This project has had the feeling of being too political and too focused on speed and not travel time before it was formally announced, to not leave massive questions. There seems to be too little consideration for what drives trips, and too much on just building tracks that allow fast trains. Airport connections matter both because the trip will often be one leg of a longer trip, but also because airports are already and should be planned to be a hub of far more local transportation, so reaching any final destination that is not the core of the city, might be far easier. Pearson and Trudeau already offer a spot in the western part of their respective cities, which offer a better jumping off point for a very large group of people.
You have to ask, to what degree have the existing alignments been examined for additional tracks straightening and improved crossings? Yes, the existing approaches to Union and Central Station are slow, but why, and can't that be improved? Aren't the current issues with speed and reliability nearly entirely the presence and primacy of freight rail on the tracks, not the maximum running speed because of the geometry of the alignment?
Before we spend $100+++billion on a new route, perhaps we should be looking at what is required to fix the existing alignment, add tracks, and make a reliably sub-3-hour trip between Union and Central Stations. The city pairings of Toronto-Montreal, Toronto-Ottawa, and Montreal-Ottawa should be considered separately to make sure we are not pushing service via Ottawa for Montreal-Toronto trips, just because.
Need to make sure we build something that serves the trips people actually want to make, and that would require it to link well to other services, and focus on total travel time, not top speed. If you are going from Montreal to Toronto, but have to cross the urban portion of the greater Ottawa region at low speed, did you not lose the advantage of a top speed of 300kph? Again, total travel time is what will be key, so in many cases it may be that some of the money would have had more effect on even the long-distance trips, by improving the local services. If it is a struggle to or from Union Station and they are headed to say the west island, it may be that the lack of local services at either end, is what puts someone in their car to begin with.
All great comments, especially about having suburban jumping off points at airports.
I don't think you will get to sub 3 hour with the existing alignment, but we know you can get to sub 4! If we had the setup we did historically and made a few additional improvements that could be pretty good and at a much lower price.
The approach to Union in Toronto is not even THAT slow and will be improved as part of existing GO plans.
When I was a much younger man, there used to be a scheduled trip, on the existing alignment (no improvements, and sharing track) that was scheduled for just a tick under 4 hours (LRC trains, which were limited by track quality and other issues, ran 160kph for decent portions of the trip).
I had been thinking 3 hours end-to-end is flying. Your reaction made me think about it a little harder. Regardless of new or old alignment, 3 hours requires some real tolerance of speed inside urban areas. I can't help but think there will be some serious NIMBY pushback on that (120 kph ok 250 though?). 3.25 hours, maybe. That seems as likely with real improvements to the existing alignment. If you have a stop in the east end of Toronto and something on the approaches to Central, it seems hard to imagine 3 hours total trip time. 3 hrs requires averaging 185km, including all stops and slow areas, including entering and exiting cities. The Paris to Marseille average is only about 200, and for some reason, I can't help but think there is more tolerance of fast trains within city limits there. It would mean holding speeds 250 for the large majority of the distance. This is to say no real slowing down through Peterborough or Ottawa on the new alignment or through Kingston on the existing one, not to mention quite high speed inside the GTA and on the Island of Montreal.
Through service for Montreal via gare centrale seems tricky. One alternative way to do things might be to break things into multiple services that don't necessarily all reach (or begin in) the city centre.
Montreal - Toronto/Ottawa would run from gare centrale, downtown-downtown (same alignment from the West Island via Dorval into gare centrale as VIA today).
Montreal - Quebec would run from Dorval and branch off onto the EXO 12 Saint-Jerome alignment through Cote-Saint-Luc, along Jean-Talon, and up into Laval, then branching off by autoroute 440 and heading for Trois-Rivieres. Stations (and connections) at Dorval (EXO, REM*), Canora (REM), and de la Concorde in Laval (orange line).
Could also run this as a Toronto/Ottawa - Quebec service alternating with the 'regular' downtown-downtown service, or just have it start/end in Dorval, ideally with a timed transfer to/from Toronto/Ottawa -Montreal trains. Also, could follow the EXO 15 Mascouche alignment with stations (and connections) at Montpelier (REM) and de la Concorde in Laval (orange line).
While that means although Quebec-Montreal wouldn't be downtown-downtown, it would be close and have very good connections to downtown via REM (8min from Canora to gare centrale) or metro (30min from de la Concorde), as well as to everywhere else those systems reach, including dense neighbourhoods, universities, the airport, Laval and the South Shore). Arguably that's better than the Ottawa train station. And while there's additional existing track to follow through the dense city, with some challenges and constraints, it does avoid the really significant tunnel problems caused by trying to get through service via gare centrale.
*Aware that REM isn't planned to run between the airport and the Dorval train station; in this scenario it would be, for airport access and West Island connections.
I don't think running around the mountain for direct MTL to QC trips is a big issue, certainly better than starting at a poorly connected station by the airport.
I do think you have the right idea in general with the point to point patterns though!
Attendees to these open houses, many of whom hopefully share your sentiments, ought to drive home a guiding principle that this project should make existing transit make more sense, and make planned transit more attainable.
One thing that comes to mind is the potential for a suburban secondary Toronto stop in the Agincourt area of Scarborough (if routing through Peterborough remains a must), which could seriously catalyse the planned Line 4 extension, and even serve as an impetus to steer the alignment for the line southeast toward terminating directly at Scarborough Centre. I'm sure similar opportunities exist in other cities too.
One thing I definitely plan to borrow from your piece when talking to the staff at my local open house is: hell no to a "rail version of highway 407"!
Frankly, I could name two dozen cities that need LRT or regional rail more than this corridor needs HSR.
I live in southern Ontario, and I'm fine with the federal government funding this, but I honestly think HSR should primarily be from Quebec City - Montreal -Ottawa. Montreal is the only city that has the existing transit that can really justify HSR, and I don't believe Toronto will be a significant demand center unless prices are like $40 to Ottawa.
allow me to clarify my negative review; Going from Toronto to Ottawa/Montreal is about 4x longer than the Ottawa-Montreal trip. I think HSR is a "nice-to-have", but really the least important aspect of a transit system. In this case, assuming distance maps to cost, roughly 80% of cost will be to connect Montreal and Toronto, and I do not believe this will drive 80% of ridership. Particularly as an existing rail service already operates. I don't see a scenario where the HSR is less expensive than what exists, or a higher cost option drives an increase in demand by people not currently taking the trip but willing to do so if it were 2 hours shorter.
I think there is much greater demand for regional/local transit, and demand that would grow overall ridership. Cities like Kingston or London or Niagara where LRTs would create transit spines, or greater Go connections allowing more trips within southern Ontario.
Toronto-Montreal is a trip I think the average person might make once a year. The speed of that trip will not determine if the person buys a car; being able to make their local trips easily that constitute the majority of their travel is what impacts this decision. So the people actually traveling to Montreal will largely be car owners, and I think many will choose to drive rather than take rail, as they currently do, because the price will not be lower.
I would agree this should not be an either/or case. And in the seemingly likely event we get HSR from Montreal-Toronto, I am not going to be upset or blame it for the fact we are seemingly not building the local/regional transit. But if you gave me control of the finances right now, I would not allocate that budget to HSR, I would be focusing on the basics. Because without those, I don't think HSR will be a success.
Montreal on the other hand has a much stronger transit usage per capita, and a wider strata of society choosing not to use a car. The trip to Ottawa is relatively short, and brings Ottawa residents to an international airport. The only two HSR projects I actually believe are justified it Ottawa-Montreal, and Calgary-Edmonton. These are routes where the cost/ridership impact make sense to me in a way that can offer frequent low cost travel that people will have a meaningful impact on a significant number of regular users.
Toronto (and I live in the GTA), has great transit if you want to get downtown. But the second you are making any other trip or a trip outside the downtown, it becomes a very inconvenient system. For that reason, I would say that the majority of users with disposable income own a car, even if it is not there primary mode of travel. So long as that is the case, I am sceptical such users will take HSR, because I do not believe it will be deeply affordable to the point it is less expensive than driving, particularly when the current rail service is not attractive. I don't think speed is the primary driver of how people choose to make these trips. And I would argue that Montreal's transit system has been better designed to allow/encourage a wider variety of people to choose a car free life style, and these people are more likely to drive HSR usage.
Brilliant breakdown of the P3 governance trap. The point about duplicate infrastructure (separate tunnels, terminals) when agencies optimize narrowly instead of network-wide is exactyl what I've seen happen in similiar contexts. Taxpayers fund redundant assets with minimal public value. Would be curious if there's any historical precedent for megaprojects like Alto actually succeeding under pure P3 structures without open-access operations.
I couldn’t agree more that at the end of the day, the responsibility lies with the governments in question. In this case, I believe the federal government has a duty to lead on what it’s touting as a true nation-building project.
Currently, the government is trying to build dedicated agencies for some longstanding infrastructural challenges such as housing (BCH). Why do you think the federal government has not taken the lead on this front?
(I could talk about the provincial roles here – which are critical – but let’s save that for now)
I have to admit I’m not super familiar with transport Canada’s purview, outside of aviation regulation.
What would you say is limiting transport Canada from assuming a more effective role when it comes to rail / transit? Or, in your opinion, is this situation requiring a blank slate / new agency?
I went to the open house and was told the reason ALTO is planning to cross the river before Ile Perrot is because the rail corridor at Dorion is allegedly too crowded with 2 freight lines and a regional rail. Apparently a problem there but not in Toronto? seems weird. There also *might* be a YUL airport connection but it would supposedly be more expensive.
The HSR can’t access Montreal from Dorion and the West Island because that corridor is occupied by two double-tracked freight mainlines and Autoroute 20. That approach also includes the already-problematic Dorval and Turcot interchanges plus the Lachine Canal and many densely populated neighbourhoods. The approach from the North would be necessary even without the extension to Quebec City.
There is oodles of space to fit lots of infrastructure and lots of ability to rearrange and rationalize. Much more has been put in less space in other places.
There are many aspects of this project that are remarkably disappointing. You touched on the P3 being one of them. Though I will say a Pearson airport connection is probably most likely with an extension westwards to Windsor down the line. I also think this project is skipping some steps here, and doesn't address the need to significantly improve regional passenger rail service in the corridor to smaller communities. The ticket price consideration is another one of them. What's the point being excited about Alto at all if round trips from Toronto-Montreal are going to be $200+ for a single person? And no...booking a month ahead is not a solution...people are just going to drive in that case.
I agree with much of what you said, only thing I take issue with is the regional service piece. We should not expect one project to solve every problem we have.
I think it's indicative of the overall position Alto/Cadence seem to be taking towards local transit: as an obstacle to plan around and not a part of the larger transit picture to be worked with.
Very fair point about the lack of air connections. What's freightening, too, is that when speaking with one of the staff at the open house yesterday, their response to "what does Air Canada bring to the table?" was "their interest is leveraging the rail too boost the amount of flights they can run"... but then a minute later, "they're a silent equity partner, really".
Yeah, no link to YYZ ostencibly until 2040s and no link to MTL airport, definitely gonna BOOST their revenues!!?!?
Most definitely don’t repeat the mistakes of the California high speed rail adventure, such as winding the route for path-of-least-resistance (no pun intended…) political reasons rather than selecting the cheapest and most direct route between the two huge metropolitan areas in the state. A lesson that the interstate highway builders in the 1950s had followed by directing Interstate 5 on a route that didn’t serve the Central Valley cities, but instead went more directly from the Bay Area to LA.
Michael Schabas made a report to the Senate that outlines in detail some of the insider discussions and one of the bid submissions for the ALTO project. A lot of ALTO's statements make much more sense after reading this.
In particular, the idea seems to be to run spurs into the cities, with potentially multiple stations per city, while also installing bypass tracks. That limits the number of corridors into each city centre to one.
Why would the connections to smaller cities be a bad thing (e.g. Kingston)? Is the issue with going through urban centers the cost/disruption? Sorry for the naive questions, but I know the Shinkansens go through urban centers on elevated platforms.
I had a look at the map Alto put out and I realize my comment doesn't make much sense. Seems the consensus is that it would be more expensive to build along the lake because of the higher land costs and private rights. In reference to going through Ottawa, do you mean that it shouldn't at all, because it's less direct to QC, or just because it's more expensive to build through the center of the city?
I don't think I suggested not going through Ottawa?
Re. Kingston, its not on their alignment, I think there is a case to be made that they should have chosen an alignment that would better serve it, but they made a political promise about Peterborough.
The issue isn't the distance, it's the geography. There is a reason there is no existing rail line along this route, there is a reason the 401 was built with the 416 as a connection rather than building the 407 between Toronto and Ottawa (even though highway 7 was the existing route).
You are simply going to spend a fortune trying to blast though the northern route and over the bogs. It is far easier to build along the flat St. Laurent river valley.
I agree it might be slower, but significantly slower? I'm not sure, I don't think it would slow things down enough to supplant HRS as a preferred option in terms of trip time. Ottawa seems like a pretty good market for ridership I would think with consistent service to public servants and diplomats to and from our capital city. And having a separate route as neolithic suggested below doesn't make any sense to me in the long run and cost effectiveness. The detour to Montreal from laval seems more significant to me.
Ultimately there should be a set of lines that roughly mirrors the connectivity of the highways. Direct from Toronto to Montreal with another loop up to Ottawa
I have to disagree it is a significant detour. The only ridership impacted would be the trips between Toronto and Ottawa, which I think is a small fraction of travel on the corridor, and those riders can transfer at Brockville onto a regular train for the last hour of the trip, or trains can run directly from Toronto to Montreal to Ottawa, and in that case its adding maybe 30 minutes to the Ottawa traveller - and by adding I mean compared to a direct route, not the existing trip.
There should be a Montreal - Ottawa HSR line, but that should be separate from the Toronto -Montreal route. It isn't just the direct distance, the land may be more expensive on the lake shore, but building on it is far cheaper than blasting through the bogs and Highlands.
This project has had the feeling of being too political and too focused on speed and not travel time before it was formally announced, to not leave massive questions. There seems to be too little consideration for what drives trips, and too much on just building tracks that allow fast trains. Airport connections matter both because the trip will often be one leg of a longer trip, but also because airports are already and should be planned to be a hub of far more local transportation, so reaching any final destination that is not the core of the city, might be far easier. Pearson and Trudeau already offer a spot in the western part of their respective cities, which offer a better jumping off point for a very large group of people.
You have to ask, to what degree have the existing alignments been examined for additional tracks straightening and improved crossings? Yes, the existing approaches to Union and Central Station are slow, but why, and can't that be improved? Aren't the current issues with speed and reliability nearly entirely the presence and primacy of freight rail on the tracks, not the maximum running speed because of the geometry of the alignment?
Before we spend $100+++billion on a new route, perhaps we should be looking at what is required to fix the existing alignment, add tracks, and make a reliably sub-3-hour trip between Union and Central Stations. The city pairings of Toronto-Montreal, Toronto-Ottawa, and Montreal-Ottawa should be considered separately to make sure we are not pushing service via Ottawa for Montreal-Toronto trips, just because.
Need to make sure we build something that serves the trips people actually want to make, and that would require it to link well to other services, and focus on total travel time, not top speed. If you are going from Montreal to Toronto, but have to cross the urban portion of the greater Ottawa region at low speed, did you not lose the advantage of a top speed of 300kph? Again, total travel time is what will be key, so in many cases it may be that some of the money would have had more effect on even the long-distance trips, by improving the local services. If it is a struggle to or from Union Station and they are headed to say the west island, it may be that the lack of local services at either end, is what puts someone in their car to begin with.
All great comments, especially about having suburban jumping off points at airports.
I don't think you will get to sub 3 hour with the existing alignment, but we know you can get to sub 4! If we had the setup we did historically and made a few additional improvements that could be pretty good and at a much lower price.
The approach to Union in Toronto is not even THAT slow and will be improved as part of existing GO plans.
When I was a much younger man, there used to be a scheduled trip, on the existing alignment (no improvements, and sharing track) that was scheduled for just a tick under 4 hours (LRC trains, which were limited by track quality and other issues, ran 160kph for decent portions of the trip).
I had been thinking 3 hours end-to-end is flying. Your reaction made me think about it a little harder. Regardless of new or old alignment, 3 hours requires some real tolerance of speed inside urban areas. I can't help but think there will be some serious NIMBY pushback on that (120 kph ok 250 though?). 3.25 hours, maybe. That seems as likely with real improvements to the existing alignment. If you have a stop in the east end of Toronto and something on the approaches to Central, it seems hard to imagine 3 hours total trip time. 3 hrs requires averaging 185km, including all stops and slow areas, including entering and exiting cities. The Paris to Marseille average is only about 200, and for some reason, I can't help but think there is more tolerance of fast trains within city limits there. It would mean holding speeds 250 for the large majority of the distance. This is to say no real slowing down through Peterborough or Ottawa on the new alignment or through Kingston on the existing one, not to mention quite high speed inside the GTA and on the Island of Montreal.
Through service for Montreal via gare centrale seems tricky. One alternative way to do things might be to break things into multiple services that don't necessarily all reach (or begin in) the city centre.
Montreal - Toronto/Ottawa would run from gare centrale, downtown-downtown (same alignment from the West Island via Dorval into gare centrale as VIA today).
Montreal - Quebec would run from Dorval and branch off onto the EXO 12 Saint-Jerome alignment through Cote-Saint-Luc, along Jean-Talon, and up into Laval, then branching off by autoroute 440 and heading for Trois-Rivieres. Stations (and connections) at Dorval (EXO, REM*), Canora (REM), and de la Concorde in Laval (orange line).
Could also run this as a Toronto/Ottawa - Quebec service alternating with the 'regular' downtown-downtown service, or just have it start/end in Dorval, ideally with a timed transfer to/from Toronto/Ottawa -Montreal trains. Also, could follow the EXO 15 Mascouche alignment with stations (and connections) at Montpelier (REM) and de la Concorde in Laval (orange line).
While that means although Quebec-Montreal wouldn't be downtown-downtown, it would be close and have very good connections to downtown via REM (8min from Canora to gare centrale) or metro (30min from de la Concorde), as well as to everywhere else those systems reach, including dense neighbourhoods, universities, the airport, Laval and the South Shore). Arguably that's better than the Ottawa train station. And while there's additional existing track to follow through the dense city, with some challenges and constraints, it does avoid the really significant tunnel problems caused by trying to get through service via gare centrale.
*Aware that REM isn't planned to run between the airport and the Dorval train station; in this scenario it would be, for airport access and West Island connections.
I don't think running around the mountain for direct MTL to QC trips is a big issue, certainly better than starting at a poorly connected station by the airport.
I do think you have the right idea in general with the point to point patterns though!
Attendees to these open houses, many of whom hopefully share your sentiments, ought to drive home a guiding principle that this project should make existing transit make more sense, and make planned transit more attainable.
One thing that comes to mind is the potential for a suburban secondary Toronto stop in the Agincourt area of Scarborough (if routing through Peterborough remains a must), which could seriously catalyse the planned Line 4 extension, and even serve as an impetus to steer the alignment for the line southeast toward terminating directly at Scarborough Centre. I'm sure similar opportunities exist in other cities too.
One thing I definitely plan to borrow from your piece when talking to the staff at my local open house is: hell no to a "rail version of highway 407"!
Yep, thats a good principle to think about, but one which is currently being violated!
Well said!
Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal need new subway lines more than they need inter-city high-speed rail.
New public transit subway lines would be more useful to more people than inter-city high-speed rail.
Ideally it would not be an either-or.
Frankly, I could name two dozen cities that need LRT or regional rail more than this corridor needs HSR.
I live in southern Ontario, and I'm fine with the federal government funding this, but I honestly think HSR should primarily be from Quebec City - Montreal -Ottawa. Montreal is the only city that has the existing transit that can really justify HSR, and I don't believe Toronto will be a significant demand center unless prices are like $40 to Ottawa.
Toronto is huge, of course it should be connected to HSR, there is no conceivable way QC has more than a small fraction the ridership.
allow me to clarify my negative review; Going from Toronto to Ottawa/Montreal is about 4x longer than the Ottawa-Montreal trip. I think HSR is a "nice-to-have", but really the least important aspect of a transit system. In this case, assuming distance maps to cost, roughly 80% of cost will be to connect Montreal and Toronto, and I do not believe this will drive 80% of ridership. Particularly as an existing rail service already operates. I don't see a scenario where the HSR is less expensive than what exists, or a higher cost option drives an increase in demand by people not currently taking the trip but willing to do so if it were 2 hours shorter.
I think there is much greater demand for regional/local transit, and demand that would grow overall ridership. Cities like Kingston or London or Niagara where LRTs would create transit spines, or greater Go connections allowing more trips within southern Ontario.
Toronto-Montreal is a trip I think the average person might make once a year. The speed of that trip will not determine if the person buys a car; being able to make their local trips easily that constitute the majority of their travel is what impacts this decision. So the people actually traveling to Montreal will largely be car owners, and I think many will choose to drive rather than take rail, as they currently do, because the price will not be lower.
I would agree this should not be an either/or case. And in the seemingly likely event we get HSR from Montreal-Toronto, I am not going to be upset or blame it for the fact we are seemingly not building the local/regional transit. But if you gave me control of the finances right now, I would not allocate that budget to HSR, I would be focusing on the basics. Because without those, I don't think HSR will be a success.
Montreal on the other hand has a much stronger transit usage per capita, and a wider strata of society choosing not to use a car. The trip to Ottawa is relatively short, and brings Ottawa residents to an international airport. The only two HSR projects I actually believe are justified it Ottawa-Montreal, and Calgary-Edmonton. These are routes where the cost/ridership impact make sense to me in a way that can offer frequent low cost travel that people will have a meaningful impact on a significant number of regular users.
that is SEVERELY underrating the public transit of Toronto in a way that makes zero sense
Toronto (and I live in the GTA), has great transit if you want to get downtown. But the second you are making any other trip or a trip outside the downtown, it becomes a very inconvenient system. For that reason, I would say that the majority of users with disposable income own a car, even if it is not there primary mode of travel. So long as that is the case, I am sceptical such users will take HSR, because I do not believe it will be deeply affordable to the point it is less expensive than driving, particularly when the current rail service is not attractive. I don't think speed is the primary driver of how people choose to make these trips. And I would argue that Montreal's transit system has been better designed to allow/encourage a wider variety of people to choose a car free life style, and these people are more likely to drive HSR usage.
I don't want to get too in the details but I think you're hard-wrong on everything down the line but whatever
Since day 1 I've expected them to drop the Québec City branch to simplify the Montreal connection, so on the one hand I'm proven right as the first phase is set to be Ottawa-Montreal, but on the other hand they still insist on making the Montreal connector as expensive and ambitious as possible ... My confidence in phase 1 being shipped at all is still hovering at around 40%, with this information
I'd say mine is lower now, quite a bit lower.
awesome lol
Brilliant breakdown of the P3 governance trap. The point about duplicate infrastructure (separate tunnels, terminals) when agencies optimize narrowly instead of network-wide is exactyl what I've seen happen in similiar contexts. Taxpayers fund redundant assets with minimal public value. Would be curious if there's any historical precedent for megaprojects like Alto actually succeeding under pure P3 structures without open-access operations.
P3s are not common outside the anglosphere, where things are so expensive (in part because of P3s) that we don't build much.
I couldn’t agree more that at the end of the day, the responsibility lies with the governments in question. In this case, I believe the federal government has a duty to lead on what it’s touting as a true nation-building project.
Currently, the government is trying to build dedicated agencies for some longstanding infrastructural challenges such as housing (BCH). Why do you think the federal government has not taken the lead on this front?
(I could talk about the provincial roles here – which are critical – but let’s save that for now)
Well they might say that "we have transport Canada" which is kind of the problem, transport Canada is terrible on rail / transit
I have to admit I’m not super familiar with transport Canada’s purview, outside of aviation regulation.
What would you say is limiting transport Canada from assuming a more effective role when it comes to rail / transit? Or, in your opinion, is this situation requiring a blank slate / new agency?
step 1 would be to put a gun to the temple of the MTQ to force it to do its job properly
I went to the open house and was told the reason ALTO is planning to cross the river before Ile Perrot is because the rail corridor at Dorion is allegedly too crowded with 2 freight lines and a regional rail. Apparently a problem there but not in Toronto? seems weird. There also *might* be a YUL airport connection but it would supposedly be more expensive.
Doesn't make any sense, Dorion has tons of space!
The HSR can’t access Montreal from Dorion and the West Island because that corridor is occupied by two double-tracked freight mainlines and Autoroute 20. That approach also includes the already-problematic Dorval and Turcot interchanges plus the Lachine Canal and many densely populated neighbourhoods. The approach from the North would be necessary even without the extension to Quebec City.
There is oodles of space to fit lots of infrastructure and lots of ability to rearrange and rationalize. Much more has been put in less space in other places.
There are many aspects of this project that are remarkably disappointing. You touched on the P3 being one of them. Though I will say a Pearson airport connection is probably most likely with an extension westwards to Windsor down the line. I also think this project is skipping some steps here, and doesn't address the need to significantly improve regional passenger rail service in the corridor to smaller communities. The ticket price consideration is another one of them. What's the point being excited about Alto at all if round trips from Toronto-Montreal are going to be $200+ for a single person? And no...booking a month ahead is not a solution...people are just going to drive in that case.
I agree with much of what you said, only thing I take issue with is the regional service piece. We should not expect one project to solve every problem we have.
Coming back to this (very) late, but I wanted to add that when I went to one of the open house events in Montreal, I spoke with someone there about the possibility of the EXO Saint-JĂ©rĂ´me line sharing the tracks/tunnel from Laval in towards Gare Centrale, and they categorically dismissed it as an option.
I think it's indicative of the overall position Alto/Cadence seem to be taking towards local transit: as an obstacle to plan around and not a part of the larger transit picture to be worked with.
As an aside, EXO train service is incredibly frustrating. Montreal could really use reliable, all-day commuter rail service, especially the Saint-JĂ©rĂ´me line given the recent growth in the northern suburbs, but there seems to be zero ambition to improve the offering.
What kind of trips use HSR airport stops? Just medium towns to international destinations?
Definitely not.
Sure medium town to international. But also . . .
Suburbs to other city
Other city to airport to rent a car and drive somewhere else
Other city to airport for cheaper flight
Other cities to domestic destinations (huge market in Canada)
Very fair point about the lack of air connections. What's freightening, too, is that when speaking with one of the staff at the open house yesterday, their response to "what does Air Canada bring to the table?" was "their interest is leveraging the rail too boost the amount of flights they can run"... but then a minute later, "they're a silent equity partner, really".
Yeah, no link to YYZ ostencibly until 2040s and no link to MTL airport, definitely gonna BOOST their revenues!!?!?
Its very weird to have them onboard, but then not connect to the airports, it really is just about battling Porter I guess.
China knows how to build High-Speed Railway (35,000km so far). They have the EXPERTISE,Technology, and are always improving with R&D.
They do. But not really outside of China.
Most definitely don’t repeat the mistakes of the California high speed rail adventure, such as winding the route for path-of-least-resistance (no pun intended…) political reasons rather than selecting the cheapest and most direct route between the two huge metropolitan areas in the state. A lesson that the interstate highway builders in the 1950s had followed by directing Interstate 5 on a route that didn’t serve the Central Valley cities, but instead went more directly from the Bay Area to LA.
Not exactly the mistakes we are making, but other ones . . .
I5 does go through the Central Valley and serves Central Valley cities, what are you talking about
https://share.google/IBu4FQJ4qeH19WbHg. I-5 bypasses by some distance Fresno and Bakersfield, and other major cities in the Central Valley.
Michael Schabas made a report to the Senate that outlines in detail some of the insider discussions and one of the bid submissions for the ALTO project. A lot of ALTO's statements make much more sense after reading this.
It's available on https://www.highspeedrailcanada.com/p/all-canadian-hsr-studies.html
In particular, the idea seems to be to run spurs into the cities, with potentially multiple stations per city, while also installing bypass tracks. That limits the number of corridors into each city centre to one.
Yeah, I'm just not sure this approach always makes a lot of sense.
Why would the connections to smaller cities be a bad thing (e.g. Kingston)? Is the issue with going through urban centers the cost/disruption? Sorry for the naive questions, but I know the Shinkansens go through urban centers on elevated platforms.
I had a look at the map Alto put out and I realize my comment doesn't make much sense. Seems the consensus is that it would be more expensive to build along the lake because of the higher land costs and private rights. In reference to going through Ottawa, do you mean that it shouldn't at all, because it's less direct to QC, or just because it's more expensive to build through the center of the city?
I don't think I suggested not going through Ottawa?
Re. Kingston, its not on their alignment, I think there is a case to be made that they should have chosen an alignment that would better serve it, but they made a political promise about Peterborough.
Ottawa is out of the way of a direct Toronto-Montreal link.
Just draw a straight Toronto-Montreal line on the map!
Such a detour by Ottawa very much undermine the Toronto-Montreal link.
Toronto Montréal straight line is 504km, via Ottawa is 518km. That's not a big detour at all.
The issue isn't the distance, it's the geography. There is a reason there is no existing rail line along this route, there is a reason the 401 was built with the 416 as a connection rather than building the 407 between Toronto and Ottawa (even though highway 7 was the existing route).
You are simply going to spend a fortune trying to blast though the northern route and over the bogs. It is far easier to build along the flat St. Laurent river valley.
I agree it might be slower, but significantly slower? I'm not sure, I don't think it would slow things down enough to supplant HRS as a preferred option in terms of trip time. Ottawa seems like a pretty good market for ridership I would think with consistent service to public servants and diplomats to and from our capital city. And having a separate route as neolithic suggested below doesn't make any sense to me in the long run and cost effectiveness. The detour to Montreal from laval seems more significant to me.
Ultimately there should be a set of lines that roughly mirrors the connectivity of the highways. Direct from Toronto to Montreal with another loop up to Ottawa
I have to disagree it is a significant detour. The only ridership impacted would be the trips between Toronto and Ottawa, which I think is a small fraction of travel on the corridor, and those riders can transfer at Brockville onto a regular train for the last hour of the trip, or trains can run directly from Toronto to Montreal to Ottawa, and in that case its adding maybe 30 minutes to the Ottawa traveller - and by adding I mean compared to a direct route, not the existing trip.
There should be a Montreal - Ottawa HSR line, but that should be separate from the Toronto -Montreal route. It isn't just the direct distance, the land may be more expensive on the lake shore, but building on it is far cheaper than blasting through the bogs and Highlands.
There are lots of options