Quote:
Originally Posted by Mister F
A safe alternative to flying used to exist but we abandoned it - the rail lines. We're now putting billions into a less safe alternative when maintaining and upgrading the existing infrastructure would have been cheaper. Odd priorities we have.
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I would argue our cross-country rail priorities are in the right place.
We have decided that our long-distance, inter-continental rail traffic will be directed to massive freight trains rather than passenger service. It makes a lot more sense environmentally, economically and from a safety perspective to remove 1,000 container trucks from the road than 1,000 cars.
It's difficult to optimize the rail network to serve both freight and passenger needs. In China, one of the purposes of building a huge HSR network was to add a parallel passenger network and relegate the old network for freight. But in so many different ways, we are not China!
There's only a handful of places - almost all of them in Ontario and Quebec - where I think that prioritizing freight over passenger rail was a mistake.
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