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Originally Posted by spaustin
Go Sue! Spending a billion to build a third crossing to deal with a problem that only exists for about 3 hours a day (once in the morning once in the evening) is a huge waste of money. A billion dollars could do so much more for transportation in Halifax. Think what a billion could do for public transit. We could have an LRT system or ferries or both!
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Which, as you put it, deals with a problem that only exists for about 3 hours a day. Plus you can't move cargo on either so it does nothing for commercial traffic.
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With a billion we could potentially relocate the port to Eastern Passage, thereby eliminating a lot of the truck congestion on the Peninsula and MacKay Bridge and opening up a huge amount of valuable land on the Peninsula for redevelopment.
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Do you have the studies on that? The issues around ship navigation and the dredging required? There is a reason why the 1999 superport proposal put the planned facility next to Ceres and not in Dartmouth. In reality, if you want assurances that any new port will be able to handle the oversized ships of the future, it needs to be somewhere other than Halifax if Halterm is not going to be in the mix as that is the only place that can assuredly handle them. And if that is the case, then you need the third bridge to get the boxes somewhere.
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Heck if wanted to limit spending money entirely, we could setup an employer pass program (e-pass) to increase transit ridership for a fraction of the cost (something most other large Canadian cities have). Building a third crossing to try and jam more cars onto the Peninsula is just about the most backward idea going, especially since we haven't even tried anything else. It would be a huge waste of money. Best to nip this in the bud!
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You just don't get it. Those cars do not necessarily stay on the peninsula any more. HRM extends well to the south and west now. An example: on Friday around 5PM I was trying to get from the Clayton Park area to Dartmouth. I took the MacKay since it seemed reasonably uncongested for the hour, and just had to use my usual shortcut to avoid the absurdity of the Windsor St exchange backup.
Once I got to the bridge I saw that Halifax-bound traffic was at a standstill virtually all the way across. That was caused by a work crew on the Halifax side that had one lane closed leading to the Fairview overpass (clearly, the kind of work that should be done overnight, but that never happens here). One lane, about 100 feet, and the bridge was at a standstill. But wait, there's more.
Once I crossed into Dartmouth I was astounded to find that traffic on Victoria Rd heading south toward the MacDonald was also at a standstill. People were avoiding the mess on the MacKay and the MacDonald could not deal with the load. It was completely ridiculous to think that one tiny works project could cause such traffic havoc. That Halifax-bound traffic was largely using the peninsula just for passage to ultimate destinations that would be west of the peninsula -- Clayton Park, Beechville, Tantallon, wherever. People who live in those places work in Burnside and other parts of Dartmouth. This is why we need to abandon the type of parochial thinking that Uteck demonstrated on this. HRM is not just the peninsula anymore, it is a growing city with legitimate transportation needs that our obsolete road network can no longer handle. While I support things like LRTs (though I cannot support large-scale spending on ferries), those point to point people movers cannot solve these problems.