Quote:
Originally Posted by Urban_Sky
We can send people to the moon and robots to Mars, so how could restoring passenger rail between Calgary and Banff be possibly not “feasible”? The question is whether the business case is conpelling enough to attract the required investment from the respective levels of governments concerned (i.e. the guardians of the taxpayer money) and the following two paragraphs from your article make me not very optimistic:
“Bus service capital costs are estimated to range from $8.1 million to $19.6 million, with yearly operating costs of about $2 million before fares are considered.
Rail is obviously more cost intensive, with capital costs between $660 million and $680 million and operating costs of $8.1 million to $9.1 million per year that would have to be subsidized.”
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I totally agree, the report wasn't exactly a slam dunk for building rail out to the mountains. If the powers that be are given the choice between a low risk, much cheaper option with decent benefit, or an option 10 times the price with about 20% more benefit that's far more difficult with more risk, it's not hard to predict what decision they will make. Especially as our likely next leader Jason Kenney has about as much inspiration as a pack of toilet paper.
I also (in my completely uneducated view) think they have underestimated the cost to build rail out to the mountains, there is pretty tough terrain out there, they are going to have to do a lot of earthworks and it would not surprise me if they have to completely rebuild sections as the circa 1880 original alignment was pretty much just guys eyeballing the route and chucking down whatever local dirt and gravel they could find. While there is a section on regulations and dealing with CP, they again glossed over this. They pretty much said, 'if CP don't like this it will be virtually impossible', but didn't seem to think this was a big deal, despite CP having no interest and no incentive to help.
However, I do also think they downplayed the benefits of rail and how popular it could be, especially compared to a bus. I know there are many people, myself included, that would never bother to take a bus to the mountains (we would just drive), but would consider taking a train. And what of international tourists - visitors from Europe would just expect there to be a train, what kind of rinky dink city doesn't have
any passenger rail? If we could actually run the line up to the airport, then YYC - Downtown Calgary -Banff rail becomes a pretty attractive proposition that we can use as a selling point and Calgary would no longer have to worry about extending it's transit to YYC.