[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by swimmer_spe

The problem is simply basing it on ridership is horrible, considering that our longest line is over 4000km and one person may stay on it for the whole length.

Yeah I've often been frustrated by people constantly trying to use ridership comparisons between systems that exist in totally different settings. I remember the same thing came up in the prior VIA thread.

Originally Posted by jawagord

Besides my prairie perspective (Calgary’s C-train) I have rode other trains from time to time:

City Transit
Vancouver: Skytrain
Toronto: Subway
Frankfurt: Commuter Train
Tokyo: Subway
Hong Kong: Subway
Singapore: Subway
KL: Subway

City Airport
Munich: to airport
Singapore: to airport
Hong Kong: to/from downtown
Denver: to downtown
KL: to downtown

City to city
Munich to Sonthoven: 3 hrs, one change
Tokyo to Kyoto: Shinkansen
Tokyo to Hitachi City: 2 hrs
Jakarta to Cirebon: 3 hrs

Via’s 15,000 passengers a day is not a well used system, perhaps your southern Ontario bubble makes you think so? I know a few things about train systems. Some were really good, some were a waste of time, some were packed full of passengers, on one I was the only person in the entire car. In Canada the intra-city train is the dinosaur not the car. These ridiculous fantasy arguments won’t bring intra-city train travel back and Via will continue to stumble along because governments lack the will to end it and lack the will to pile billions into it for marginal gain.

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

The total number of passengers is not a good metric to use when comparing different types of systems (urban vs suburban vs interurban/rural). There may be fewer passengers, but each passenger is being provided with much more service since they're on the vehicle for longer (hours or even days) and covering large distances. The only realistic way to compare them is in terms of the total amount of transportation provided in terms of passenger kms. If we look at Calgary for example, the C-Train is about 60km with four arms stretching out from downtown - two for route 201 and two for route 202, making each arm an average of 15km. Some riders will be coming into downtown from the very ends of each line (about 15km trip) while others will be coming in from very close (about 1km), so we can approximate the average trip distance at 8km. The average weekday ridership of the system is about 315k, so 315,000 * 8 = 2520000. About 2.5 million passenger km per weekday.

Meanwhile, according to your Tesla post the QC-Windsor corridor can be assumed to average 15,000 riders per weekday. It spans about 1,150km, but of course most people won't be going the whole distance. There are three main segments (Toronto-Windsor, Toronto-Montreal, and Montreal-QC, so if we divide the corridor by three (383km) and assume about half will be crossing each full segment and half will be getting off at points in between, we can divide that in 1/2 again (191.5). If this is the average trip for 15000 people, that makes for 2872500km passenger km of transportation per weekday. About 2.9 million. That's more than the CTrain. The reason VIA's corridor trains won't seem as busy is just due to the nature of intercity service vs urban service. To accommodate peak loads on an urban service you would assume a high number of standing passengers so even at quiet times there will still be many steaded passengers. On an intercity route, your plan for peak times is to have all seats filled, but not to have standing passengers since the travel distances are too far for that that be practical. So if you have train capacity that never has any more than seated passengers, at quiet times some cars in some route segments will seem practically empty.

Anyway, the point is not that VIA is a super bustling system by world standards but rather that it can still be well-used without having a high number of individual passengers compared to an urban system. It just isn't useful to make assumptions about a service or its validity based on inappropriate comparisons or assumptions.