This morning CBC radio broadcast from the new Community College in Dartmouth. Much was made of the new building’s eco-friendly design and operation which, according to a press release from the college, includes:
This is truly a good thing, and we should applaud the effort.
But…
Whatever the eco-credentials of the campus, there’s no getting around its geographic location– three and a half kilometres out Pleasant Street from downtown Dartmouth. On the plus side, the campus is next to the Woodside Ferry terminal and on a bus line, but there’s no getting around the fact that soon thousands more daily car trips will be made down Pleasant Street. So, the buidling itself may have a small eco footprint, but the people using it will be the souce of a great deal of new greenhouse gas emissions.
This was missed in the CBC discussion, but the show did go on to interview Tim Olive, the president of the Downtown Dartmouth Business Association, who said predictable things about the campus bringing new life to downtown. Why exactly these students would get in their cars and drive three and a half kilometres to get lunch or whatever downtown wasn’t explained. As usual, small town boosterism sees everything as a plus, even something as straightforwardly bad for business as building new stuff, ya know, somewhere else.
Both the environmental issues and the health of downtown Dartmouth could have been addressed had the campus been placed downtown in the first place.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2007.