Dartmouth Crossing vs. Downtown Halifax

I just received a press release from the Greater Burnside Business Association. They are in opposition to a plan by nearby Dartmouth Crossing to rezone 31.5 hectares of land to the north of the shopping complex, from commercial to residential. Dartmouth Crossing wants to build apartment complexes, containing 1,500 units, on the land.

There are legitimate arguments on either side of the rezone issue. Personally, I think that mixed use developments—commercial with residential—are essential, but everything about Dartmouth Crossing was so horribly planned that this particular residential development makes no sense at all. Your opinion may differ, and that’s fine.

What I find interesting, though, is the Burnside Business Association’s logic for opposing the rezone:

“HRM’s Business Parks Functional Plan, and specifically its focus on Burnside, has not yet been officially adopted by HRM,” says Nancy Sweeney, chair of the GBBA. “The total inventory of industrial zoned land within HRM has yet to be defined. In addition, there’s no master transportation plan, by either the municipality or the province, to address the movement of public or commercial vehicles in, through or around Greater Burnside.”

“Furthermore,” Sweeney continues, “HRM still needs to step up its review of public transportation, as there aren’t enough buses or routes into or through Greater Burnside to properly service the current demand. Adding 1,500 more residences is only going to put additional strain on an already inadequate transit infrastructure.”

This is absolutely correct. We shouldn’t be building stuff out there willy-nilly; rather, it should all be planned out on the macro level first—where are the cars going to travel and how will they impact the overall transportation system? Can the bus system accommodate this development? Are we shortchanging the amount of land needed for business parks? All very good questions.

But that is precisely the reason that GPI Atlantic opposes the implementation of HRM By Design, the downtown planning initiative—the big picture plans have not yet been completed:

For example, with regard to transportation in particular—a key component of the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index (GPI) for which GPI Atlantic recently developed a separate HRM-specific transportation study—the foundational HRM documents have yet to be completed. Thus HRM’s Transportation Master Plan—which itself will be comprised of five key Functional Plans—does, encouragingly, promise and intend to deal effectively with sustainable transportation issues, including improving public transit, active transportation, and transportation demand management.

But this TMP has not yet been fully developed and integrated into the overall HRM by Design Plan, with only the active transportation and parking functional plans so far completed and approved by Council. The public transit functional plan has yet to be tabled with Council and the all-important transportation demand management functional plan and road and road network functional plan are still under development, though these are arguably among the most important documents required to assess the transportation impacts of HRM by Design.

And yet, the HRM by Design Plan targets the downtown for “significant” residential and commercial growth, which may well translate into a significant increase in vehicular traffic in the downtown area unless a coherent and fully developed transportation plan spells out in detail how that growth can be accommodated sustainably and without increasing traffic.

In all likelihood, city council will (appropriately) listen to the Burnside folks and delay any rezone of Dartmouth Crossing until after the various functional plans are in place. But, they’ll reject GPI Atlantic’s advise and make all the bylaw changes related to HRM By Design, even though the various functional plans are not in place.

Why should the logic hold in Dartmouth Crossing but not downtown?

This article appears in May 7-13, 2009.