Quote:
Originally Posted by acottawa
This is why I don’t believe “true believer” theory for Moose’s ongoing existence. There has been almost no interest in improving or even updating the plan or the public documents. Some things such as geotechnical studies need a lot of money, but a lot of it could be done with open source material and a basic knowledge of Excel.
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It is one of many catch 22's that Moose is in. They need money to do a proper feasibility study so that the true costs can be calculated, and they can have a solid plan to pursue investors with. But they need some investors right out of the gate in order to get that study done. It feels like they have created a plan with numbers that are not so low that people don't think he doesn't know what he is doing, but not so high that it scares of potential investors by pushing a multi-billion dollar plan from the get go.
At this point I feel like one of five things will happen with this project (the list is in order of how likely I think the outcome is, from most likely, to least).
-One, no investors come to the table to even get the feasibility study done and once Moose runs out of money to pay for lawyers to pursue cases that keep their name in the paper, they just fade away.
-Two, the feasibility study gets funded, Potvin takes a million for his time, and when it comes out with more realistic numbers Moose says there is some nonsense reason they can't continue, and it shuts down.
-Three, it does continue after a feasibility study is done, but languishes after years of being unable to find investor support, and slowly fades away.
-Four, after the feasibility study there is a bait and switch. In order to keep the plan at their original budget, they drop lines, or change some key aspects of the project so that it is quite a bit different then originally planned. This likely leads to investors and local councils dropping support as it is ultimately not what they signed up for.
-Five, the plan goes ahead, but faces a critical battle with the City of Ottawa, and Gatineau. The use of the Trillium, and the placement of stations on, in particular, the VIA lines, cause the city to enter the commuter rail game/planning earlier than anticipated.
Even if it does get to scenario 5, the chances it gets through that unscathed are small. And while the NCR doesn't have any formal plans for commuter rail, there are no doubt people who are thinking out a decade or two about what might be feasible, and beneficial to the region. Between the Trillium line and a modernized VIA rail line, there are some pretty large development opportunities for the city. I have actually often wondered if the reason why Ottawa has been a bit slow to put too much more money into the Trillium line, and make it an immediate priority, is because VIA has an interest in using that corridor as well for inter-city rail service into Gatineau and beyond. I have no proof that is actually the case, but, VIA has been making somewhat more ambitious plans as of late (see VIA HFR), and if the city thought VIA might be close to investing in an upgrade to the Trillium line corridor to accommodate inter-city rail as well, it might be hesitant to make too many large investments in it, until those details are better understood.
A little off this topic, but something I thought of this morning, is how many riders would be needed in order to make back Moose's self indicated $200 million/year operating budget, if the only model they used was fare box recovery. It is hard to say what the average ticket price would be, but let's say that it is around $12, each way. The bulk of the passengers will be Monday to Friday commuters, so let's say that accounts for 80% of the trips done on the system. So that means commuters need to cover $160 million of the operating budget. There are 260 weekdays in a year, and once you factor days commuters don't travel because of holidays or vacations or being sick, they are likely to travel 240 days out of the year (though it could be even lower than that as many of the commuters will have 3, 4, maybe even 5 weeks of holidays, plus work travel, etc). When you do the math on all that, you find that the system would need 27,777 daily commuters, paying an average of $12 each way, in order to cover 80% of the operating costs. If the average ticket price, each way, was $10, then that 2 dollar difference would result in the system needing 33,333 commuters per day.
Just for comparison, GO trains, which serve the Golden Horseshoe, not just the GTA, which has a population of 9.2 million, has an average daily ridership of 215,500 people. For Moose to be able to cover its costs just through fare recovery, it would have to be almost as good as GO at capturing the commuter market. While Moose serves rural towns and small cities, GO gets to capture its market from cities like Barrie, Hamilton, Oshawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, Burlington, etc. Moose would have to capture a large portion of its commuter base from with the City of Ottawa in order to have any chance of building a customer base, which is hard to do when it is hostile to working with the city. Given that Moose might be lucky to attract 5000 daily commuters, that means almost a substantial part of its operating costs will have to be funded by some other "Property powered" method, to the tune of at least $150 million per year.
Whether it's tomorrow, or next month, or a few years from now, Moose will end up dead in the water.
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