown next to the water, and then spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fix the problem to little effect. Some of those cities have since torn down the expressways.
Some examples I can think of are Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Toronto, and various parts of Manhattan.
I don't think that strategy would have been successful in Halifax. I'm not sure the vision of a mixed-use waterfront with a recreational component goes back that far either. The waterfront dead zones were, at the time, semi-abandoned industrial areas that were not considered valuable. The modern waterfronts happened because of containerized shipping, the decline of heavy industry in North America, and better pollution controls.