I posted this elsewhere. It shows that there is potential to increase ridership in the West.
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Information can lead to some great discoveries....
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3wx7vr93sq...FINAL.pdf?dl=0
This was shared on Urban Toronto with regards to 2018 Via Rail boardings and deboardings. When you dig through it, you start to see some patters that are only apparent on a map.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/drive?...7D&usp=sharing
I put all stations with over 1000 on the map.
The colours are as follows:
over 1 million, red
500,000 - 1 mill, green
100,000-500,000, yellow
50,000-100.000, orange
10,000-50,000 purple
under 10,000, blue
Zooming in and out, and looking at more than just the numbers, what we see are some obvious things, and some things we can extrapolate from.
1) The 3 highest cities are Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Makes sense. They have the most trains to them. They are also among the top 5 cities in Canada.
2)The busiest stations are all along the Corridor, where it has the most trains.
3) London is the 4th and Kingston is the 5th in ridership. They are both about 2 hours drive to Toronto. This also means that one day if GO is extended to them, it will likely do well, and these numbers would drop. There is already murmurs that this will happen.
4) All terminals, except for Churchill are on the map. Churchill has 494.
5)Smith Falls is on the map, and likely would grow due to HFR going to it. It might be a good way to get to Kingston from places along the HFR route.
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Now it is time to have some fun. It is time for.... math.
Lets take the major cities outside of the Corridor and see what more service might look if the growth was linear.
The cities we will look at are: Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Moncton and Halifax.
I have suggested a few things:
1)Daily service
2) cutting the long haul lines up
3) Adding additional service as needed between those terminal cities.
Lets start with the 1st one. It is simple math.
Currently, with 3 days a week service, the cities have:
Vancouver - 42,838
Edmonton -14,858
Winnipeg - 15,089
Moncton -18,823
Halifax -29,865
So, simply doubling it would give
Vancouver - 85,676
Edmonton - 29,716
Winnipeg - 30,178
Moncton - 37,646
Halifax -59,730
Ahhh, but you see, in my idea of daily service, you actually have in and out, both ways. Which means each day is 2 trains, not 1.
Vancouver - 171,352
Edmonton - 59,432
Winnipeg - 60,356
Moncton - 75,292
Halifax - 119,460
So, now it comes to cutting the long hauls up and running services like they do on the Corridor.
So, lets say we still keep the daily service, but we have alternative routes. Lets say they are also only 1 a day, both ways
For the Canadian, only Vancouver and Winnipeg would change
Vancouver - 342,704
Winnipeg - 120,712
For the Ocean, there are alternatives. So, here is how Moncton and Halifax would fair:
Moncton - 150,584
Halifax - 238,920
What about Edmonton? Well, lets say we had service down to Calgary. lets say it was really horrible, and was only 4 times a day. Lets also assume that the amount would be equal to the numbers on the Canadian getting on or off.
Edmonton - 237,728 + 59,432 = 297,160
Realize, we have not added an HFR route on any of these routes. We have not made them faster. We have just added daily service plus adding 1 new route that could draw more service.
So, our new numbers are:
Vancouver - 342,704
Edmonton - 297,160
Winnipeg - 120,712
Moncton - 150,584
Halifax - 238,920
On the map, that would make all of these go yellow. That would move Vancouver to the 6th spot.
Now, one could argue that adding the southern route across the Prairies would actually add more than this as there is more population than the northern route. And if we ever saw a return of the Gull/Downeaster to Halifax, then the numbers for Moncton and Halifax would jump too.
This is basic math. I did not even do it where I bumped the numbers up for that 7th day. So,there is a buffer in these numbers. As an engineer, whenever we do math calculations,w e always have some sort of buffer/safety factor built into the math.
Numbers don't lie. They are numbers.. They do not care about your motives.
So, once HFR frees up subsidy money, we should add services elsewhere to build up the numbers.