Several dozen Dartmouth High School students braved a
downpour last Thursday to hold a spirited protest against Metro
Transit’s plans for an expansion of the nearby Bridge Terminal. They
carried signs calling for preservation of the Dartmouth Common, and
chanted “Metro Transit, we need a better plan” and other slogans.
The students were well received by passing motorists, many of whom
honked in support.
As proposed, the expanded terminal will stretch from its present
location next to the Sportsplex, all the way up Nantucket Avenue to the
crosswalk leading to the McDonald’s. A rough sketch of the proposed new
terminal is posted on the city’s website (see tinyurl.com/mzo4jj), but it doesn’t
show the high school. Students and teachers at the school, however, say
the terminal will be just 10 metres from the school.
Moreover, as proposed, the terminal expansion will consume 3.5 acres
of the six-acre Dartmouth Wilderness Park, a forested area of the
Dartmouth Common that has been left in a natural state.
(Full disclosure: I live in the neighbourhood and have a relative
who teaches at the school.)
“We have limited green space left,” says student Chelcy Jordan, one
of the organizers of the protest. “And nobody wants to have an
environment driven by the demands of technology and industrialization.
This is a school environment; this is not a mall, or a parking
space—this is meant for us to grow and learn and have fun while doing
it and to be able to have a healthy environment.”
“I want to save the green space for further use, by maybe reading a
book in the space or something like that,” explains student Jacob
Larkin, another organizer. “Also, I don’t want the bus station too
close to our school—the noise pollution or air pollution could
potentially harm people. And also I have security concerns.”
The Bridge Terminal is one of the busiest in the system, serving 18
bus routes and 17,000 passengers each day, says Metro Transit’s Lori
Patterson. It is presently severely crowded and has no room to handle
the additional buses called for in the city’s five-year transit
plan.
Metro Transit has been working on the terminal expansion plans for
at least a couple of years, and last year the legislature amended the
Municipal Government Act to allow Dartmouth Common land to be used for
the terminal. But the Dartmouth High community wasn’t notified about
the plan until last month, says Michael Cosgrove, a teacher. Students
in Cosgrove’s philosophy class initiated last week’s protest, which was
sanctioned by the school administration.
Many of the protesting students are themselves regular bus users,
and they acknowledge that the existing terminal is too small and
presents a safety hazard to users.
“But the amount of space they want to take up to have a new one, and
where they want to have a new one, is not ideal to us at all,” says
Jordan.
“We’re trying to come up with options,” says Larkin. “I met with a
couple of architects and urban designers—we want to move it a bit
farther from our school, and keep it under a hill, so the noise will be
absorbed by the hill and the trees.
“I want to preserve as much of the trees as possible, because it
also is a part of our heritage. The Nantucket whalers in the 1700s gave
it to us, the people of Dartmouth, so we should cherish this land.”
Students want the new terminal oriented perpendicular to Nantucket,
and to run along the back side of the Sportsplex parking lot, instead
of up the hill. Such an orientation would spare the bulk of the
Wilderness Park and provide a good distance between the terminal and
school.
Patterson says that despite the sketch on the website, no detailed
plans for the terminal have been completed. She insists that there will
be a “green” buffer between the new terminal and the school.
“We looked at different sites,” says Patterson, “but none of them
worked, for various reasons.”
But the idea of purchasing and tearing down the Scotiabank building
at the corner of Wyse and Nantucket to add space to the terminal was
rejected. “I don’t know why,” says Patterson.
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Dartmouth High School students protest bus terminal expansion into the Urban Wilderness Park
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2009.
Don’t these kids have something else to do? We need a new transit terminal there and HRM seems to have made a decision that won’t cost taxpayers’ a bundle in land purchases. Yes we’ll lose a few trees and some green space but hopefully the new facility will encourage more people to park their cars and use transit. It’s a fair trade off.
It’s so easy to put them down as “kids” isn’t it? In fact, because they are young and in school, they have the great luxury of being able to see things clearly, unfettered by venal needs, as we oldies too often are.
The students are the ones who will be adversely affected by this expansion, if it goes ahead as shown in the draft plan. (Did you see that, “voice-of-reason”?) So they are the ones whose voices need to be heard.
First principle: do no harm. Going ahead as shown in the draft will irrevocably harm the commons, will very likely harm the health of the students, teachers and staff at the school, and will visually harm the neighbourhood. (No, I don’t live there.) The plan must be revised. Get rid of the bank and use that area to its fullest, then see what else is needed.
While I don’t disagree with the idea of having the bus terminal plotted perpendicular to Nantucket…
The site isn’t close enough to the school to cause noise and pollution issues. Aside from the fact that it doesn’t extend that far up the block, there’s still going to be a thick stand of trees separating it from the school. (This is all my own personal interpretation of the crappy rendering they sent out combined with Google Earth).
I could take the students seriously if they were a bit more articulate. I went to Citadel and I have the same issue with “Students for Peace and Socialism” or whatever it’s called. One of the students mentions “security concerns”…erm, care to elaborate? I’m left only with questions.
“And nobody wants to have an environment driven by the demands of technology and industrialization. This is a school environment; this is not a mall or a parking lot” – Christ. Y’know, aside from the fact that I have no clue where the mall thing comes into play (hint: it doesn’t), it’s quite obvious that buses are more environmentally-friendly than cars, and if we want expanded transit service in the area, we’ll need to enlarge the bus station.
Robo: The site isn’t near the Commons, but rather, the “Urban Wildnerness Park”.
what about the vacant land across from the old Dartmouth shopping Centre,where the old Star manufacturing site was…seems pretty simple idea to me….old.i forgot.people
might have to waddle two blocks to catch a bus,most need the exercise…
keep up the great work rebels….looks like a great turn-out for sure….never too young to start fighting the man
Fact: The teminal needs improvement
Fact: That location is a great location
Fact: That location is a hot spot for crime at night.
Fact: That location is already a barren wasteland of blacktop and extremely exposed in bad weather.
Question: with so much added capacity, are two entry points really going to be adequate?
Question: If every bus must make a loop of the entire terminal, is that really efficient?
Question: By the looks of the HRM planning map HRM owns most of that block. If that’s the case, and the self-evident benefits of mass transit are what we are using to dismiss these “kids” then why don’t we eat into the Oversized Sportsplex Parking Lot rather than the Wilderness Park. It’s never full, and if it was smaller, well people going there might actually take the bus.
It seems to me that the design is downright uninspired, will exacerbate the already existant atmospheric problems of that swath of Dartmouth, is not efficient or esthetic and will piss off a lot of people. Once you pave it, it’ll never be the same – I’m not asking anyone to buy the bank land, but at least use some of the bitumen that’s already there, the last thing that area needs is more pavement.
Kagurazaka – the boundary of the bus terminal is 50 feet from the school wall. The plan includes, a coffee shop, other reatail, a police office and a rest place for the bus drivers. It is a crap plan because HRM seees ‘free’ land and uses that as a starting point rather than looking at the bridge head and the surrounding area and coming up with a development plan which includes private as well as public property. If HRM doesn’t get it right this entrance to Dartmouth will have as much appeal as a rotting fish or sewage plant that is broken.
Halifaxmentor – the land across from the shopping centre belongs to the Keating family and was assembled more than a decade ago. HRM seems reluctant to engage them in discussing possible development of the land and how it could be put to better use. A few years ago a gas station was proposed, then dropped, from the part facing Wyse road. HRM is obsessed with Halifax and seems willing to just let developers throw up any old crap that fits the zoning. Morons.
Betty Sirus for mayor !!!!!!!
Robo, the Citadel student, needs more information. The bus terminal IS on Common Land. So is the Sportsplex, the Holiday Inn, Dartmouth High, BiCentennial High, three graveyards and the entire mall across from the Wilderness Park. It is similar to the Halifax Common in that there is constant pressure to use it.The Common Land is owned by the citizens and has been since the 1700’s. Development has happened piecemeal and has resulted in a terribly developed downtown Dartmouth. A poor approach to civic dialogue is to deride people, in your case you chose the articulation of your peers. It’s not really productive. Come over here and see what is at stake. Take a walk in the Wilderness Park, and continue to have a social conscience, as it appears you do. We need concerned citizens like you. However, derision and diatribe aren’t super helpful.
The point here, is the 6 acres of Common Land were delegated to bus terminal expansion as an ammendment to a 170 page bill, BILL 179. The matter was never discussed in the legislature. It should have been. It snuck through unnoticed. Also, a better site is in conjunction with a more developed mall across the street. You need to see the full layout of the Commons to get a better sense of how little sense the new location for the terminal makes.
halifaxmentor: The access to the site across from the Dartmouth Shopping Centre is inferior to the current location. Buses coming from Halifax would have to turn left, bad logistics. Always avoid left turns, going straight or right is always more efficient. That land is also privately owned and not for sale.
Come up with an alternative and then I’ll be interested, until then you’re exactly like the NDP: all you know how to do is complain.
Looking at the sketch proposed by HRM, the design is totally suburbanized and not taking the surroundings into consideration, what’s wrong with traditional off-street bus stations like Scotia Scotia on Barrington Street ?
I like to eat apples and bananas.
He first divides all mental perceptions between ideas (thoughts) and impressions (sensations and feelings), and then makes two central claims about the relation between ideas and impressions. First, adopting what is commonly called Hume’s copy thesis, he argues that all ideas are ultimately copied from impressions. That is, for any idea we select, we can trace the component parts of that idea to some external sensation or internal feeling. This claim places Hume squarely in the empiricist tradition, and throughout Book 1 he uses this principle as a test for determining the content of an idea under consideration. Second, adopting what we may call Hume’s liveliness thesis, he argues that ideas and impressions differ only in terms of liveliness. For example, my impression of a tree is simply more vivid than my idea of that tree. His early critics pointed out an important implication of the liveliness thesis, which Hume himself presumably hides. Most modern philosophers held that ideas reside in our spiritual minds, whereas impressions originate in our physical bodies. So, when Hume blurs the distinction between ideas and impressions, he is ultimately denying the spiritual nature of ideas and instead grounding them in our physical nature. In short, these critics argue that, for Hume, all of our mental operations – including our most rational ideas – are physical in nature.
Why wouldn’t Metro Transit want to integrate the terminal with the exsisting Ferry Terminal in Downtown Dartmouth?
To have two major transit terminals split up by over a kilometre – that both service the exact same clientele – makes absolutely no sense to me.
Then they wouldn’t have to bulldoze trees and could instead do something about the derelict industrial lands of the downtown Dartmouth waterfront at the same time as providing a multi-faceted transit hub which Dartmouth desperately needs – place it on that block between Ochterloney and North Street for example – or further down near Park Ave…
Then again, Metro Transit seems to quite often pull these “ideas” out of thin air (or, more often, the deep dark abcesses of their asses, whichever comes first I suppose).
Good on the kids – though they should get used to a life of heartbreak if they think they can change anything about this depressing regressive backwater of a town called Halifax.
Who would want smelly bus exhaust/fumes/noise coming into the classrooms? Yuck!!
Keep up the fight DHS !!