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Originally Posted by someone123
There's a stubborn, false line of thinking that transportation by car is the ultimate ideal we should be reaching for. Cars are good in some places but not others. They are great if you live in a sparsely-populated rural area. They are completely unworkable in a place like Manhattan. They don't work well everywhere. They don't even work well in a lot of the places that were explicitly designed for them. The 1950-1990 period was a time of experimentation with expensive infrastructure that was going to make cars work well everywhere. The results (including the bills) are in at this point and the whole endeavour was hardly a resounding success. At this point the attitude that everything will work out if we just double down yet again on highways isn't very credible.
There also used to be a line of thinking that low density is best, but if this is true then why do people keep trying to crowd into places like central Paris, Manhattan, or San Francisco? This is a purely free market effect based on people's preferences; city planning actually discourages development in these areas but prices have skyrocketed.
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I can get you a very good deal on property in the central parts of Detroit or Baltimore.
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The most desirable places attract people and remain desirable in spite of (or maybe because of) their density, and these dense areas are not suited to cars, period. Cars cannot serve a significant percentage of the transportation needs of densely-populated areas.
It would be a lot easier in Halifax if everybody just accepted a more balanced role for cars. At this point, I think most people are starting to come around. Cars are never going to be a perfect solution downtown, or, if we look at it the other way, nobody wants a downtown that is a good place for cars. Other solutions are needed; more people need to be able to take transit, walk, or bike to their destinations on the peninsula and downtown. Halifax should keep its streets as they are and find a solution that works for the city people want.
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The reality is that we don't live in Manhattan or Tokyo and cars are the preferred way for most people to get to where they need to go. Halifax isn't ever going to have a subway or a network of streetcars (which wouldn't work anyway because
our streets are too narrow) and even Beijing has abandoned the bicycles that used to be prevalent there back in the 1970s in favor of the automobile. Saying cars only work if you live in a sparsely populated area implies they should only be on the plains of West Texas.
It never ceases to amaze me how ANY TIME someone proposes widening a street in this town the other side immediately goes to the straw man that expressways are not what we want. Well, guess what: nobody is arguing we need expressways on the peninsula. What we ARE arguing is that there are certain logical spots where some change has been needed for 50+ years, not only to accommodate cars, but to also handle the seemingly beloved diesel-spewing buses, trucks to move commercial traffic, and whatever else needs to get from A to B. We saw this with the compromised widening of Chebucto Rd which helped a little but not as much as it could have, and we see it now when I talk about obvious choke points like North St, parts of Robie St, and parts of Bayers Rd.
It is simply insane. There is no other word for it.
When the Interchange was built it was because people wanted change (it was built 45 years ago). The Harbour Drive through downtown Halifax was stopped at a time when cities like Toronto were building the Gardiner Expressway. If anything, Halifax was ahead of its time by stopping the Harbour Drive. Unfortunately, the Interchange went ahead.
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