Quebec-Windsor Corridor

[just east of the creek]

This isn't future election policy, simply policy recommended by party members at convention. It's not binding for election policy decision-making.

I think we all understand that, but if you are as evasive as our local candidates are, you realize there will be no stated policy until PP’s PMO’s office takes shape, so we are left with this guidance only. Their last fundraising effort appeared to be more concerned about ‘woke’ Tim Horton coffee cup lids than any meaningful public policy. It is a tiresome conversation.

 

[Bordercollie]

I think we all understand that, but if you are as evasive as our local candidates are, you realize there will be no stated policy until PP’s PMO’s office takes shape, so we are left with this guidance only. Their last fundraising effort appeared to be more concerned about ‘woke’ Tim Horton coffee cup lids than any meaningful public policy. It is a tiresome conversation.

The problem is that they don't have a real clear stance on anything except that they unconditionally 100% supposed Israel, they are against the carbon tax, but don't have a climate plan. They also oppose universal dental care and pharmacare for children and seniors.

Given that I find it hard to believe that they would support anything that costs tax payers money to build a passenger train system. They are fiscally conservative, building a pipe dream train line is likely not part of their agenda unless it's funded by the private sector and run and managed by the private sector. It will be like the 407 where only wealthy people can afford it and regular people will take the milk run slow lakeshore trains.

 

[Urban Sky]

The problem is that they don't have a real clear stance on anything except that they unconditionally 100% supposed Israel, they are against the carbon tax, but don't have a climate plan.

They also wants to close the CBC and everyone working there knows what awaits them once he is in power. He has not shown anything like that towards VIA or HFR and the criticisms he has of the CBC don’t apply here (as HFR will be run by the private sector and it’s not competing against private competitors in the same industry).

They also oppose universal dental care and pharmacare for children and seniors.

These are government services (paid out continuously as operating subsidies), not government investments (paid out upfront as capital expenditure).

Given that I find it hard to believe that they would support anything that costs tax payers money to build a passenger train system. They are fiscally conservative, building a pipe dream train line is likely not part of their agenda

It will certainly be difficult to convince a fiscally conservative government of paying for “a pipe dream train line”, but if they find the proposed taxpayer share for the price tag too big to justify, they will have the ability to insist that the selected private partners find ways to descope the project until the taxpayer exposure becomes more palatable.

unless it's funded by the private sector

It will be, at least partly.

and run and managed by the private sector.

It will be.

It will be like the 407 where only wealthy people can afford it and regular people will take the milk run slow lakeshore trains.

Toll roads work fundamentally different from rail infrastructure, as they compete against infrastructure which is provided to any users for the free (the public road network), which means you will never be proce-competitive (unless you just don’t charge any tolls). This means that the only way to make money is to provide users with something they value and that is: saving them time and the inconvenience of being stuck in traffic. And this is where this becomes a function of demand and supply: the more overall traffic volumes increase, the more the equilibrium price rises and as much as this makes them look like greedy, price-gorging hyper-capitalists, they have no choice other than to increase tolls, because underpricing the tolls increases traffic and thus congestion, which reduces the time savings and thus reduces the driver’s willingness to pay.

Conversely, the only way to make money from rail infrastructure is to run trains close to capacity and considering that the Japanese run double-tracked HSR with up to 14 trains per hour, we really don’t have to fear that the infrastructure owner has to start aggressively pricing out demand…

 

[afransen]

This assumes there is any configuration of HFR with a small enough public contribution for PP that is also financially viable for private sector partners. Much likelier that the whole thing stagnates.

You also seem to assume that PP's issue with the CBC is principled rather than pragmatic in a way that could inform how he would approach other services. I don't share that view.

 

[Urban Sky]

This assumes there is any configuration of HFR with a small enough public contribution for PP that is also financially viable for private sector partners. Much likelier that the whole thing stagnates.

I don’t know what the red lines of the private investors are, but if the government scales the project down to the point that the selected investors walk away, then this wouldn’t be wuite a different situation from on where the government simply nixed the project.

You also seem to assume that PP's issue with the CBC is principled rather than pragmatic in a way that could inform how he would approach other services. I don't share that view.

I really hope that the people at VIA HFR-TGF and the CIB have considered the possibility that a conservative government might be much less inclined to spend big on HSR, but the scope creep we’ve seen so far (extension to Quebec City, electrification, elimination of a slower example which doesn’t trigger full grade seperation) is ringing a worrying number of red bells. If HFR fails to materialize during the next government, I’d place at least half of the blame on the project promoters for apparently failing to do their homework (i.e., anticipating and accommodating different priorities amongst different governments).

I’m pretty sure PP would love to have something to rub it into JT’s face that “whereas the incompetent Trudeau government dithered endlessly and let scope creep turn a sensible idea into a second California HSR monster, we cut the unnecessary bloat and got the project of the ground, delivering real improvements for passengers rather than unserious lofty promisses”*. The question is whether there will be plans in the drawer which are actually interesting for him…

* Seriously, the parallels to CAHSR and Wynne’s unserious election stunts contemplating HSR in SWO are increasingly worrying me…

 

[dowlingm]

To my mind HFR (on the existing VIA service areas) would be more of a Tory friendly policy, targeted as a rural to urban service to please conservative ridings/voters in central Ontario and the Montreal hinterland.

It could be delivered for a relatively modest sum (depending on how closely CN were policed vs Kingston Sub Third Track Project) - recall the Conservative MP and MPP getting exercised about the return of 643 (now 641) - and positioned as a return-to-office-friendly service for workers who moved out of GTA during pandemic and don’t want to move back to even more expensive housing markets (and of course to conservative business owners who view all hybrid or remote workers as layabouts), and also to meet in some degree commuting demand resulting from the withdrawal of Exo from the St Hyacinthe route, if that proceeds.

HSR is simply another order of magnitude in terms of costs of building new alignments, electrifying them, and acquiring >125mph trainsets. It’s a better overall outcome, and something a conservative government might continue if a liberal government had taken 3-4 years of budget hits in land acquisition and prepartory works, and there was a sense of being too far along to stop - but that’s not where we are now

 

[chrisw]

Not even close to CAHSR level. No experience with environmental assessment but hopefully it goes more smoothly here (CEQA lawsuits are a disaster). CAHSR has more challenging terrain through mountain ranges. Maybe we'll be smarter with building grade separations. If we need to phase HFR, there's a much more sensible approach that will be able to generate revenue and derisk the project.

Is electrification scope creep? Seems like a disaster to buy more diesel locomotives. You save money by electrifying while building the tracks.

 

[Urban Sky]

Not even close to CAHSR level. No experience with environmental assessment but hopefully it goes more smoothly here (CEQA lawsuits are a disaster). CAHSR has more challenging terrain through mountain ranges. Maybe we'll be smarter with building grade separations. If we need to phase HFR, there's a much more sensible approach that will be able to generate revenue and derisk the project.

I wasn’t referring to the design, engineering or construction of CAHSR, but its financing - namely through Proposition 1A:

Proposition 1A authorized the issuance of $9.95 billion in general obligation bonds, including $9.00 billion for the planning and construction of an 800-mile high-speed rail system connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles. Proposition 1A's remaining $950 million in bonds was intended for commuter rail systems that provide connections to the high-speed rail’s facilities. Proposition 1A said the high-speed train would need to move at a speed of at least 200 mph and connect San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2 ⅔ hours.

Note that SF-to-LA is 500 miles (800 km) and thus only 50km shorter than T-O-M-Q and that 2:45 is far more aggressive than any travel time promise I’ve seen for TRTO-MTRL (580 km) I’ve seen to date. The big clusterfuck of Proposition 1A is that the only way to bring construction costs down would be to descope the project to something less ambitious, but also more sane, but that would void a massive part of funding and thus lead to the collapse of the entire project. So that’s why everyone moves on pretending that there was a way to finish the project within our lifetimes.

Is electrification scope creep?

Unless someone really wants to pay a few extra billions for it: yes.

Seems like a disaster to buy more diesel locomotives.

No, the looming disaster would be not buying any new rolling stock because the project gets shelved due to the lack of funding interest for full HSR.

You save money by electrifying while building the tracks.

Sure, but if you narrow down the choice to “build all the way to full HSR at once” or “go home”, you are guaranteed to end up with the latter option…

And this is the CAHSR trap into which I see HFR-TGF heading: electrification is treated as a hard constraint, such is extending the damn thing to Quebec City (a 47% increase in distance with the added headache of mitigating the radioactive fallout from the REM) and (probably worst of all) achieving a sub-4-hour travel time between Toronto and Montreal - but nobody seems to be prepared to pay for such a massive over-engineered infrastructure project in this country!

I should probably update this graph, but for reference purposes, 850 km divided by 41 million Canadians equals 20.8 mm per capita, whereas 1,885 km (i.e., CAHSR LA-SF plus NEC BOS-WAS plus Brightline West) divided by 345 million Americans equals only 5.5 mm per capita, which is much more in line with where other countries started:

Two graphs which might explain why Canada still has no High-Speed Rail

Whenever I mention that I have written my Bachelor Thesis about High-Speed Rail (HSR) in Canada, Canadians usually ask me how it is possible that Canada is about the only rich industrialized country left without any fast passenger train service (which for our purposes shall be defined as a maximum s

www.linkedin.com

 

[roger1818]

Can you tell us what was said? I have met PP a few times but never spoke on this topic.

He said that he would invest in VIA Rail in ways that would reduce its need for subsidies in the future.

 

[roger1818]

I have also met Poilievre on more than one occasion but I would consider my interactions to be more misfortune than pleasures.

lol. Ya. My kids joke that he came to our house to practice his debating skills. Overall I’ve never been overly impressed with my interactions. He tended to ask very general questions that were obviously designed to lead to his talking points.

 

[Bordercollie]

He said that he would invest in VIA Rail in ways that would reduce its need for subsidies in the future.

Yes like sell the whole thing to a private company and legislate them to maintain some remote services.

 

[Voltz]

Yes like sell the whole thing to a private company and legislate them to maintain some remote services.

Just like was done in the UK.

 

[nfitz]

Just like was done in the UK.

I assume that's a joke, given they are now renationalising the remaining private railway companies, because of how badly that went.

 

[micheal_can]

I assume that's a joke, given they are now renationalising the remaining private railway companies, because of how badly that went.

Doesn't that sound a lot like the mess we have now?

 

[Urban Sky]

I assume that's a joke, given they are now renationalising the remaining private railway companies, because of how badly that went.

The privatization of Great Britain’s rail infrastructure (through an insane jigsaw of actors, overseen by incompetent Railtrack) was certainly a disaster, but I’m much less sure for the train operating company side, which mostly suffered from their overexposure to revenue risks and infrastructure underinvestments. There certainly are different ways to achieve privatization and I believe the Continental European way of tendering of regional services through public service obligations is rather successful, with unit unit costs decreasing while train volume (and ridership) increases…