Quote:
Originally Posted by scryer
Be careful about glorifying Portland's transit system.... Most of it is grade integrated if I remember correctly; and it is frequently used as a bench-mark for what Vancouver doesn't want because it isn't a fast system.
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Vancouver's system is vastly superior (if you happen to live near a station, which a lot of people do) but also more expensive to build. Each SkyTrain line cost the equivalent of $1B+ in today's dollars. Halifax could maybe pay for one or two lines like this but not a comprehensive system, and the $1-2B expense would starve a lot of other infrastructure projects.
Grade-integrated transit can also be fixed piecemeal. Many cities have small tunnels for streetcars, etc. It's true that the max speed of the streetcars is lower than conventional subways or SkyTrain but I don't think that is as important for Halifax.
Halifax's situation is somewhat different because it is smaller and distances are shorter. Most of the inner suburbs that are dense enough to be served with higher-order transit are only 5 km from downtown. In Vancouver or Portland the equivalent neighbourhoods are perhaps 15 km away. Even if you can do an average of only 30 or 40 km/h your 5 km commute will be pretty good. 100 km/h travel speeds that you can get with SkyTrain are not really important. You just need to make sure that, if you have streetcars, they are able to move around.
You could probably get really good service in Halifax with some dedicated lanes, signal priority, and maybe some small tunnels or overpasses to circumvent the really bad bottlenecks. You could also do okay by adding these things for buses.