Quote:
Originally Posted by RyeJay
Time isn't worth ..much? There is always someone willing to pay more to get their product to shelf faster because there is always profit in doing so.
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I don't think this is true. For example, imagine that you are shipping hammers from Canadian Tire. Getting the product from Asia to North America in 3 weeks is not much better than taking 10 minutes. It's probably better, all else being equal, but I doubt it's something Canadian Tire would pay significantly more for. Looking at it the other way, I'm sure they'd build a bigger warehouse in Mississauga and carry more stock if it meant long-term savings on shipments. And all of that aside the HSR is only going to work for the land portion of the shipping anyway, so the overall reduction in time is likely very small even if the rail reduces travel time to zero. For Halifax you're talking about cutting travel time from N weeks + a couple days to N weeks + a couple hours.
Produce is more time-sensitive but is it worth spending billions on? Seems unlikely when there's already air and there's the possibility of setting up local production with greenhouses.
I do think that if high speed rail were implemented it would be useful for shipping, but I've yet to see a good argument that justifies the expense.
Passenger traffic is a little different because people care very much about personal travel times. They don't care how long most products take to get to them as long as local availability is maintained.