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Originally Posted by someone123
I'm not sure if you meant this, but your explanation seems to imply that railways were always public and automobile traffic are private or more private. This isn't the case. There used to be lots of private rail companies and the roads and highways in Nova Scotia are heavily subsidized. For better or worse, there was a deliberate shift in public funding from rail to highways. The decline of the railways only happened after the shift in funding to roads.
This is why we see a stretch of 10-lane highway in Dartmouth (now featuring traffic jams) but almost zero rail service. It's a bit silly that projects like the 102 widening and 3rd bridge will be proposed at a cost of over a billion dollars but then when it comes to transit something like a $20M bus terminal is considered a huge deal and LRT is beyond the pale.
For all the talk of NS being sparsely populated, I bet that some rail service in the Netherlands is subsidized too. In the last few years, probably because of Republican-style propaganda (which seems to seep unthinkingly into public life in Canada too), all public expenses and subsidy have taken on negative connotations. This shouldn't be. Some of these public expenditures are necessary and many of them are excellent projects. Without them, modern life wouldn't be possible.
People in Halifax should accept that given the size of the city and how it's growing there needs to be, over the years and decades, billions of dollars in transportation funding, and there should be some major projects. That is all perfectly normal. There should also be a debate about the allocation breakdown between roads and highways and public transit.
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No, it's not what I meant, nor intended to imply. However, it's my belief that the deliberate shift in public funding was due to the general acceptance of the car as the next big thing in the early 20th century. It could come down to a chicken vs egg scenario, but my impression is that funding was shifted to roads vs rails because that's what the public wanted or the powers that be saw as the future. Perhaps it's more sinister than that, you tell me.
In my post above I was attempting to focus on the years near the end of the small branch lines, from the 1970s to 1990s, as it would be a waste of bandwidth to try to recite the history of rail in Canada for every post involving rail. Sorry if I mislead.
I agree with you that we should be taking on big projects, such as rail and other infrastructure (as I've mentioned in numerous other posts), however in this post I was simply musing at the reasons that places like The Netherlands have such a highly developed rail system vs Canada. I'm sure the true answer would be much more intensive than I could produce, but I'm also sure that population density is a large factor.
FWIW, I don't think you need to venture as far as republican-style propaganda for attitudes on public project spending, you really only have to look as far as municipal and provincial politicians selling the public on the idea budget surpluses are a good thing, or how much better they are than previous governments because they managed to balance the budget.