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Originally Posted by ssiguy
So if the argument is that VIA is needed to connect towns then fine. That said, they should also have to damn well pay for it. Calculate the average subsidy given on the Corridor routes and apply it nationwide. Fare is fair. If they want to take it then go ahead but be prepared to pay for it.
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If you take the operating subsidy of VIA Rail and divided it by the number of Canadians, you get a per-capita subsidy of $7.26. If you only take the operating subsidy of VIA’s Corridor services and divide it by the number of people living only in those CMAs&CAs which are directly served by VIA’s Corridor services*, you get a per-capita subsidy of $8.77:
Compiled from:
VIA Rail Annual Report 2017
This means that if Canada’s non-Corridor population would receive the same per-capita subsidy as Canadians in the Corridor, they would have $55,244,645 more to spend on their intercity passenger rail transportation needs, which would represent an increase of 44.7% over the value of the subsidy they currently receive. This amount is slightly higher than the operating deficit of all Corridor services west of Toronto and east of Ottawa (i.e. Southwestern Ontario and Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec).
*14 CMAs with a combined population of 15,582,454 in the 2016 census (Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa-Gatineau, Quebec City, Hamilton/Burlington, Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, London, St. Catherines – Niagara, Oshawa, Windsor, Kingston, Guelph, Brantford and Belleville) and 11 CAs with a combined population of 573,494 (Chatham-Kent, Sarnia, Drummondville, Cornwall, Saint-Hyacinthe, Woodstock, Brockville, Stratford, Cobourg, Port Hope and Ingersoll).
Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
When in a small town it is patently unreasonable to expect the same services as one finds in the larger cities. Healthcare is also a right but that doesn't mean that every Tom, Dick, & Harry settlement gets to have a hospital or a school/college/gov't offices/transit etc for that matter. It's called setting priorities. If these little places need to be connected by transportation and one doesn't have a car or can't drive then replace the damn trains with buses that won't have to be subsized to the obscene levels of up to $500/trip.
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Can you please drop using per-trip subsidy figures and compare per-passenger-mile figures instead? As you can see in the previous table, VIA’s per-passenger-mile subsidy was $0.18 on the Corridor and $0.67 outside the Corridor, which is only 16% or 57% of the $1.16 per-passenger-mile subsidy (
$0.72 per passenger-km) which will be paid for passengers of the REM…
Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
If VIA and the government were REALLY interested in providing transportation for these areas then a bus will do and buses are cheaper and faster alternatives to VIA while providing daily frequent service as opposed to a useless 2 or 3 times a week. The travelling public in these areas would be far better served and with the standard VIA train subsidy at the Corridor average applied to the bus service, the price would be drastically lower and really provide an accessible transportation service that VIA trains can't..
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You are right that intercity travellers in non-corridor areas like the Prairies would be better served by a daily bus service than a rail service operating only 2 or 3 times a week, but you still seem to be incapable of comprehending that any VIA service operating at such low frequencies serves either tourists or residents of isolated communities for which such a service level is adequate.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
Sell VIA's non-Corridor routes to tourist operatos and funnel that money into a fleet of inter-city buses...........like transit not every area justifies a subway but buses provide the services that are needed and most cost effective.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
I have answered it. I have plainly stated that all non-corridor services should be cancelled and only run by the private sector for tourists. I have no problem subsidizing transportation but VIA outside the Corridor is not a transportation service but rather a tourist cruise ship running on tracks and I don't feel like subsidizing a cruise ship.
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Similarly, you seem to be incapable of comprehending that VIA’s mandatory services are essential services offered to Canadian citizens which happen to live in isolated communities without year-round road access (if at all) and that there is no market for “selling” public services which operate at substantial deficits, regardless how often I’ve explained this to you.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
Question...........yes, I want an honest answer...........If you didn't have a car or weren't able to drive and so you needed inter-city transportation would you rather have a frequent, reliable, faster, and affordable bus service or a train that comes by 2 or 3 times a week {as opposed to 3 times a day}, is slower, less reliable, and costs 3 times as much?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
I still havenèt heard anybody answer my question.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
Also whatever happened to the radical idea of actually asking people effected what they want? Ask Albertans if they would rather keep their slow boat to China VIA service or have that line cancelled and using those operational subsidies to resurrect the Cal/RD/Edm corrior. I would say 95% of Albertans woyuld choice the latter.
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The barrier against running an intercity passenger rail service between Calgary and Edmonton is the same as elsewhere in Western Canada: That it would cost eyewatering amounts of capital funds to upgrade the existing corridors to allow the travel times, punctuality and frequencies needed to be commercially relevant against the car, plane or the bus. Alberta’s share of the Canadian’s current subsidy ($6.3 million, if dividing its total subsidy of $41.2 million by 4466 km and multiplying it by the approx. 680 km long stretch which passes through the “strong and free” province) may pay for 1 day trip between Calgary and Edmonton. But given that the CP line is only a secondary line in the CP network, maximum track speeds are unlikely to exceed 50 mph (80 km/h), which makes such a service at least a full hour slower than by driving (3 hours for 300 km, according to Google Maps). So unless you are willing to invest billions in upgrading the existing rail corridors (basically copying HFR), I don't see how a passenger rail service depending on intercity travellers could be viable between Calgary and Edmonton (or anywhere else in Western Canada)...
Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
Unlike UrbanSky, I do not put my priority on VIA but rather on the travelling public. It is the public that should be served as opposed to a an expensive government make-work project which is all the non-Corridor routes are as far as I'm concerned except if a valid business case can be used on a new service ie Calgary/Edmonton.. As I stated, use the average per-person subsidy on the Corridor and apply it nationwide. If the service is still viable then they can keep it or perhaps only run it during peak seasons. If not let a private company run the tourist service and let VIA replace those routes with faster, more reliable, much more frequent, and vastly cheaper inner-city buses.
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I actually do “put my priority” on the “travelling public” and also on the taxpayer, as they jointly pay my salary. This is why I work on a
project which my employer expects to eliminate the operating subsidy for the Corridor, while serving more than twice as many passengers. I can find merit in the idea of allocating a fixed per-capita Dollar amount to the governments of every province so that they can fund the local and intercity transportation networks which best suit their needs, but this requires a lot of intra-provincial coordination. I wouldn’t be surprised if the subsidy “gap” of $55 million I calculated at the beginning of this post could fund an intercity bus network which is almost as extensive and probably even more useful than the Greyhound network which was abandoned in the last fall…
Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
This gets to one of the problems with VIA with it's 19th century mentality trying to work in a 21st century reality..............it is just a train service as opposed to what it should be, a transportation service.
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VIA could not charge the prices it’s charging and recover almost two-thirds of its operating costs if it understood its business as a mere transportation service: Its services combine mobility with hospitality, while trains are just the means to offer these services. You would of course have to actually travel with VIA (especially on its premium products like Business Class, Touring, Sleeper Plus or Prestige) to grasp this philosophy…
Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
I remember it well and it was 100% pure politics. The ONLY reason they used the northern route as opposed to Regina/Calgary was because the Minister of Transportation at the time was Don Mazankowski and he was the MP from, you guessed it, Edmonton.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
It wasn't due to CN or CP nor the probably jobs but the politics. Closing a route thru your city, regardless of whether it makes sense or not, is a no-win scenario so the travelling public be damned when a politicians seat is at risk. It was 100% politics.
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There might have been a bias towards the CN and against the CP route, but I struggle to imagine how the government could have chosen to retain the CP route instead of the CN route, given the overarching objective of the January 1990 cuts to minimise VIA’s subsidy need: Abandoning Winnipeg-Saskatoon-Edmonton-Jasper-Vancouver would have stranded passengers from the Skeena in Jasper, which would have probably required to extend the Skeena to the nearest international airport (i.e. Edmonton). East of Winnipeg, choosing the CP over the CN line would have necessitated to keep the remote service which had been offered between Winnipeg and Capreol since VIA consolidated the Canadian and the Super-Continental in 1981.
Extrapolating from the per train-km subsidy costs in the 2017 Annual Report and assuming that the choice of route does not significantly affect the operating deficit of the Canadian, extending the Skeena to Edmonton might have costed an additional $2.6 million in operational funding, while the Winnipeg-Capreol might have costed $18.3 million in operational funding. This suggests that the value of the incremental subsidy needed for choosing the CP routing over CN would be $17.5 million today ($2.6 for the Skeena plus $18.3 million Winnipeg-Capreol minus $3.4 million for Sudbury-White River).
Compiled and extrapolated from:
VIA Rail Annual Reports 2016 and 2017
Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
As opposed to this, VIA could serve dozens of other communities, millions of more people, provide faster and more reliable service, come by at least once a day even on the remote routes, and, due to the same Corridor subsidy, be sizably cheaper to boot. Which service would you rather have?
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I’m a bit confused. Usually you argue for abandoning all non-corridor services, but now you demand daily service “even on the remote routes”…?
PS: I would highly appreciate if your future contributions would indicate that you have attentively read and at least tried to understand the points I've been making in my replies to you. Thank you!
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