Rail-based Transit Discussion

[MalcolmTucker]

For population important to compare apples to apples. Lausanne agglomeration has 70 municipalities of which Lausanne is only 1 which have a total population of just under 400k.

Even given that it is still impressive. Also impressive is the line was seriously controlled in scope with some single tracking to keep costs down. It also keeps capacity down to around 6,000 ppdph but I doubt Halifax would require much more in any near term.

It is also unclear how much tunnel infrastructure they were able to reuse, the project site describes that it uses 8 tunnels, and 6 were built new. It is possible the reused tunnels were of a fairly significant length significantly reducing costs to just over $600 million if today's exchange rates are used. So $100 million per km is pretty cheap for entirely grade separated - I wouldn't be surprised if the budget didn't include some costs that in Canada would be included in the project budget.

Few questions for Haligoanians:
How much is the gas tax transfer to Halifax and what is it being used for now? I don't think a city would ever take on a project larger than 10 years of transfers times the three levels of government.

What would be a good guess of the number of buses crossing the MacDonald bridge at peak plus the number of ferry crossings? Presumably fixed transit would eliminate all these crossings, so it would be a good estimate of what the low end of demand would be. If low, it would rule out a crossing on a route I think.