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Originally Posted by someone123
It's fine to say that retail should be downtown and that there should be good transit service and so on but that's not what the HRM has and it's not likely to happen anytime soon. It's in fact much worse because there is so much obstructionism downtown.
I also don't think that suburban retail areas need to be as terrible as Bayers Lake is. Part of the problem with Bayers Lake is its awful design. It could have been mixed-use with much better access for everything - cars, transit, pedestrians, and cyclists.
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Most big box stores belong in suburban business parks. They would be out of place in a dense downtown city core. The core should concentrate on restaurants, pubs, specialty retailers, neighbourhood services (grocery stores, pharmacies etc.) and commercial service providers (like Staples).
My main objection to Bayer's Lake is the absolute lack of planning that went into this development. It wasn't even supposed to be a retail development in the first place and then just grew like topsy to become the monster that it currently is today.
Despite this, I am not against expanding Bayer's Lake. This might in fact be an opportunity to correct some of the past wrongs of this development - I'm thinking particularly of traffic access and traffic flow here. Also, most of the stores that usually set up in a place like Bayer's Lake wouldn't seriously think about locating downtown in the first place. An expansion to Bayer's Lake would be more of a threat to Dartmouth Crossing than to downtown.
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