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Originally Posted by someone123
My point with the Switzerland example isn't that that's what should be built in Halifax, it's that the state of the art has moved far beyond what people in Halifax tend to discuss. The scale of public works in other places is also much larger, even on a per-capita basis, than what people consider possible in Halifax. Halifax is also far behind the times in terms of the transit vehicles and technologies that tend to be discussed. Basically, it's always 1982 in NS it seems, at least when it comes to transportation. $1B will always be scary and until the end of time the dream will be to reinstate 1970's-era passenger rail.
This wasn't always so. Around 1900 the city built a rail line through kilometers of supposedly difficult to deal with rock, and in the 1950's the city built one of the largest suspension bridges around. It's hard to imagine analogous projects happening today.
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I can't speak for the west coast, but the troubling thing to me is that this seems to afflict western culture broadly. The late 19th and early 20th centuries seem to have been the right time for drastically ambitious public-works projects. Today, timidity is the rule.
A classic Canadian example is Toronto's Prince Edward (Bloor Street) Viaduct, built in 1915-18 to have a railway trestle for a subway--which wasn't built until 1966. But the city's commissioner of public works at the time, R.C. Harris, envisioned when this might be needed, and convinced the city council of the time to pay for it. Can we even imagine a Canadian city ponying up today for a hypothetical piece of infrastructure for a future generation?
Another relatively visionary project would be the Calgary/Edmonton light-rail lines, started in the late 70s, among the last ambitious infrastructure projects (non-automobile related) in those cities. Maybe an Expo 67 hangover, when Canada was still dreaming big?
I agree that Nova Scotians' perception of being especially hard-up and debt-burdened adds yet another layer of uncertainty and unwillingness to invest, though. The "we can't afford nice things" mentality is especially prevalent here. The no-vision thing, sadly, seems to be all over.
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