Rail: Ontario-Quebec High Speed Rail Study

[nfitz]

What I always find amusing is that the overwhelming majority of people who would use such a line would be Tor/Mon travellers. A new HSR rail corridor would take a less direct route to Ottawa and then have to make a stop..............tens of billions spent and getting from Montreal to Toronto will hardly be any faster than it is today.

That seems to conflict with what we've discussed earlier in the thread.

 

[gweed123]

What I always find amusing is that the overwhelming majority of people who would use such a line would be Tor/Mon travellers. A new HSR rail corridor would take a less direct route to Ottawa and then have to make a stop..............tens of billions spent and getting from Montreal to Toronto will hardly be any faster than it is today.

1) Via currently offers 7 trains daily to Ottawa, and 8 trains to Montreal. I'd hardly consider that an "overwhelming majority".

2) As has already been mentioned on this thread, the Toronto-Montreal route would use a bypass just to the south of Ottawa, avoiding stopping at the station.

 

[Hipster Duck]

High speed electric train service is, thankfully, a non-starter.

The monsterous amounts of money spent on the infrastructure to move a few thousand a day is an obscene waste considering the million per day that would be carried if those funds went into urban transit. In terms of emissions reductions HSR is one on the worstinvestment a country can make. Cars today have quite low emissions but is thew sitting and idyling in traffic that does all the harm as HSR does nothing to relieve that. Once cars get onto free flwoing freeways their per km emissions drop off dramatically as opposed to the stop and start of urban commuting.

Many politicians love the idea of HSR because it makes for great ribbon cutting but little else and jobs robs the precious few funds from urban transit. Certainly maybe using the faster more modern trains and improving the rail corridor itself is a good use of funds but outside that it simply doesn't make sense from a financial or enviornmental point of view.

What I always find amusing is that the overwhelming majority of people who would use such a line would be Tor/Mon travellers. A new HSR rail corridor would take a less direct route to Ottawa and then have to make a stop..............tens of billions spent and getting from Montreal to Toronto will hardly be any faster than it is today.

First of all, HSR is not all that popular with politicians because, if it was, we'd have it by now.

Secondly, neither GHG emissions nor a very narrow view of economic benefits (in your case: riders per dollar spent) should be the reason to build HSR and most countries in the world that have HSR don't use these criteria to build these projects.

HSR is built because it improves the capacity of strained transportation corridors between major cities and promotes greater regional economic competitiveness for a segment of the population that contributes disproportionately to national income and wealth.

I hate to say it, but it is probably more important for national well-being if a businessperson has the ability to reliably reach Montreal in a short time to seal a business deal than if a working class employee in Scarborough cuts half an hour on his commute time by taking a subway rather than a bus.

 

[diminutive]

HSR is built because it improves the capacity of strained transportation corridors between major cities and promotes greater regional economic competitiveness for a segment of the population that contributes disproportionately to national income and wealth.

None of the routes an Ontario/Quebec HSR would replace are particularly saturated, though. Pearson or Trudeau are hardly strained. The highways are ok outside of Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal's commuter belts. VIA and bus operators aren't bursting at the gills.

As for whether business people are more important than random commuters in Scarborough, this gets to another much less frequently remarked aspect of HSR; it's totally regressive. The overwhelming beneficiaries of an HSR would be Bay Street people. That's fine as far as it goes, but it's hard for governments to justify spending tens of billions of dollars to make life easier for some of the richest people in Canada, especially while "the rest of us" are stuck in traffic.

 

[Michael62]

we have a high speed rail system already, it's called Porter Airline

 

[Hipster Duck]

As for whether business people are more important than random commuters in Scarborough, this gets to another much less frequently remarked aspect of HSR; it's totally regressive. The overwhelming beneficiaries of an HSR would be Bay Street people. That's fine as far as it goes, but it's hard for governments to justify spending tens of billions of dollars to make life easier for some of the richest people in Canada, especially while "the rest of us" are stuck in traffic.

I know it's an elitist and maybe even a cruel thing to say, but I would argue that there is some merit in projects that are "regressive"; that benefit the "most productive" members of our society. The premise is shaky, I'll admit, but it goes under the assumption that we'd be all a little better off if the most productive members of our society had the tools to create a lot of wealth and knowledge that could then be redistributed among the rest of us. That is to say, I think that if HSR allows a businessperson to create a lot of taxable wealth or the researcher at Sick Kids to meet with her colleague at McGill and make a breakthrough dsicovery that leads to taxable wealth, we can then use this wealth to build rapid transit to help workers in Scarborough reach wealth-supportive but not necessarily wealth-creating jobs. The other way around, though, would not help. If an administrative worker got to his job half an hour faster each day, it would certainly help his welfare and increase his life satisfaction but it probably wouldn't lead to [as much] generation of taxable wealth.

Of course, we have to assume that wealth that is generated is fairly and equitably distributed and that people who create wealth don't do so in a way that incurs externalized negative costs on the rest of society, but you get the idea.

I remember making a similar argument in favour of the redesign of the pedestrian realm on Bloor Street. One forumer argued that that money should be spent on making the sidewalks of Malvern more attractive and I pointed out that 2 shopping blocks in Malvern don't generate 1% of the sales taxes in the City of Toronto the same way that the 2 blocks of Bloor street between Yonge and Avenue Road do.

 

[ssiguy2]

If the corridor should be geared towards the business class then fine............let them pay for it. When, however, they are using PUBLIC money to build it then it should be the PUBLIC who benefit from it not the people who can use it as a tax write-off.

That's as crazy as using tax dollars for airport lines that only the Rothchilds can afford to take and the public who are actually paying for it still have to take the same old packed bus to get to the airport. What kind of place would be stupid enough to...............................oops, maybe I shouldn't have said that.

 

[EnviroTO]

If the corridor should be geared towards the business class then fine............let them pay for it. When, however, they are using PUBLIC money to build it then it should be the PUBLIC who benefit from it not the people who can use it as a tax write-off.

Everyone that uses transportation in their job can write it off, it isn't a class of people that can write it off. There are far more people writing off transportation in cars and trucks (on roads paid for with public money) than writing off VIA Rail. Would we rather business write off environmentally friendly transportation or write off transportation that harms the environment more? The hate for people writing things off is misguided.

 

[gabe]

Air travel has become undignified to say the least. High-speed train travel would be a welcome alternative to flying to Montreal.

 

[dunkalunk]

Drove to Laval from Ottawa today (road trip with some friends), and decided to take Highway 50 for part of it. Of course, Highway 50 goes right past Mirabel, and it got me thinking. I figured this may be worth discussing here:

Would it be worth it to route the future Quebec City-Windsor HSR line, or more specifically the Ottawa-Montreal HSR line, through Mirabel and then down into Montreal? The land on the Ontario side of the river between Ottawa and the Quebec border is flat as can be, so I figured a new alignment than would then cross the Ottawa River just east of Hawkesbury, hit Mirabel, and then take the originally-conceived HSR alignment into downtown Montreal.

Even with the recent expansions to Trudeau, my understanding is that it's still under a bit of a capacity crunch. And given the prime real estate that it occupies, 10+ years down the road it may be worth re-evaluating whether or not keeping Mirabel shuttered (at least for passenger traffic), and keeping Trudeau open is really the best option. Heck, selling off the massive chunk of land that Trudeau sits on could probably fund a pretty decent percentage of the HSR project!

Of course, HSR on its own could cut down on the number of Montreal-Toronto and Montreal-Ottawa flights required, rendering the capacity crunch at Trudeau moot, seeing as how those 2 routes are amongst the busiest at the airport.

I would far prefer an expansion of either an expansion of both Ottawa's Macdonald-Cartier Airport and Montreal's St Hubert Airport over the re-commissioning of of Mirabel. The existing CN/CP ROW between Ottawa and Montreal is probably the most-direct existing corridor there is and would not require much in terms of new bridge construction and curve-widening to create a 300km/h service. Additionally, both airports would be served nicely with spurs from the proposed HSR line.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

Air travel has become undignified to say the least. High-speed train travel would be a welcome alternative to flying to Montreal.

Well no worries Gabe! In 50 years after Canada publishes its 25th High Speed Rail Study, construction will begin construction on the first phase of the high speed rail line only for it to be canceled 3 years later by a Conservative government! Well that's my prediction anyways.

But in all seriousness it's disappointing that Canada, which is a country that was very much built by the railroad, is struggling to build a proper high speed rail network. Canada is such an absolutely massive country that has major population centres that are completely isolated each other. I hope that one day in the near future a Canadian teenager living in Toronto will be able to hop on the HSR to Montreal in the morning to go watch a concert and be back home by supper time. That capability will certainly bring the nation allot closer together.

 

[gweed123]

I would far prefer an expansion of either an expansion of both Ottawa's Macdonald-Cartier Airport and Montreal's St Hubert Airport over the re-commissioning of of Mirabel. The existing CN/CP ROW between Ottawa and Montreal is probably the most-direct existing corridor there is and would not require much in terms of new bridge construction and curve-widening to create a 300km/h service. Additionally, both airports would be served nicely with spurs from the proposed HSR line.

Good point. I think alignments and service areas (how far a specific route goes, and where does it terminate) are a little tricky for urban areas with respect to airports. For example: A Montreal-Toronto route. It's pretty easy on the Montreal side, because Trudeau is west of downtown. But in Toronto, Pearson is also on the west side of downtown. So does that route continue to Malton (Pearson)? Or does it stop in downtown, forcing a transfer on whoever is bound for Pearson? Ditto for a QC-Mtl route. Does the Mtl-bound route have the terminus as downtown or Trudeau?

The up-side is connectivity, but the downside is that a lot of those stations are not set up to be terminus stations at all. Do we set up the routes to cater to those trip patterns, or do we rely on local shuttles that run between downtown and the airport?

A big plus for HSR in my book is using HSR as the first leg of a long-distance trip. If I'm coming from Quebec City and catching an international flight in Montreal, why not take the rail from QC to Trudeau, and then catch my flight from there?

 

[Wrenkin]

1) Via currently offers 7 trains daily to Ottawa, and 8 trains to Montreal. I'd hardly consider that an "overwhelming majority".

2) As has already been mentioned on this thread, the Toronto-Montreal route would use a bypass just to the south of Ottawa, avoiding stopping at the station.

Many of the "Ottawa" trains begin in Montreal and end in Toronto, or vice versa. E.g. 656 and I think 659.

 

[bleu]

That's as crazy as using tax dollars for airport lines that only the Rothchilds can afford to take and the public who are actually paying for it still have to take the same old packed bus to get to the airport.

I don't think the airport line will be so expensive than only the rich people can afford to take. How much will it cost any way, $20? How often does the "public" fly anyway?

 

[bleu]

we have a high speed rail system already, it's called Porter Airline

unfortunately Montreal doesn't have an airport right beside its business district for Porter to land on.