VIA Rail network developments

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by Kitchissippi

Both YYZ and YUL have issues with capacity, and have limited areas to expand. YOW can potentially capitalize on this instead of being threatened by HSR by offering direct flights to destinations not covered by either airport, or taking on peak travel capacity. Being less than an hour from Montreal or 3 hours from Toronto with a direct-to-airport link could be a game changer and possibly make YOW an alternate hub.

• Toronto’s Pearson airport says it’s imposing new limits on flights this March break and summer to reduce delays

• Montreal’s decades-long airport curse is about to get much worse

Can't see your Montreal story, but your Pearson one is talking about restriction at peak holiday season. Most of those travelers have zero interest in taking a flight from Ottawa. The demand for those flights would probably move to Hamilton. Likewise, Montreal traffic could more easily move to St-Hubert as their reliever airport than YOW.

YOW is more likely to lose customers to YUL than gain customers with HSR. Slots will get consolidated and airlines will simply fly fewer frequencies to more destinations with larger airplanes.

Originally Posted by acottawa

I think it is thinking like this that will cause this project to fail. To be even remotely plausible as something people want to take it needs to get from Montreal to Toronto in under 3 hours. A 20 minute trip from Tremblay to Fallowfield uses 10 percemt of the time budget to cover 1-2% of the distance. An elevated track through all of Ottawa will use a good chunk of the money budget.

The good thing about a private developer is that the private sector is more resistant to scope creep of this sort, which politicians will always inject into most publicly run projects.

On this project, there's literally only one airport that most seem to care about: YUL. If they line gets to Quebec City, maybe YQB will be a suburban station. I would bet money there will be no moving the principal station in Ottawa from what is there now. Unless the developer somehow gets a whole lot of land that they can develop around the station harvest extra value. Can't see that at Greenboro.