Quote:
Originally Posted by J.OT13
Will it possibly take some of the truck traffic out of downtown Ottawa?
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I don't know the O-D traffic patterns *anywhere* near as well as a lot of the others do on this forum (Dado and eternallymee, I'm looking in your direction! ;-) but I wouldn't expect a big impact. The intermodal, warehousing and logistics infrastructure in Montreal is really clustered around the Port, existing Rail Yards and Trudeau Airport, all of which are much more oriented towards the A20-401 and A40-417 corridors than the A50.
And in case someone is about to say that this is why we need rail-intermodal infrastructure in Ottawa, two points I've made before: anything within ~500km is within the optimum distance for intermodal trucking, so it's more efficient to move things from the Montreal area to Ottawa (and ditto from the GTA) by truck than to build an Ottawa-bound train (which takes time), and then put it on a truck here for the local short-haul movement. And of course, this local short haul truck movement would still be a truck movement through the city (and for me, a truck is a truck, and it doesn't really matter whether it's origin is Montreal, Markham or somewhere along Walkley Rd).
Warning: more Transport Geekery ahead!
Where the choice between truck and rail (vs. Seaway, for that matter) starts to get interesting is between Montreal and Toronto, where the distance is right on the borderline, and the highway congestion at each end can erase the potential time savings from loading a truck vs building a long train. (this dynamic also plays out in a smaller scale inside the railway companies, where there is a constant push and pull between taking the time to assemble a fewer number of longer trains which cost less to run and are more profitable, vs running a larger number of shorter trains which allows faster deliveries which gives more value to customers and might command higher prices).