Quote:
Originally Posted by halifaxboyns
The comments from FOS don't surprise me. The GM for the planning department out here retired and in his parting comments, he noted that the change that is being invisioned for Calgary is going to be tough on many communities.
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In a way Halifax might be worse than Calgary since in Halifax the growth is more moderate. Another difference is that a lot of people move to Calgary for economic reasons --
because it's growing -- whereas a lot of people in inner-city Halifax have simply been there for many decades. Areas like Spring Garden Road saw almost no construction from around 1990-2002 (there was LOTS of construction in the 1980's) and it seems like that became a new norm for many people.
Similarly in Halifax infrastructure problems develop slowly and it's hard to sell forward-thinking planning. There definitely seems to be an attitude in Halifax that transportation problems and the like aren't really a big deal and that they'll just sort themselves out, or something. We don't really need a third bridge, we don't really need Bayers Road widened, we can't have rail transit, but maybe we'll look at adding some new buses someday. Halifax's self image and planning regime is still in transition between a small town scale and the medium-sized city approach that will be required to tackle future problems.
Looking at Calgary's planning history really puts things into perspective. The C-Train was advocated in a 1967 report and the modern plan was adopted in 1977. According to Wikipedia construction started 1 month later, which I'm not sure has ever happened in the history of HRM. In 1977, Calgary had about 490,000 people. Right now Halifax is probably around 413,000.