VIA Rail

[swimmer_spe]

Originally Posted by Mister F

What you fail to understand is that if you successfully campaign against rail upgrades in one part of the country you've just made made upgrades less likely in other parts of the country. That money saved won't go towards your favoured rail project, it'll get spent on something other than rail altogether. Or it won't get spent at all. The stronger the rail network in the Corridor, the more likely that other parts of the country will get some love too.

When was the last time service was ADDED to anywhere outside the Corridor? This is either more times per week, or new routes. This does not include restoration of service once repairs to the tracks were done.

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

His narcissism requires that HFR fail so that he can be proven right about working professionals at VIA knowing less than him.

Just imagine the delusion required to think that after a $4-6B project failing to generate the promised returns, future governments will happily sign up to fund more multi-billion projects in areas of the country with a fraction of the population and the traffic between them.

Ottawa-Montrreal and Montreal-Quebec City, are both city pairs that are closer to together with higher combined populations than Calgary-Edmonton. Quebec also has higher fuel taxes then Alberta. If those city pairs don't perform as promised the case for Calgary-Edmonton will be shot.

I do want HFR to be successful. But I doubt it'll be the windfall some think it will be.
The line will not be much faster than it currently is. I am talking hour(s), not minutes.
The line likely will not be much more frequent than the planes are.
The line will do nothing to show a city pair that does not have an abandoned line should get service.

In short, how well it does will only benefit Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal.

Originally Posted by someone123

I think our planning horizons are too short and we are too focused on the bottom line in Canada rather than long-term value. I don't know how something like the TCH or original Pacific rail connection ever could have been built with the current mindset (I suspect that if you looked at the % of GDP of even some modest projects from the first half of the 20th century they'd be far beyond anything on the table today).

One good goal in Canada would be to develop new cities and areas to build where people want to live. Trains would be great for this, particularly as more work becomes remote but people want to be able to go in to the office a couple times a week. If you live on a 200 km/h rail line, you can live hundreds of km from a workplace that you visit a few times a week.

The Lower Mainland is kind of screwed because it's largely ALR land but there's still some potential. Ontario has lots of old towns that would be pretty nice places to live if they were stops on a quick train route to Toronto.

NS and NB are extremely ripe for this type of development. If you built a 200 km/h line between Halifax and Moncton it would create a quasi-metro area with a bit of critical mass, revitalize a bunch of towns, and open up lots of attractive land to develop (non-agricultural land around lakes with a comparatively mild climate that is actually pretty rare in Canada). It would also be an immediately useful service for a bunch of suburbanites. This could be for Canada a bit like what some of the Sunbelt metros are for the US.

I also liked the post earlier about how HSR between Toronto and Montreal would change how people work and live in Canada. I even think it would have a cultural impact, and that it's highly desirable to encourage travel between Ontario and Quebec in Canada (or Quebec and anywhere else, but Ontario has the most people living the closest).

The fact is, those major civil projects would never have been started. People in Toronto would be whinging that their trip to Montreal is taking too long and that the money is better spent to speed that up.

HSR will never be built in Canada. It has too high a cost for citizens to value it. he problem is, it is needed badly. Had we not cut taxes, and instead invested for the future, we would likely have HSR in most areas.

Instead, we have unreliable service in most of the country, if they even have service.

If we really want to fix this, the government needs to stop expecting Via to be profitable, and instead expect Via to be able to transport as many Canadians as much as possible. Bring back the 1989 routes. That would be one of the first starts. (I already know some of those lines do not exist.) Get all schedules predictable. I should know when the Budd car passes my house. I still have yet to catch it - And I have been trying for a year.

But, lets be fair, 20 years will pass and no new services will exist outside the Corridor.