Quote:
Originally Posted by jawagord
The only people that want to ride Canada’s antiquated inter city rail system are tourists. They want to experience the way travel was a 100 years ago, except the service isn’t as good and the steam engines have been replaced with diesels, whomp whomp. Our population goes up and ridership goes down, VIA is a rail system for those few who have no transportation options. As VIA points out in their study a dedicated track high speed rail system is needed to increase ridership. But we’ve done the high speed rail debate already, you don’t do it until intracity rail systems are in place. You get way more bang for your buck building city LRT and metropolitan commuter rail, more ridership, more cars off the road, better for the environment. Who would spend $20 billion building HSR between Calgary and Edmonton, when the green line and the blue line aren’t finished? Ditto for LRT and commuter rail projects in Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal. Maybe 40 years from now we’ll be ready for HSR, that’s if self driving car technology hasn’t made it redundant .
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If you read my posts in this thread you'll see I'm not advocating for building intercity rail (high speed or not) in the west, at least not yet. I even said pretty much exactly what you said - build what gives you the most bang for buck first, which until now has indeed been LRTs. But looking forward, I would like to see the province or a regional partnership or someone look at passenger rail outside of city limits. We can't get to a point of people riding rail without building something first.
I mentioned running intercity buses precisely because running trains to many places would currently be a waste of money, but I don't think it is right that the only way to get around is a car or plane. Just because Greyhound decided it wasn't profitable does not mean it isn't a good thing for the country to have the government invest in public transit - if we only funded roads based on a purely profit rationale, then every single road is a net loss and should not have been built.