Quote:
Originally Posted by adamuptownsj
These are not useful priorities for the city. You disregard basic population stats and respond with with Field of Dreams stuff. We need to focus on improving what we have, not money-losing nautical curiosities. Complete Harbour Passage, improve other trails and paths- especially something north-south.
And on the subject of the state of Waterloo Village, ask residents how much worse it is than even five years ago. I'm working in a project there and the locals are not happy about the state of things. Poor and lower-income people should not have to live around rampant public drug use and unhinged behavior. They have as much of a right to a pleasant safe neighbourhood as anyone. We have bylaws about panhandling and public intoxication but they are not enforced, to the detriment of those who cannot afford to live away from it. If you want to improve the city for tourists, you start by improving the city for locals.
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Field of Dreams stuff? I'd say it's the opposite, considering Iowa is quite literally landlocked, and your comparing bringing back a ferry to a city that did once have one, to a movie where baseball players are resurrected to play baseball in the middle of nowhere in a corn field. Do you of a way to find some stats on how many people use the Belleisle Ferry or the Evandale Ferry? There's way less people living way out near those ferries than live in West Saint John. If we can justify the expense of those ferries, I don't see why you're so intent as deriding the possibility of the return of the West Saint John ferry as a "money-losing nautical curiosity"
Why can't these people just "drive around" if they wanna live way out there and work in Saint John? That seems to be your attitude to when it comes to pedestrians in Saint John walking between Uptown and the West Side.
All five Saint John Region ferries are money losing endeavours that don't even charge a toll. A West Side to Uptown Ferry could be administered by Saint John transit with the same usage fees as the bus system. To borrow your bit about Field of Dreams though... "if you build it they will come" ... if we had a ferry between West Saint John and Uptown,
they, being developers would be far more likely to come here and build more ambitious projects on the West Side. Moreover, having a ferry in the mix would help alleviate concerns about increased traffic, which already was used as an excuse to shut down an ambitious high rise development projects on the West Side in the past.
Saint John is the third biggest port in Canada, and could eventually be the second biggest port in Canada if our container growth does indeed reach 800,000 BTUs one day, there's going to be more and more people working at the port as it continues to rapidly grow. I really don't think the return of a ferry is nearly as much of a fantasy you are making it out to be, considering it's something the city did have running for the majority of its history until the construction of the harbour bridge. I get it... you're fiscally conservative and don't want to see provincial funds wasted on what you see as a money losing project. However, If your idea of "completing" the harbour passage still results in a route where it takes 1.5 hours+ to walk between the West Side to Uptown, that'd be a failure AND a waste of funds, which is even worse, imo.
If not via a ferry, the West Side and Uptown need to be linked by a multi use trail no less direct than the harbour bridge is for car traffic. Whether that means building under the harbour bridge, or beside it, a more direct connection is what's needed to make walking between The West Side and Uptown a more convenient and common occurrence for people on both sides of the harbour. 1.5 hours is way too long of a distance to expect people to walk between locations that are
physically only one two two kilometers apart.
As for Waterloo, Village I'm not exactly sure what you're suggested be done. I'm in complete agreement that they have "just as much of right to a pleasant safe neighbourhood as anyone in the Saint John Region", and that if we want to improve the city for tourists, we start by improving it for locals. I just think we have completely different ideas on how much is needed to be done in order to achieve these improvements, let alone how much it will cost.
It's laughable to think that the situation at Waterloo village is going to be solved with bylaw enforcement, as you've suggested. What it will take is tens of millions of dollars being pumped into the priority neighbourhoods of Saint John. The Blaine Higgs PC's have shown zero interest in spending that kind of money on low income urban neighbourhoods, and they've barely even moved an inch on comprehensive tax reform, which could actually allow the City of Saint to invest in making the priority neighbourhoods more positive places to live.
I still think AIM is the far bigger, more unavoidable eyesore when it comes to tourism (it's probably the first thing cruise ship passengers notice coming into the harbour), especially compared with visiting Waterloo Village, which is completely optional, and not something many tourists do. The province could step in tomorrow and do something about AIM, and make it so their operations at the Port of Saint John are for nothing more than the importing/ exporting of scrap/recycled materials, while moving their processing operations to a more suitable location like an industrial park. Such a change would be good for the optics of tourism, but also good for residents on both sides of the harbour that have been impacted by AIM's operations at the Port of Saint John. If there was a list of "seaside industrial eyesores" found across cities in Canada, I think AIM's operations here in Saint John would top the list.
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