Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
Unfortunately with downtown retailers in Halifax there's been a bit of an obsession with attracting suburbanites and competing with suburban stores by offering parking and so on. I think that attitude's been really harmful to areas like Barrington. Barrington is never going to compete with Wal-Mart on the basis of cheap goods and free parking. It's also totally unreasonable to think that somebody living in Sackville is going to drive an extra hour whenever they want to do some shopping.
I agree that by far the best thing for the city right now is to get another 30,000-50,000 people living in the core.
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Its the same here in Calgary. 11th Avenue (also known as Electric avenue) has been trying to pull shoppers from the burbs with trendy flower and home decor stores. They are able to do it reasonably well because they can park on the various side streets or at the safeway parking lot near by.
The downside for Halifax is that there is much less on street parking available and the distribution of parking garages through downtown is a little off (at least in my mind) since you have Scotia Square, then the MetroPark and then City Centre Atlantic and that lot that will soon be the library.
If the retails in the main core blocks of Barrington Street want to attract those people; there would have to be some sort of parkade in the middle as well - oh whoops; isn't that the convention centre site? Oh silly me... haha.
Seriously though; if the convention centre offered public parking on the weekends, then they could have some chance.
I was doing some rough density calculations on the Quinpool, Agricola corridors. If the density of the parcels was 250 units/hectare and up; and you built at minimum of 10 stories - Agricola (between North and the commons) could have about 8,000 people and Quinpool would be about the same. If you pushed it up to 15 stories, about 10,000 and 20 was pushing 15,000. Now this is all rough math - but if both sites brought in 15,000 each; there is 30,000 new shoppers for the downtown core that could walk, bike or take transit to the stores.