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Posted: Dec 2, 2011 10:32 PM AT

Last Updated: Dec 2, 2011 10:30 PM AT

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Mary MacDonald, who uses a wheelchair, says it’s a huge inconvenience that the No.52 bus no longer cuts through the main parking lot of the shops in Bayers Lake Business Park. (CBC)

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Some transit users who take the No.52 bus through Bayers Lake Business Park are frustrated with changes being made to the popular bus route, which no longer goes across the business centre’s main parking lot.

Mary MacDonald, who uses a wheelchair, says she takes the bus to go shopping at Bayers Lake on a regular basis and used to get dropped off at one of four stops in the parking lot.

But the No.52 now only stops on Chain Lake Drive, which she says is making her commute more challenging.

She said she has to completely reassess the situation to figure out how she’ll get around.

“I don’t know if the bus stop down there is wheelchair accessible. I’d have to check that out,” she said.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE Bayers Lake bus route change angers rider – Nova Scotia – .

1 – there are no sidewalks on the inbound side of Chain Lake Drive so passengers are dropped off on a concrete island pad with in some cases 100′s of feet to the nearest driveway. Should make things really interesting in the winter.

2 – none of the driveways from Chain Lake Drive up to the retailers has any allowance for pedestrians … in fact there is not even any shoulder along the curb, forcing those brave enough into the driveways to play do dodge ball & now there will be many more trying.

3 – all of the retail outlets currently served by the #52 inbound are set back +500 feet from Chain Lake Drive & elevated at least 20 feet above street level. It is not uncommon to see people who feel they are mountain goats try to scale the steep banks close to the street in order to shorten the trip.

4 – As an example …. the last stop on the current rout through the parking area is in front of Wal-Mart. Most trips there are 8-20 passengers get on the bus at this stop. There is a notice at that stop instructing the passengers to go to the stop on Chain Lake Drive in front of Costco … a distance of +/- 1,000 feet with no sidewalks, no cross walks and no option. Pedestrian / passengers will be strolling through the parking areas & down those steep narrow drive ways caring their purchases … in all sorts of weather.

This is just NOT a safe change! There will be accidents.

5 – All of us regular customers of Metro Transit are being tossed into traffic just as the busy Christmas season starts. Those of us who are lucky enough to be able bodied might be able to adjust our shopping & travel times to meet this change but the car drivers are not going to be prepared to give the right of way.

6 – one of the advantages of the current rout is that any handicapped passengers could get dropped or picked up immediately in front of the retailers in this section of Bayers Lake. I don’t even want to think of the challenges that will face any one with a hearing, sight or mobility restrictions when faced with this change.

There has to be a better way to handle this… or at least the change should be delayed until proper sidewalks are installed, cross walks in place and room allowed along the driveways for pedestrians.

The widening of Bayers Road is not just a bad idea, it’s a horrific idea.

Quite literally, if the Bayers Road/102 widening project moves forward, it will utterly destroy any hope that HRM will ever have an effective transit system. It will cost us about a billion dollars for construction, then untold billions more to operate the thing, money exported right out the province, year after year after year, assuming we can afford it in the first place.

In short, the Bayers Road project is a make or break moment for the province of Nova Scotia and the city of Halifax and its suburbs. We either kill this project now and adopt sensible transportation policies, or we lose the possibility forever.

The project

Bayers Road widening has been talked about since at least 2006, when it was incorporated in the HRM Regional Plan. But we need to understand that the project is much, much larger than simply the stretch of Bayers Road between Windsor Street to the beginning of Highway 102; in fact, from a conventional traffic engineering standpoint, there’s no sense in widening Bayers Road unless the rest of the project also proceeds— that is, the widening, rebuilding, realignment of Highway 102 from Bayers Road, up past Bayers Lake, around Bedford and all the way up to Exit 5 in Waverley. It assumes that highway 107 in Dartmouth will be extended (the so-called Burnside-Sackville Connector) to Highway 102 near Duke Street, or more likely, to Highway 101 in Sackville, and it assumes that a highway 113 will be built from Bedford to Tantallon.

The traffic engineers want to widen Bayers Road because widening Highway 102 will bring so much traffic onto Bayers Road that it will have to be widened as well.

via Billion dollar Bayers Road/102 project will destroy Halifax transit forever.

By JOHN DEMONT Business Reporter       Wed, Sep 7 – 4:54 AM

With new business and residential developments in the works, Halifax’s downtown commercial centre is primed for a renaissance. (Tim Krochak / Staff)

Remember Halifax’s Spring Garden Road back in the 1990s? Louis Lawen does — the empty malls, the blank storefronts, the fast-food joints occupying prime street-front real estate space.

“It didn’t much look like a place where anything was happening,” the president of Dexel Developments says. “Not like now.”

That’s not just a developer’s empty talk.

Lawen’s company, after all, is behind the high-end 97-unit residential development over City Centre Atlantic. But that’s only one of a long list of residential and commercial developments already underway or on the planning board for the Spring Garden Road area.

The new library, when it is finished, may be the shining symbol of the area’s rebirth. But 1,000 residential units are also set to come on stream in the next few years. And that figure is sure to soar, given the large swaths of downtown land likely to fall into developers’ hands in the near future.

There’s a new look coming for Spring Garden Road – Business – TheChronicleHerald.ca.

If it goes ahead, the proposed convention centre for downtown Halifax will certainly be a big construction project.

It does involve big sums of money from federal, provincial and municipal levels of government. In fact, since the feds announced their contribution of $51.4 million, the developer has said the overall cost of $159 million will be even bigger.

There are big numbers of construction jobs and person hours of work predicted. The province says 12,000 jobs.

And it will fill a big hole in the middle of Halifax. The hope is that this will prompt further development to fill those other big holes on Barrington Street and other parts of downtown Halifax.

So yes, it is a big plan, no question, but what this convention centre project is not, is a big idea.

It is an example of thinking from “inside the box.” Sure, it will put Halifax on the map as a premier destination for convention business, along with all the other cities with convention centres that occupy that same map. Ottawa and Winnipeg are building their new convention centres, too. Halifax will be right in the horse race with the rest of them.

Conventional thinking not big enough – TheNovaScotian – TheChronicleHerald.ca.

It was reported this week that Nova Scotia Business Inc. is seeking $300,000 from the owner of a failed cruise business, Canadian Sailing Expeditions Inc. NSBI provided the company with a $2.5-million loan guarantee in exchange for a personal guarantee from the owner and fellow guarantors.

It was also reported this week that a wood pellet mill in Upper Musquodoboit, subsidized by taxpayers, has been placed in receivership. Enligna Canada Inc. received almost $2.8 million in two loans from NSBI in 2009 and 2010.

As of last month, the province was also owed money by Maritime Steel and Foundries Ltd., and it was unclear how much of its $2-million investment would be recovered through a new plan to revive the bankrupt company under new ownership.

Halifax convention centre looks like a good bet – Business – TheChronicleHerald.ca.

Bevboy’s Blog: Post 1679 -

Welcome back to the Things in Halifax That Just Don’t Make Sense series!

This very-irregularly-published series is about things in Halifax which, at first blush, may look just fine.  But, upon closer examination, they don’t make sense.  They may even be stupid.

I do apologize for letting this series go dark for the last 17 months.  I did not mean for this to happen.  I will try to do more of these posts depending on Bevboy’s Blog feedback.  Do let me know what you think of these posts, folks.

(You can see the former entries in this series by clicking on the “Nonsense” label that is associated with this post.)

You are looking at a picture of the so-called Twisted Sisters lot, and what the proposed buildings would look like.   This lot, for many years, housed what everyone called the Tex Park, which was a Texaco service station on both the Granville Street and Hollis Street sides.  You could buy gas on either side.  I believe that you could get your car fixed as well at one point.  Above the gas stations you could park your car.

Read the rest of this blog …… Bevboy’s Blog: Post 1679 – Things in Halifax That Just Don’t Make Sense, Part Nine.

Rex’s take on the riots      – June 16, 2011

Those clod poles, ne’er-do-wells, vandals, punks, thugs and assorted clueless dolts who smacked people around, piled on others, fought with and sought to injure police, set fire to cars, broke into stores, trashed and looted at will in Vancouver last night – are all a pathetic pack of cowardly destructive losers. An older generation, not bent by the winds of political correctness would rightly have called them the scum of the earth.

There aren’t any excuses for they did. None. None. At. All. If these whiny, pampered, useless sacks of skin even try to claim it was because their team lost, then they haven’t got the intelligence of a ball of mud. Fools don’t need a motive to be fools and destructive and threatening fools, such as those who rioted last night in Vancouver are no exception to this rule. This kind of fool will riot when “his” team wins as easily as when it loses, the game was just a convenient trigger.

The damage was one thing. The insolence is altogether another. Consider what they did.

These vulgarians defecated on the reputation of one of Canada’s first cities. They hurt the stores and the employment of honest city-caring people in Vancouver. They sprayed dirt and worse into the face of every half decent sports fan in all of North America. They turned what was – even with the loss – a moment of intense national interest and pride into a world-class embarrassment, an ugly, bloody, ignorant and arrogant stain on the city that hosted the Olympics.

They trashed our country’s reputation as well.

Read /view the video at …. CBC News – The National – Rex Murphy – Rex’s take on the riots.

Nova Scotia’s NDP government wants a new study on the socio-economic impacts of gambling, after scuttling such a study in 2009.

Communities, Culture, and Heritage Minister Dave Wilson, responsible for Part I of the Gaming Control Act, said this morning that the work will be done through the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation, which he said is arm’s-length from government.

Wilson couldn’t say when the study would start or finish. He said there’s now a transition underway with Gambling Awareness Nova Scotia being folded into that organization.

He said the study will examine gambling-related suicides.

Dexter government wants new gambling study – Front – TheChronicleHerald.ca.

The pathetic farce that passes in Halifax for good civic government reached a new low on Tuesday.

It was bad enough watching four hours of ineffective efforts to hold Mayor Peter Kelly to account on a matter that he refuses to be held accountable.

None of the councillors who were supposedly mounting the effort to bring Kelly to task were capable, apparently, of mustering a workable amendment to a motion that was obviously on the verge of being defeated, a call for a police investigation into the scandal surrounding unauthorized cash advances paid to a concert promoter.

That was bad enough, but as the vote was held, Kelly took the opportunity to scold councillors who had publicly questioned, in the days before Tuesday’s meeting, the legality of the payments.

Kelly complained about comments that he says included “a lot of innuendo and comment, especially in terms of illegality.”

The mayor was speaking from the chairman’s position, having ignored requests that he recuse himself from chairing the meeting during a debate on a matter in which he is a central figure, in what is an obvious conflict.

He then went on to chastise councillors — you might want to buckle up for this one — for their failure to represent the municipal council in a favourable light.

“When you make comments, you make them for all of us,” he scolded.

The unmitigated gall of the man.

Read the rest of this Opinion Piece >>>>>Kelly’s criticism height of hypocrisy – Opinion – TheChronicleHerald.ca.