Quote:
Originally Posted by portapetey
Fair enough on most points, but those metro areas provide a hell of a tax base to draw on for funding rail projects (and probably lots of inter-urban commuters), whereas we're surrounded by thousands of square kilometres of forest.
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I'm not so sure about this. Does the Tacoma light rail really get lots of commuters from elsewhere? Up until recently when I was there it didn't connect very meaningfully to other transit services in the region. It has a daily ridership of 3,600, which is less than a lot of bus corridors in Halifax.
A lot of cities in the US aren't particularly well off, nor do the suburbs always want to cooperate much. American cities are however more ambitious and have a greater tendency to invest in big projects. They also blow lots of money on sporting venues, which I think is less wise, but when it comes to transit Halifax is not ambitious enough. It is actually in a pretty enviable position in the sense that the municipality and region and one in the same and the tax base is fairly large. HRM is comparable in size to cities like Miami and Minneapolis. It is a smaller metropolitan region but the fact is that the municipality is significant and makes it much easier to coordinate transit projects than in comparable metropolitan areas with more municipalities.
The thinking around commuter rail and the way it's presented in that Globe and Mail article are emblematic of the problems in Halifax. People talked about the low-end version of commuter rail, which clocks in at around $30-50M in capital outlay (if I remember correctly), as though it's some huge undertaking for the city. The version with a short track into downtown that would cost something like $90M was considered the gold-plated version. Neither version was amazing from a value per dollar perspective, but they are both extremely modest projects compromised by the desire to be as cheap as possible. Something in the $100-300M range might produce much better value for dollar, and actually be transformative for the city, but the political climate is too timid to even consider something in that range. It's really unfortunate.
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