Quote:
Originally Posted by Colin May
A new bridge from Woodside would result in significant sprawl to the east of Dartmouth and the defeat the desire to encourage growth in the urban core. Make it easier and quicker to get to work and people will live further away from the core on larger lots in cheaper homes; creating greater demand for for schools, rec centres, libraries etc,
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One could also make the alternate argument that making it easier to get to the centre of the city would encourage people to do so.
I'm also not sure a bridge would encourage a lot of sprawl beyond Dartmouth—once you're east of Dartmouth, it doesn't really matter which harbour crossing you take, in terms of time spent driving to the bridge. It might boost land values or encourage intensification in Eastern Passage and Cole Harbour, but that's probably a good thing. These are already well within the built-up urban area, and in fact, given their proximity to the peninsula, are ideal candidates for suburban densification in decades to come, once we've infilled the peninsula more thoroughly.
I also think we can rely largely on changing residential preferences to boost populations in the core. (If you look at recent housing starts, they're heavily weighted to multi-unit buildings in the urban core. Single-family is way down.)
In any case, it's definitely a losing battle to try and trick people into living downtown by depriving the city of important long-term infrastructure. I do understand the concerns about sprawl, and they're the same concerns I have about rapid transit: If we make it easy to scoot around the city via LRT on a ROW, I think we can expect a lot of people to decide they want to live at the end of the line. Does that mean we shouldn't build a rapid-transit system? Of course not.
There's a long history of such expansion facilitating sprawl—in the 19th and early 20th century, cities from Vancouver to Toronto to Halifax were building streetcar lines into the countryside to encourage growth. Should we do that? Definitely not, but building a bridge from the centre of the city to an adjacent and populated commuter suburb is not the same thing.
It'd be much easier of we could just implement a Portland-style growth boundary and be done with it.