[someone123]

Sprawl to the North will continue but it is a supply/demand driven process. If there are two competing areas where new construction is viable, the Northern suburbs will capture less of the new development.

The MacKay didn't promote growth near the foot of the bridge because this area was already built out and Burnside was planned as an industrial area, while to the North of that are DND lands. Sackville was also promoted as a new growth area by the government in the 1970s.

As far as I know, most of the empty land between Cole Harbour and Dartmouth is suitable for development.

The argument that roads create sprawl is overly simplified and doesn't capture what's really going on. Halifax is simply a bigger city than it used to be. Being a bigger city implies more land and more buildings. The amount of sprawl in a city should be considered in terms of ratio and proportion - i.e. amount of land used per resident (as a counterexample, suppose we compare Tokyo to Halifax.. is it sprawlier because it covers more land?). Building a new bridge does not necessarily cause this to go up when it's built in a growing city.

The congestion arguments ("if you build more roads they just get congested and we're back to square one!") are also bogus since they ignore the whole point, which is increased capacity. Expanded roads allow more people to move around at roughly the same speed, which is exactly what is needed in a city where the population is growing. In Halifax the aim is to keep congestion roughly equal to what it is now while absorbing further increases in traffic through a combination of road projects and transit.