Third Harbour Crossing

[Keith P.]

Arrdee, you are overlooking several things. A great deal of the bridge traffic currently is trucks going to from Dartmouth and points beyond. They are limited to the MacKay at present. Dartmouth is exploding in population just like Halifax. Those people want to move around for work, entertainment, shopping, whatever. A south-end bridge would not exist to serve the south end but rather all of HRM. With our increased population it seems unrealistic to depend on the undersized Macdonald and a MacKay replacement at the very northern tip of the peninsula.

[Saul Goode]

If a south-end bridge is ever built, it'll be some time off. The priority has to be the MacKay replacement, which will be a multi-billion dollar job itself, and which I'm led to believe is more urgently required than has been reported.

[Arrdeeharharharbour]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

With our increased population it seems unrealistic to depend on the undersized Macdonald and a MacKay replacement at the very northern tip of the peninsula.

This sentence resonates with me. Given that the Macdonald is not likely to be replaced (at least I hope not as it's a beautiful and recently renovated bridge) and with an increasing population, perhaps it is unrealistic to expect a replacement MacKay to handle all new traffic, no matter how large the replacement bridge might be. And I suppose that it follows that if closer to the coast areas of Dartmouth are growing quickly then the same may (or perhaps is) happen on the Halifax side of the harbour. Perhaps a new south end bridge from Woodside should touch down in the far south end of the peninsula and then continue on to land somewhere on the other side of the north west arm?

[OldDartmouthMark]

Originally Posted by Arrdeeharharharbour

Perhaps a new south end bridge from Woodside should touch down in the far south end of the peninsula and then continue on to land somewhere on the other side of the north west arm?

It could work if they capped the cut!

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by Arrdeeharharharbour

This sentence resonates with me. Given that the Macdonald is not likely to be replaced (at least I hope not as it's a beautiful and recently renovated bridge) and with an increasing population, perhaps it is unrealistic to expect a replacement MacKay to handle all new traffic, no matter how large the replacement bridge might be. And I suppose that it follows that if closer to the coast areas of Dartmouth are growing quickly then the same may (or perhaps is) happen on the Halifax side of the harbour. Perhaps a new south end bridge from Woodside should touch down in the far south end of the peninsula and then continue on to land somewhere on the other side of the north west arm?

The early posts in this thread date from 2008 when HHB released their concept for exactly that (or alternatively, a south-end tunnel), concepts that were quickly shouted down by the usual anti-progress types. It is worth going back and reading some of those comments. Sam Austin decried the concept, saying that it would encourage car-based suburban development in Woodside among other nonsense. Shockingly, Mason appeared to be in favor of it.

[someone123]

There were two interacting views that, I think, both aged badly. One is that any road development is suburbia-generating and to be avoided and the other is/was that the city isn't growing much so let's kick the can down the road. But the city slowly lost the infrastructure "slack" it had in the 90's and earlier and is going to have a big infrastructure deficit. The current transport network was more or less for a city of 300,000 or so and by the time any major project is completed the city will likely have 600,000 or more residents.

Often people say there should be transit instead of road investment (often ignoring that roads can help with buses; more bridge lanes would enable dedicated transit lanes for example) but, well, where's the transit? Usually in NS it's just opposition to road building and then no transit building.

[OldDartmouthMark]

These have probably been posted before, but in case they haven't here are a couple of plans from 1963, showing a potential south end crossing aligned with a North West Arm crossing.

The first one picks out potential problems with the plan, while the second one shows a couple of alternatives, with an indication that it would link up with the planned Harbour Drive project, which eventually was incomplete (ending at Cogswell).

My apologies for the large size, but it does make it easier to pick out the details.


Source


Source

[OldDartmouthMark]

Here's a map of the proposed Central Business District, including Harbour Drive, from 1964. What I found interesting about this was the notation near the bottom right of the map indicating the site of a possible tunnel crossing.


Source

I blew it up a little, but the text is somewhat fuzzy.

[josh_cat_eyes]

Thats very interesting that they were looking at building a tunnel as early as the 1960's. I thought that idea was a more recent one. Its to bad that they never got it build back then, when it would have been more affordable to build. You'd be looking a several billion dollars to build a 4-6 lane tunnel today.