Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
I wonder what will happen to London VIA service if this HSR ever gets built?
If this line is "premium" like the UPX with very high prices, Londoner may balk if it's going to cost them a lot more than the standard VIA service. VIA and Queen's Park are going to have to work out some form of arrangement because London is VIA's 4th busiest rail station in the country. Londoners are going to get REALLY pissed if all of a sudden VIA cuts service dramatically due to the HSR but the fares double overnight due to being a faster service.
If VIA cuts service between London and Toronto, then what about other people along the line such as Woodstock and Brantford to say nothing of people who want to get to Hamilton/Halton/Niagara?
What about Windsor & Sarnia service? London is a major market by itself but much still comes from other SW areas and Detroit and US destinations. Will this service continue on from Windsor to Toronto via Hamilton as it is right now or via HSR to Kit/Tor and same goes for Sarnia trains? If they have to take VIA to London and then transfer onto HSR will they pay twice? Will their VIA Corridor pass still be valid? Are they going to run on the exact same schedule for both Sarnia and Windsor trains? If not then does that mean they will have to wait to transfer onto HSR for a couple hours at London...............makes the whole notion of high speed rail rather absurd.
Is this line going to be subsidized as much as regular GO commuter buses? For those areas that will now have dramatically reduced VIA rail service between London and Hamilton be getting GO commuter bus service as a replacement? A cut in VIA service will save the feds money but is that money going to be redirected to this service? If not then Ontario has increased it's transit subsidy bill significantly and saved the feds a fortune.........hardly seems fair.
This may have made for great speeches at election time but the logistics are going to be just as difficult as the construction. There is also politics at play having to appease the people along VIA who will get their service cut or people from Win/Sar who now have to transfer at London.
It was also mentioned earlier about potentially just running the line to Kitchener and if the government ever did that then you would have a full scale riot on your hands from every member in the SouthWest regardless of political stripe. Londoners especially would be outraged that their city would get shafted made much worse by the fact that KW & Ham are both getting funding for LRT and yet London which has higher total ridership and much higher per-capita ridership than either one hasn't been offered a cent for it's BRT.
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innsertname will have to make a full response to this (he's the expert at GTA transit issues
) but I'll stab at the price. The government stated an average fare of $40, so comparable to current VIA pricing.
As for why this line is only $500M, two reasons:
1) The line will make a profit, so a P3 partner will be able to pay about $2B of their own money for it in exchange for capturing profits for 20-30 years
2) The project is piggy-backing on other projects that do most of the heavy lifting for it. Grade separation and electrification will be done on half the line anyway as part of the GO RER plan.
Nowhere else in Canada is such a cheap & easy HSR possible. A Toronto-Ottawa line wouldn't work like this, because while it could probably raise $3B from P3 financing, its construction cost would be way higher. It would require a new greenfield ROW for almost its entire route making it cost something like $10B or so. So it would have a net cost of about $7B, 14 times higher than the KW-London line.
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