Quote:
Originally Posted by halifaxboyns
I 100% agree and this is one of the big issues I had with the Regional Plan. While the Regional Plan is good (I would give it a 7 out of 10) - it failed to have a really good transit/transportation plan with it. Which begs the question - how can you invest in transportation and transit and then maximize the return, when you are doing your land use decisions separate?
That said; what could happen with this engagement is the with the RP+10 (the next RP update); they could amend the plan to include far more land use/transit decisions together. So I don't think the engagement idea is bad and it could have a helpful impact down the road...we will have to see how it goes...
|
Are you kidding? The RP+5 initial draft is a piece of garbage.
It's the same old crap from the 2006 RP, which has gotten us, 7 years later, with 17% growth urban compared to 60% in the suburbs, thus more and more costly and wasteful sprawl, more needless shitty business/retail parks in the middle of nowhere (Bedford Commons / Dartmouth Crossing) & designed so badly that you literally cannot walk from one store to another without walking across an unsafe highway-like road; no imaginative transit changes, more NIMBY power to kill modest density infill (Spirit Place), more car culture, more highways, more widened roads, more congestion, more "collector" routes, etc, etc, etc.
Same old 25/50/25 growth targets (that led to actual 17/59.5/23.5 % growth) with no new policy ideas or "teeth" to actually achieve those targets (the new Q&A on the PlanHRM site talks about "teeth", but nothing they list is set out in the RP in a concrete way nor is it explicitly required or mandated)
And even the green belt strategy in the RP+5 is shambolic.
In fact, it's Orwellian. A Green Belt land use strategy is universally understood in land planning as wrapping an urban area with a large green space where development is prohibited, which has many planning and environmental benefits.
But rather than adopt a Green Belt strategy-- which would help HRM but would actually require some real work-- they've instead adopted a strategy that they call "greenbelting", which sounds like Green Belt but isn't at all.
Here's the "facts" on the HRM "Greenbelting" strategy
http://www.halifax.ca/planhrm/docume...ngMay30.13.pdf
And here is what a REAL Green Belt looks like (Toronto/GTA):
http://greenbelt.ca/sites/default/fi...png?1289319124
See any difference? Oh yes, in the GTA Green Belt, you have a massive green belt of land enveloping the entire urban area. That's why it's called a "Belt".
In the HRM "Greenbelting", rather than create a Green Belt to force better land use and prevent sprawl, HRM's just creating tiny patches and narrow slits of green land inside a growing mass of sprawl that is HRM.
The HRM "greenbelting" sounds like a Green Belt, but it's fake.
I mean, that is just shameful. It's like Stephen Colbert's concept of "truthiness" (as opposed to truth).
If PlanHRM planners think a Green Belt wouldn't help HRM or think it would take too much work to implement or it would be too hard, then say so. Don't offer something else, and try to pass it off as "Greenbelting". Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.