Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith P.
However, look at what Boston did in recent years with their Big Dig project. The former Central Artery was undergrounded and the area above is now green space, with a large area of park and recreation space. While I would not consider that ideal for Halifax, a similar plan at least in sections would have allowed easy access to whatever use was intended for the waterfront, and surely at less cost than the Arm Bridge/rail cut developments mentioned by another member.
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I am not sure it would cost less. The old railcut study looked at running trucks alongside the rail tracks or building an inland terminal to transfer containers onto trucks in some suburban location. The estimated cost was around $20-60M in 2006.
The Big Dig cost over $24B (complete financial disaster; a lot of Northeastern US cities make Halifax look competently run). It was a much larger project than Halifax would need but each lane-kilometer of tunnel costs $100M+ these days. I agree that tunnels downtown might be a nice solution, but they would not be cheap.
Cogswell is a great opportunity to build underground infrastructure, but there doesn't seem to be much vision behind that project, or if there is it hasn't yet manifested itself in the plans. There's nothing particularly impressive about rebuilding some surface streets and selling off the new plots of land.