Some of these will be perhaps of greater cost or difficulty to implement, but hey - ideas have to start somewhere. I am going to start off small and work my way up.
Do More Scramble Crosswalks
The no-brainer of all no-brainers is to take the lights at Spring Garden and Barrington and make that a scramble crossing. That's when all cars stop for the same cumulative time they are already stopped, and pedestrians can walk from any corner to any corner. As it is now, any T intersection in the urban core can benefit from this. It should not greatly affect traffic flow, and should improve it as vehicles wishing to turn are not delayed by pedestrians (the rest of the time there is no pedestrian crossing at all). It is possible now to be coming down Spring Garden to turn on to Barrington, and not get through a light even if you are second in line, simply because of all the people crossing from in front of the Maritime Centre to Spring Garden. Most of them legally. No right turns of red allowed. No pedestrian - vehicle conflicts other than ones from illegal movements.
This works at George and Water (especially when the ferry has just arrived or is about to leave) and would be good at Sackville and Brunswick. Let's just do this.
Reinforce Lines of Desire, Especially those on a Diagonal
This is perhaps more of a principle than a project. The idea here is to identify the routes people now use to walk though our city, and reinforce these corridors with better infrastructure, things that make it easier to use, barrier free, and provide priority over cars. Ideally bikes get to play too.
One of my "Aha! moments" happened while walking down Market Street in San Francisco. I realized that walking on that diagonal, I got to look down (or up) nearly every single street in the city. The ones running North-South, AND the ones running East-West. Years later, while participating in a workshop on siting the new Halifax Library, I realized that there is a significant diagonal path through our own downtown that is a very powerful economic corridor. Because, like Market Street in San Fran, you can link to almost every street in the downtown.
Start at Purdy's Towers and go across Water and Hollis (yikes!) to the end of the Granville Mall, up the hill to Barrington, cross Grand Parade on an angle to Argyle and Prince, then to Blowers and up along Grafton to the path in front of the library to Spring Garden. And soon, right into the new Library.
When the Cogswell Interchange is redeveloped this will be even more important. It is also very much connected to access points to the indoor pedway system we now have, so there are places to duck in out of the rain or cold and still move half of this trip inside if you must.
This is about a 20 minute slow walk, 15 for me. Things along it that we could do to make it better would include making that crossing from Historic Properties to Granville Mall safer, extending Granville Mall and opening it up to "vehicles as secondary occupants" (Like Prince Arthur in Montreal) all the way to George Street (thus fixing up that dead cold bit between George and Duke), actually finish the Grand Parade renovation that was designed but not built before the G7, making the front of St. Paul's into a more modern space with a clear diagonal path from the monument to the southwest corner. Use the upcoming construction of a new facade/streetface of the Convention Centre to create a desirable pedestrian path along Argyle, possibly doing the Prince Arthur treatment there as well. Make the old library site into a proper park, with a speakers corner/performance type venue and hopefully some significant partnering with the First Nations group that currently has an option of sorts on the site.
Then you're on Spring Garden, which needs little or no new things, just upgrades to what they have. Nicer furniture and surfaces. Perhaps more on-street meter parking and less cab stands. You're connected to the Public Gardens and on the way you've looked down Water, Hollis, Duke, up Carmichael to the Town Clock and the Citadel, Barrington, Prince, Blowers, and Grafton - businesses' signage can respond to that. For a tourist, that's Halifax in 20 minutes, leaving lots of time for shopping.
It's not pyramid power. It's diagonal power.
There is another significant pedestrian line of desire route that is not as integrated into the street network, but is a major pedestrian corridor. It's connected to the one I just described. Start at Queen and Spring Garden (yes, the library again), walk Queen to Sackville, cross, cut straight across the corner of Citadel Hill and either veer left to follow Bell, or right to follow Ahern. Bell takes you to the path across the Common by the Skatepark, and then straight across the Common to the Robie/Cunard corner, where a tremendous amount of pedestrians are inconvenienced every day by the pedestrian hating crossing lights.
On this route mini projects could include widening sidewalk along Queen, installing a better crosswalk on Queen and Sackville (I believe traffic here warrants a signal, or a small roundabout). Make the trail across the Garrison Grounds/Citadel Hill into a real one, and not the goat path it now is. Formalize the connection to the bikeway on Bell and the connection to the path around the Bengal Lancers past the Museum to Summer Street and the hospital and ultimately Jubilee Road. Acknowledge the line of design along a common elevation of the Citadel, with a connection down to the door to Citadel High and the Spatz Theatre, and ultimately connect to the new trail along Trollope and through to the one on the east side of the Common. Then you're dead on to Agricola, what will probably be the main bike street. It is now.
The other leg, over to the skate park and on to the Pavillion and The Oval, is built, and used. The Common only needs to be rearranged to allow people to be able to walk easily on the lne they want to. The best answer here is an interesting one.
Freashwater Brook once wandered through a bog approximately along what is now the clear preferred walking path on the Common, from the northwest corner to the skatepark. There is a storm sewer there now. Lets open this back up, and daylight the stream here, with trails on either side meandering gently along that original route. The oval pond that used to exist on Freshwater Brook is now the skatepark, so perhaps we'll leave that part hidden for now. And anyways, it turned into a fairly deep ravine where it ran along the west side of the museum, ultimately into the Public Gardens.
Its a lot easier to make a path where people already walk and bike, than to try to force them to go your way. Maybe we can do more than just pave a path while we're at it?
Make the Railway Cut Into a Multi-Story Active Transportation Corridor
This is a doozy, and hopefully it won't make you stop reading now, but this idea has been floating around in my head for a few years now, ever since I noticed how deep The Trillium was excavating for parking, and how much that excavation into Halifax's bedrock looked exactly like the sides of the rail cut.
I have long been a proponent of getting the truck traffic to the container pier the hell out of downtown. Since about 1985 I have understood the incredible economic and quality of life damage that the congestion, noise, exhaust and hammering of city streets the constant transport of containers down Water Street and Hollis Street has on the downtown. If those were gone, the change would be astounding. Streets and lanes would not have to be as big as they now are, you could hear yourself think on Hollis and Water, and traffic would flow much more smoothly. I still remember Phil Vaughan coming into his office on Hollis Street every morning and having to straighten out all his awards and certificated and photographs, framed and hanging askew on his wall.
The way to solve this is pretty simple, I think, the rail cut should be used for this traffic. But studies repeatedly get saddled with Terms of References that result in proposed solutions that end up costing far more than it should to solve this problem. One problem with studies is often a "blinders on" approach to a task that leaves out the opportunity for lateral thinking, and identifying opportunities to solve other problems at the same time, thus "sharing the load" of the cost of solving the initial problem.
We know we can pave the rail line and leave the rails there like street car track in a big city street (Halifax is not a big city). Trucks have big wheels. They can drive on that no problem. There is a huge area at each end of the rail cut where trucks already are marshalled to wait for ships to load and unload. They could easily be held to reach a convoy size and proceed as a group from one yard to the other without affecting trip time. It would be pretty simple to do this with a basic schedule.
That is not a new idea. Here is an idea that is a bit radical, but I'll share it anyway. The rail cut between the South End Terminal and, let's say to Chisholm Avenue, is a lot of real estate. About 3.4 miles and most of that is 100 feet wide. Lets remove the part that is at grade along by the West End Mall, and call it 3 miles. So we have real estate with an area of about 36 acres. Some of that land, were it at normal surface grade, would be very valuable for residential, university, and open space use. And we only really need to be able to fit two train tracks through it.
So why not simply make the train and truck way into a subway by building over it, and using the rest of the volume, where the cut is deep enough, for underground parking for new buildings? In Montreal, Via Rail runs under and through several large hi rises, after it's run under Mount Royal. And the noisy rock excavation (of acid slate) is already done! Plus the noise from the trains and trucks is buried along with their travel way. The new subway, much of it, could be created one piece at a time by the buildings. The engineering for this is out there, that's how a lot of subways are built now, not by tunnelling, but by digging a trench and covering it.
But wait, there's more! This is already a corridor. Other things that need such a corridor but might be a bit dicey to fit through the fabric of the city streets could use it. Natural gas mains, wind proof underground electrical banks, new water transmission lines, communications, whatever. These could all be run "underground" without digging.
The surface area around these new buildings, matched to the existing edges of the rail cut, offers a great opportunity for an active transportation route. We have already done some of this, along the south end of Oxford Street. Imagine if you had a bikeway and a trail running along the "top" of an infilled cut. It's connectivity would be amazing. A typical bike going at 14 mph could bring a commuter from the West End Mall to the Seaport Market in 15 minutes, easy. Some days, that's hard to beat with a car going through the city street network (Google says 13 minutes). And the route would connect with powerful cross city street corridors like Jubilee, South, Tower, Robie, South Park, ultimately connecting to the Trans Canada Trail (yes, the waterfront walkway is either on the TCT or planned to be) and easy access to the downtown, ferries, Point Pleasant, and the farmers markets.
So you create new real estate for residential development, with underground parking for them half done, and require the developer to build their part of the trail system, all the while removing the truck and train traffic from the neighbourhoods the rail runs through now.
Yes, this is expensive. Yes it is huge. But it would be an amazing thing to have in our city. A silk purse from a sow's ear.
So there you have it. Three ideas, big medium and small. If we could wave a magic wand and make them happen, Halifax sure would be a nicer place to walk and bike around. And we'd have a lot more people living on the peninsula to do just that.
Hopefully someone will suggest a few more. You?
"And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly ..."
-- from Machiavelli's "The Prince"
