Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
The problem in Halifax is finding one or two good routes for light rail that justify unusually high investment. The city has a somewhat older setup where there's a relatively large urban core that doesn't have a single standout focal point or corridor. There are 7 or 8 randomly scattered destinations to serve and that's hard to do with a small scale LRT system. The city's BRT plan calls for serving the urban core with an "8" pattern plus 2 dead ends.
In Canada we tend to think of cities as going along a normal progression from small to large and getting certain kinds of infrastructure at certain milestones, but every city is different. Dartmouth NS has a 10-lane highway for example because it's full of lakes and hills it's hard to build arterial roads with a reasonable grade that connect up well over long distances (almost all of metro Halifax is like this). Halifax also has much less transit than it used to. In 1921 it was a metro of about 100,000 where almost nobody had a car, and in 1971 it was a metro of 265,000 where almost everybody had a car. The 1921 city had much better transit. In the 1940's, the streetcar frequency on Barrington St in Halifax was every 90 seconds and those connected up to suburban commuter rail as well as 4 regional rail lines.
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It's crazy what Canadian cities gave up in the post-war years, and how little it's a part of the public consciousness. In Winnipeg they usually point to the Panama Canal, or NAFTA, or the 1919 general strike (as if actual communist revolutions weren't going off everywhere that year) as the reason Winnipeg stagnated, but they're silent on how they deliberately ripped out their city's circulatory system and catalyst for growth through the first half of the 20th century. It would take investment in the billions to restore what they casually threw away. It's plausible that if so many Canadian cities hadn't destroyed their transit infrastructure that they would be not only denser and more urban, but larger overall.
Anyway, I think your points about Halifax's decentralized core and challenging terrain outside of it are exactly why it's a good candidate for rail investment. If you can't build a lot of arterial roads, just build higher-capacity rail lines and negate the need for the roads.
Here's what I'm thinking:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1cnoYlhQxbvmLnP5s3gIumPZsUaSnwiB7&usp=sharing
There are notes on all the of the lines if you're interested in reading them.
A few more thoughts:
With this system, almost everywhere in the downtown peninsula would be within 600m of a line.
This isn't a crazy system for a city Halifax's size. In fact, it's pretty comparable to what you'll find in Rostock, Germany. Rostock is pretty similar to Halifax in a lot of ways--it's the east-coast city, it has a similar population (hard to figure out because Rostock has some kind of "regiopolis" setup that obscures its metro population, but it's a little over 400k), and both cities have a generally linear development pattern, strung around an inlet or estuary.
Rostock has an S-bahn line doing the heavy lifting connecting the city with its DDR-era suburban residential districts and the coast. It also has
I think 6 tram lines.
It's an appropriate level of service for Halifax now, and will handily support the city's growth for decades to come.
This is all probably politically challenging--if not impossible--but it shouldn't be. That's why it's imperative that smaller cities take on these kind of projects before they sprawl too much, their streets become too rammed with personal vehicles, and car culture dictates everything.
Trams are good. Anglo Canadians are allergic to them--probably because Toronto's system is really bad and because most Canadian drivers would rather remove their own legs than let a more efficient vehicle take away road space--but they work very well all over Europe. Even in mixed traffic. The key is to get them out of mixed traffic whenever possible, keep their stops far enough apart, and not give personal vehicles any signal priority over trams. The TTC commits each of those sins, plus uses a bunch of outdated technology like trolley poles and manual switches.
A final point on the regional/S-bahn line. This is a big project that would best be implemented incrementally, starting immediately. A handful of stops, some track construction, and you could get a single diesel train running on an hourly frequency. Spend the next thirty years improving the system and nobody will even notice what a big, expensive project it was. No need to build a Skytrain network or anything in one shot.
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