Transportation Capitalizing on its location at the confluence of the Saint John River and the Bay of Fundy, Saint John relied initially on the timber trade, shipping business and shipbuilding industry to position itself in a transport network encompassing the province, the Atlantic coastal communities, and the colonial empire.

Growth in the Canadian West and the advent of railways laced Saint John's waterfront with grain galleries and rail lines as the city claimed its role as winter port of Canada, thus becoming part of the Canadian system of cities through its transport sector. Steamships deposited trans-Atlantic passengers who boarded trains, continuing their journeys inland. Regularly scheduled coastal steamships from Boston and railways enhanced the city's emerging tourism industry.

Saint John's three peninsula topography demanded a cross harbour ferry to connect the main peninsula with the west side, while a secondary harbour emerged at Indiantown to handle much of the river traffic unable to pass through the Reversing Falls. A ferry system also anchored the up-river towns and villages to the city's hinterland. By mid-century a Suspension Bridge spanned the Falls, strengthening communication within the harbour community; a generation later in 1885 a railway bridge tied the city to the rest of Canada. In 1915 the fairly narrow Suspension Bridge was replaced by a wider structure designed to accommodate a range of traffic from the ubiquitous pedestrian, to horse and buggy conveyances, then only beginning to be replaced by automobiles, and finally to the mass transit of its day - the urban street railway.

Gradually busses replaced street railways, and after World War II, as automobile ownership increased, rail travel everywhere declined. Exquisite examples of railroad infrastructure, such as the Union Station, were replaced by parking garages and four lane highways. A viaduct, once proposed in the nineteenth century to accommodate rail-based travel and commerce, was built a century later as part of highway development.

As the auto became the preferred transport mode, retail development focused on parking-free mall construction, with the first mall opening in the mid-1950s, and successive mall developments continuing to require huge amounts of land to support acres of parking and more highways.

Meanwhile, the city's uptown began to host a greater number of retail boutiques, restaurants and cultural attractions, including the entrance to Harbour Passage, a pedestrian walkway, quietly reconnecting Saint John to the source of its earliest transport sector, the waterfront.