Quote:
Originally Posted by Mister F
The demand is there, just look at the traffic that clogs up the QEW every day. Niagara Region has almost half a million people plus tens of millions of tourists every year, most of them travelling from Toronto. That's plenty of demand for a rail service. The problem is the bare minimum has been done get GO trains to the area, making them slow and infrequent. A lot of expensive work is needed to speed up the service but it would be worth it. If an hourly train took 90 minutes to make the trip the ridership would skyrocket. Think of it as an alternative to the mid-peninsula highway, which would cost several billion dollars. This is a great opportunity to make our transportation system a little less dominated by cars.
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How many billions will it take to provide the service? It would not just be a major rail upgrade, but a fixed rail crossing over or under the Welland Canal too, to avoid major delays from ship traffic, especially with frequent service. The demand has to be there to justify that spend.
Estimating travel demand for a specific mode is not simple.
According to StatsCan, in 2017 there were nearly 8.7 million visits to the St. Catharines-Niagara CMA, 5.4 million of them same-day. The majority are likely Friday to Sunday, plus holidays. I'm not sure if GO has published ridership for their seasonal Niagara service but that may be a good starting point for looking at tourist trip demand by rail.
Weekday service would rely on commuters. From the
2016 Census data on commuting flows for CMAs and CAs, there were 11,145 commuters from St. Catharines-Niagara to the Hamilton CMA and 5,725 to the Toronto CMA, the vast majority by car. There would be auto users willing to convert if the time/cost makes sense and they can connect to their place of work at the destination end, and you'd also have to look at where those people are coming from and going to within the CMAs to see if the rail option is reasonable (a better picture of origin-destinations can be had from the
more detailed table for Census Subdivisions that covers the smaller geographies but would take a while to compile numbers). Some may just end up driving to Hamilton or Burlington and taking the train from there. Some may not want to switch at all, until congestion gets bad enough on the Niagara section of the QEW (and even then, commuters can be stubborn). The bus to Burlington remains a viable option too, until congestion affects travel times in a big way, and some of those commuters take it and may continue to take it. The portion of those ~17,000 commuters who would take the train to Hamilton or from Niagara region to Toronto may not end up being very big.
The numbers GO was showing a few years ago at their public info centres for Niagara expansion were small, far less than a full trainload per day from what I recall. They'll likely go up as growth continues and traffic worsens (and there are travel demand models that forecast trips for projects like this, which draw on data like the Census and travel surveys) but how much?
I'm not against this service (it's worth a trial at least). I'm just not optimistic the cost of a higher level of service will be justified for a long time.
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