Whatever happened to the new Bridge Terminal? Plans for new $9.5 million Bridge Terminal were approved by Halifax council at the end of the summer, with a tender put out in late July, with the expectation that the winning bid would be approved in early September, with construction starting by October 1. But into November, there’s still no word as to which company won the contract, and the fall construction season is coming to an end.
The problem is that only two bids were received, from Pomerleau Contracting and Dexter Construction, both about $11.6 million—about 15 percent over budget. At that time, Metro Transit staff said they would do a detailed analysis of the bids to try to identify potential cost savings, but contacted this week, project manager Darren Young refused to comment.
But City Hall plans on reducing the cost of the project by removing the celebrated, but costly, pedestrian bridge from the plans, says a source close to the project who is given anonymity because he could lose his job for speaking without authorization. The bridge was designed to keep pedestrians from having to cross bus lanes to get to the terminal, and to provide access for people with wheelchairs. The bridge is also the signature architectural feature of the design.
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2010.
Caught between rocks, (pyritic slate) and a hard place (the bank account).
I bet the architect is not too pleased., and the wheelchair crowd will be shouting very loudly.
On the positive side we won’t have to worry about punks tossing rocks etc off the top.
My guess is the wheelies will get their bridge, HRM can’t be seen to be shortchanging a minority.
What irks me is that they can’t come up with the extra money it would take to build this greatly needed terminal, but they’re managing to come up with way more to put into a convention centre that is only going to benefit a small portion of the population.
A well done terminal will benefit all, for different reasons. The convention centre will only benefit those who build it(briefly) and those who’s livelihood relies on conventions. The rest of us will just see it as a building to walk by everyday.
Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it the case that all we need – really need – is a better *bus terminal*? Forget the frigging architectural statements, all that the public wants is some roofs, maybe a bit of windscreening, and a small building to provide a warm place to pee and have a dump. All that MT itself needs is more space to wheel the buses around and pick people up. There is no way when you really scrutinize the actual requirements that the cost for this project should have been more than half of the “target”.
Cut out the frills and you can put that bridge in. And by the way, you don’t need lots of benches and warm places to hang out if there’s enough buses and routes. Maybe if you save a few millions by not building Alvar Aalto bus stations you get to buy some more buses even.