VIA Rail network developments

[Buggys]

Originally Posted by acottawa

Ticket checkers and coffee pourers are different jobs on Via trains.

Oh, that's not very efficient is it.

[lrt's friend]

Thank you Urban_Sky for all that detailed information.

Interesting that the old Canadian Northern route between Smiths Falls and Napanee is considered the most viable for HSR.

[roger1818]

Originally Posted by Buggys

Oh, that's not very efficient is it.

I’m not sure but I would assume trains need to have a certain employee to passenger ratio (similar to airlines). If that’s the case, it’s probably more efficient to have one employee do all the tickets and another do the cart than it is to have both do both jobs.

[Catenary]

Originally Posted by acottawa

Ticket checkers and coffee pourers are different jobs on Via trains.

Not on any of the trips I've been on recently - It's usually the same person unless the service manager steps in and helps with the tickets. In my last trip in business class, the car attendant served the meals, scanned the tickets, and showed me how to operate the car door in an emergency.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by Urban_Sky

Excuse me for my ignorance, but if a project must be financially self-sufficient without any subsidies in order to get financed through the CIB or receive funding from private investors, then how did the REM get funded, which depends on an operating subsidy of 72 cents per passenger-kilometer? Had VIA Rail received that level of subsidies in 2017 for its Corridor East (i.e. Quebec-Montreal-Toronto) operations, the resulting subsidy payment of $755.6 million ([652,090,156 passenger-miles = 1,049,437,380 passenger-km]*$0.72) would have exceeded the operating costs for its entire (!) network ($630.9 million).





Yeah right, VIA increased its ridership between 2014 and 2017 by 30.5% (or 11 times population growth, if extrapolating from the annualized growth of the combined population of Ontario and Quebec between 2011 and 2016) while investing “only” $359.1 in capital expenditure (and only part of that in infrastructure), but investing 11 times that amount in a dedicated infrastructure will surely increase ridership by only 29.0% by 2030 (or just 2.3 times population growth)…^^


I struggle to understand what’s so shocking about a business plan becoming unviable if you arbitrarily remove more than half of its projected ridership. If you take the 9.9 million projected by VIA, then your per-passenger contribution for capital costs decreases from $50 to $20.20, thus a total operating cost of $100.20 per passenger or 140% rather than 181% of the current fare...


I believe that we’ve also reached the point where we need to talk about Generalized Journey Time (GJT), but before we can do that we need to somehow distribute VIA’s ridership from Corridor segments to the individual routes: The least arbitrary way I could find was to reallocate the passenger miles provided in the 2017 Annual Report (by multiplying the “Shortfall” figure with the “subsidy per passenger-mile”) according to the train mileage calculated from the 2017/05/29 timetable (i.e. the timetable which was valid for the largest part of 2017).

The second step is to adjust the ridership by the average of the annualized growth rates observed between 2011 and 2016 in the respective CMAs at both ends, which increases the passenger-mileage by 14.6% on average (which happens to achieve already half of the entire growth rate you only seem capable of imaging).


Source: Victoria Transport Policy Institute (2018, p.23)

Step three is to multiply the change in generalized journey time (see my table in my previous post) and multiply it with the applicable elasticity: As you can see in above table, the elasticity for intercity rail travel demand in respect to its travel time is -1.58, which means that demand will decrease for every 1% increase in travel time by 1.58%, while it will increase by the same margin for every 1% decrease in travel time. This means that travel demand can be expected to increase by between 22.9% (Toronto-Montreal) and 61.1% (Montreal-Quebec) for an overall increase of 38.5% in the Corridor East or 32.6% over the entire Corridor (note that GJT stays unchanged for Southwestern Ontario). This means that the combined effect of population growth and reductions in GJT on passenger mileage equals an increase by between 14.7% for Southwestern Ontario (i.e. the pure population growth effect) and 79.5% (Montreal-Quebec) for a total growth of 58.6% on the Corridor East and 51.9% on the entire Corridor. Similarly, dividing the passenger-mileage by the average trip length in 2017 yields the same 58.6% as increase in passenger figures on the Corridor East, but (due to the longer trip lengths on the Corridor East) a slightly lower 47.8% for the entire Corridor – for an increase in total passenger count on the Corridor East from 3.1 million in 2017 to 5.0 million in 2030 and total Corridor ridership from 4.1 to 6.1 million:

Note: The respective growth rates for Southwestern Ontario (SWO) are taken from Toronto (CMA) as start of route and Ontario (Province) as end of route.
Compiled from: VIA Rail Annual Report 2017, VIA Rail's travel time projections for HFR, Passenger Demand Forecasting Handbook, and Victoria Transport Policy Institute (2018).

 

To my knowledge REM has attracted no private sector funding, just federal and provincial funding from various pots of money. Quebec has more control over the CDP than the federal government has over the CPPIB so it is able to force it to become an infrastructure slush fund. That model would not work for VIA.

Private sector money requires a reasonable return. There are a limited number of ways to get a return out of infrastructure. The most common is on the interest rate differentials (e.g. if the investor can borrow cheaper than the proponent), which would not work here because the federal government can borrow cheaply. Another option would be a leaseback arrangement, which also makes little sense given how cheaply the feds can borrow. That leaves profit on the actual operations that are sufficient to provide a return on capital, which means that revenues have to cover expenses and capital. I guess technically more subsidies could count as revenue, but it sort of negates the point of trying to get private sector money.

As I have noted earlier, extrapolation based on a small sample of results is not a valid methodology. For example, if you started your sample in 2010 when the corridor had 3.7M pax then annual growth rate is in the 1% range. If you believe some paradigm shift occurred in 2014 that permanently shifted demand for rail services in the Corridor then you need to explain your methodology.

Economists go to enormous effort to calculate elasticity and usually have huge error bars. I find it somewhat incredible that you have calculated an exact elasticity that is valid for projection models. If you have done that you should expect a dinner invitation from the King of Sweden.

[roger1818]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

Lanagan is a tool. An ideological purist who argues against projects like HFR because HSR is the only acceptable solution to him. With "friends" like him, rail in Canada doesn't need enemies.

Guys like him like to pretend that moralizing and lecturing the public will magically result in politicians plopping down tens of billions for high speed rail.

Agreed. He seems to suffer from delusions of grandeur, wanting everything now. I don't know of any western country that built HSR before they had frequent, reliable intercity rail service.

Originally Posted by acottawa

I think you’re drinking the Potvin Kool-Aid. Who wants to commute 3+ hours a day? I am sure the odd person would, or somebody who primarily works from home, but that would not appeal to most office workers.

I tend to agree with you on this one. Montreal isn't Toronto or Vancouver where people need to commute for hours because of a lack of affordable housing. Now there are other extenuating circumstances that might require this commute. I once spent about 16 months working in Montreal while living in Ottawa, though I didn't commute daily. Regardless, a faster, more frequent train ride would have been amazing!

While the train may not be the right solution for everyone, it could be the right solution for a lot more people than currently use it. As quoted an interview with the VIA president in the winter 2016 issue of Interchange (reference found by 1overcosc in post #115):

Today, 87 per cent of travel between Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal is by car, six per cent is by plane and five per cent is by train.

That 87% by car is a huge market available for VIA Rail. They don't need to bring that down to zero, but even a 5% reduction in those who drive (to about 82.5%) in favour of the train would almost double the number of people using the train (from 5% to almost 9.5%).

[Urban_Sky]

Originally Posted by acottawa

Economists go to enormous effort to calculate elasticity and usually have huge error bars. I find it somewhat incredible that you have calculated an exact elasticity that is valid for projection models. If you have done that you should expect a dinner invitation from the King of Sweden.

I'm starting to struggle justifying to myself committing the time needed to read (let alone: reply) to your comments, given the increasingly patronising tone I read out out of them. Therefore, would it be to much to ask from you that you invest the 120 seconds of your precious lifetime to at least read my comment before schooling me on elasticities? Because if you had at least attempted to read my full post, I don't know how you could have possibly missed that I of course relied on "Economists [going] to enormous effort to calculate elasticity" figures (in this case:
Clifford Winston of the Brookings Institution in Washington and Kenneth A. Small of the University of California Irvine), without making the presumptuous claim that I "have calculated an exact elasticity that is valid for projection models":

***Quote from my message***



***

I'm willing to commit to a respectful discussion which relies international experiences and well-documented evidence, so please let me know if you are willing to do the same. And even if we might discover that we are only able to agree on the fact that we disagree in certain discussions, I have seen enough alignment in our views on other questions (such as pointing out the questionable value of certain HSR-style investments) to conclude that we have enough common ground to engage in such a civilised discussion.

Thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your weekend,

Urban_Sky

[acottawa]

You’re taking one price elasticity from one study from 20 years ago and declaring that is the elasticity.

This analysis is out of date, but it is an example of the type of analysis needed to try to arrive at a price elasticity in a specific market.

http://publications.gc.ca/collection...92-4-5-eng.pdf

It is too bad the Government of Canada doesn’t publish this sort of sophisticated analysis anymore.

[Urban_Sky]

Originally Posted by acottawa

You’re taking one price elasticity from one study from 20 years ago and declaring that is the elasticity.

This analysis is out of date, but it is an example of the type of analysis needed to try to arrive at a price elasticity in a specific market.

http://publications.gc.ca/collection...92-4-5-eng.pdf

It is too bad the Government of Canada doesn’t publish this sort of sophisticated analysis anymore.

I’m afraid that if showing the courtesy of

1. actually reading comments before you reply to them (instead of: accusing me of calculating meaningless elasticity figures, when I clearly and correctly referenced them as the work of academic researchers),
2. acknowledging and correcting apparent mistakes (instead of: leaving wrong accusations as a result of not reading posts entirely before responding unacknowledged),
3. responding to questions which are asked to you (instead of: ignoring my question whether you are still willing to commit to a respectful and civilised discussion) and
4. presenting evidence before dismissing the calculations and assumptions made by others (instead of: criticising me for providing sanity checks without making a full literature review, while seemingly pulling numbers like “4 million passengers at best” out of the air without providing any rationale, let alone: methodology)

seems to be too much to ask from you, then there is apparently no place for both of us in the discussion here.

I’m not the kind of person which holds grudges, but I would expect to see a clear commitment to engage in a respectful and constructive discussion before we can have a fresh start here. In the meanwhile, I want to thank @Buggys, @lrt's friend, @esquire, @roger1818, @ghYHZ and @Truenorth00 for the friendly and interesting discussion and to let them know that they can find me anytime in the relevant threads on Urban Toronto, the Canadian Public Transit Discussion Board or Amtrak Unlimited (I recall seeing some of you there already).

Until then: Good Bye,

Urban_Sky

[roger1818]

^^^Personally I would much rather see acottawa leave the thread Urban_Sky. The latter had provided valuable contributions to the discussions while the former only seems to oppose everything anyone says without backing up any of his statements with any references.

[milomilo]

He's right to question it though. That 1.58 ratio is one estimate from one study, 20 years ago. If that estimate is inaccurate, then everything based on that number is inaccurate. It's also a highly precise number for something that is likely very imprecise, giving reason to be skeptical.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by acottawa

I think you’re drinking the Potvin Kool-Aid. Who wants to commute 3+ hours a day? I am sure the odd person would, or somebody who primarily works from home, but that would not appeal to most office workers.

First, a lot of suburban/exurban Toronto does that. I did 2.5 hrs total just going from suburban Scarborough to Ryerson in undergrad. That was a trip entirely in the 416.

Next, it's why I said it needs to be sped up, so it's not 3+ hrs.

Lastly, you don't seem to get the idea that better links expand the employent market. For both employers and employees. Will all of them commute 3 hrs daily? No. But this would open up a ton of non-daily exurban commuters. This is exactly what you see on a lot of Europe and Japan's HSR networks. Lots of men and women in suits commuting.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by milomilo

He's right to question it though. That 1.58 ratio is one estimate from one study, 20 years ago. If that estimate is inaccurate, then everything based on that number is inaccurate. It's also a highly precise number for something that is likely very imprecise, giving reason to be skeptical.

1) Johannes has to be careful what he says as a VIA employee. So whether he knows or not, he's not going to discuss any recent modeling done by VIA.

2) It's pretty damn unfair to shit on someone's research without offering up reasonable facts to counter. You think that 20 year estimate is stale? Okay. Provide a more recent estimate that you think is more credible.

3) That elasticity is one among many factors. And I'm sure when reporting in non-PR channels, there's a lot more ranges of figures provided.

[milomilo]

I don't think it's shitting on research, it's just fair questioning. Any questioning that's done on an internet forum is going to be incredibly tame compared to the questions asked by the people actually handing out the money. It's not up to us to come up with the numbers, as it's not us selling it.

[OtrainUser]

Originally Posted by milomilo

I don't think it's shitting on research, it's just fair questioning. Any questioning that's done on an internet forum is going to be incredibly tame compared to the questions asked by the people actually handing out the money. It's not up to us to come up with the numbers, as it's not us selling it.

Acottawa is just being a hypocrite for trashing numbers when he's got none to back up his point.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by OtrainUser

Acottawa is just being a hypocrite for trashing numbers when he's got none to back up his point.

Nobody has any numbers. If Via has them they won’t release them. Urban sky seems like a very passionate person but he is trying to build economic models with basic arithmetic and an excel spreadsheet without any economic analysis tools, models or datasets. It would be like trying to build a weather forecasting model on excel by averaging temperature for the previous three years.

[OtrainUser]

Originally Posted by acottawa

Nobody has any numbers. If Via has them they won’t release them. Urban sky seems like a very passionate person but he is trying to build economic models with basic arithmetic and an excel spreadsheet without any economic analysis tools, models or datasets. It would be like trying to build a weather forecasting model on excel by averaging temperature for the previous three years.

That's done all the time with weather forecasts, Urban sky has a much better idea of the rail business than you do since he works at VIA. I'll take his word over yours any day.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by OtrainUser

That's done all the time with weather forecasts, Urban sky has a much better idea of the rail business than you do since he works at VIA. I'll take his word over yours any day.

Do you think weather forecasts are done with arithmetic on excel spreadsheets?

My first job out of grad school was the transportation group at a central agency. I didn’t work on rail files, but that person was two cubes over, so I got a pretty good sense of how things work. I watched ViaFast die and see Via making the same mistakes all over again.

Anyway, I don’t want to cause trouble. If you guys want this thread to be only people who support Via’s current management then that’s fine.

[JohnnyRenton]

Originally Posted by acottawa

Do you think weather forecasts are done with arithmetic on excel spreadsheets?

My first job out of grad school was the transportation group at a central agency. I didn’t work on rail files, but that person was two cubes over, so I got a pretty good sense of how things work. I watched ViaFast die and see Via making the same mistakes all over again.

Anyway, I don’t want to cause trouble. If you guys want this thread to be only people who support Via’s current management then that’s fine.

I am going to agree with acottawa on this one. Not even because I necessarily agree with him (I really haven't had the time to look at all the information in Urban_Sky's posts carefully, and make an assessment on it), but because this is a discussion forum, and its value comes from having many different viewpoints, rather than just a few.

At this point, HFR is too far along for anything radical to change about it (unless it doesn't get funding/investments and goes back to the drawing board). But, if HFR goes ahead, the public scrutiny of VIA is going to increase several fold as people watch how it handles a multi-billion dollar expansion project, and what the end result of it are. And while HFR is largely flying under the radar, the next big project that VIA pursues is going to be in the spotlight. There are also a lot of unknowns even when trying to guess what will happen 5 or 10 years out. What will the price of gas be? Will electric cars have an impact on peoples transportation choices? Will urban living/building accelerate as more local transit projects come online? And how exactly will the public respond to HFR? Was it what people wanted? And what pushed, or pulled, people away from using the service?

This is the time to be questioning possibilities for passenger rail, and decisions that are being made, as much as possible. I still fully support HFR, but when it comes time for the next round of expansion in 5 or 10 years, any political or economic misstep is going to be met with front page reaction, not buried on the bottom of page 23 like anything related to VIA is now. VIA better be prepared to quickly adjust to peoples expectations as HFR comes into service; hubris will be its own worst enemy.

Edit: This isn't directed at anyone specific. It is a statement for anyone who wants to see passenger rail grow and succeed. I can attest to this myself. For years my mindset was that HSR was the only way to go to kickstart modernization of The Corridor. I was probably closer to the Lanagan camp than I would like to admit. But a few years ago I decided to ditch every notion I had about passenger rail in The Corridor (and across Canada for that matter), and start building my viewpoint about it from scratch. There is still lots I am undecided about. But the one thing I do know is that the cities in the corridor have undergone significant change in the past 20 - 30 years, and will continue to do so for at least the next 20 years. This presents a great opportunity for passenger rail to be expanded and modernized, but also presents a chance for things to go horribly wrong if plans are simply a rehash of those created 20 or 30 years ago, and if the publics needs and opinions don't start to be considered in a more meaningful way.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by Urban_Sky

Have a look at the table below:

Source: FRA (2011, p.20)

• If you refer to above table, the dilemma is as follows:
  
• Everything until 177 km/h (110 mph, Tiers 0/IA/IB) is relatively straightforward,
• Level crossings: whereas TC regulations [insert link] outright ban them beyond 177 km/h (110 mph), FRA regulations [insert link] allow a work-around in the 178-200 km/h (111-125 mph) band (Tier IC), but the necessary investments into "impenetrable barriers" under FRA regulations will become useless the moment you upgrade beyond 200 km/h (125 mph).
• Corridor-sharing with freight is still allowed beyond 200 km/h (125 mph), but only until 240 km/h (150 mph, Tier II), so moving beyond that speed requires a dedicated HSR Corridor which again renders prior investment useless.
• Track alignment: according to the Ecotrain Study, 200 km/h requires a minimum radius of 2,500 meters (2,000 meters with tilting trains), whereas 300 km/h requires a minimum radius of 6,000 meters. Investments in less generous track realignments therefore risks becoming useless when design speed is increased towards 300 km/h.

For all above reasons, investing in any infrastructure to reach speeds beyond 177 km/h only makes sense if you make sure that the investment is HSR-ready, i.e. compatible with a later upgrade to 300 km/h. For exactly that reason, I would strongly object upgrading any rail segments beyond 177 km/h, unless they overlap with Ecotrain's E-300 alignment and as far as I see that is only the case for parts of the Trois-Rivières Subdivision, Montreal-De Beujeu, Casselman West-Ottawa-Smiths Falls North and Port Hope West-Toronto:

Note: ROW sections eventually shared with HSR are highlighted in green, whereas existing and new ROW sections which will not be eventually shared with HSR are shown in yellow and red, respectively. Originally posted on Urban Toronto and reposted here as #1182.
Compiled with: distances obtained from historic CN/CP timetables or measured with Google Earth and routings obtained from The Globe And Mail (for HFR) and the Ecotrain Study (Deliverable 5).


Basic maths reveals that you can’t cover 180 km in less than 1 hour without exceeding 200 km/h (125 mph, i.e. the maximum speed of the current fleet), which means you will need HSR equipment to reach such a speed and you won’t be able to justify such a dedicated high-performance fleet without securing the funding for such infrastructure at the same time. You are already calling for HSR, not for a step towards it…

I get what you're saying. I guess, what I am hoping for here is that:

1) They pick an alignment that can sustain > 200 kph. Whether that's 240, 270 or 300 is irrelevant. Hoping for something beyond 177 kph here. My immediate concern would be to pick something where most of the curve radii and grades don't have to be discarded when going about 177 kph.

2) There's an investment path that allows for the attainment of that top rated speed on portions of the corridor through steady investment. Perhaps, over the next decade we see slow increases in speed on discrete sections, as capital is invested on grade separation, banked curves, etc. This is what I mean by upgradability.

3) I get that Ottawa-Montreal under an hour means HSR. Which is exactly what I hope happens within a 5-10 yrs of building HFR. I look at this corridor and I can't imagine they'd need new rolling stock to reduce travel times to under an hour. I would think this is all about track work. My broader point is that investment in this stretch probably pays off more than investing to improve average speed anywhere else. Perhaps, the Ottawa-Montreal portion should be moved to the Ecotrain 300 corridor. And perhaps it needs just a bit of smoothing out a few curves and grade separation to make it < 1hr.