Can high-frequency rail help growing transport woes in Ontario and Quebec? - National | Globalnews.ca
Can high-frequency rail help growing transport woes in Ontario and Quebec? - National | Globalnews.ca
The rail solution must be reliable and fast enough to have a decent edge on cars. House to work times need to be considered over station to station times. Building reliable inner transit at the stations is essential. I think there should also be plans to enforce density minimums around stations.
Canada has been lacking a competitive rail line along this corridor for decades, we need good urban fabric and public transit to support each other.
The rail solution must be reliable and fast enough to have a decent edge on cars.
I personally think the reliability on via rail isn't too bad of a problem in the corridor relative to cars. The frequency and length of delays are more or less equivalent to cars. It needs to improve, but I don't think it's the priority
Speed is an issue; train routes are, at best, the same time as driving. A Toronto-Montréal flight (was, and maybe still is busiest route in the country) is 1h20 min average. With boarding and crap that works out to 2h30 at best. At 220kph, the train becomes faster than flying; for comparison the TGV has 280kph start-stop average.
Convince is an issue; the train times are fixed scheduled reducing transit windows, and are incongruent with working hours. For example, when I was working one day a week in Ottawa (from Montreal), the first train was 0630-0820; since I worked 8-17, the train was not an option. Even if I could flex to 9-18, the morning would be tight and I'd miss the last train back (1755).
Cost is an issue; if you already own a car, driving is normally cheaper than a single ticket. If you don't own a car, renting is cheaper than two or three tickets.
Boarding procedures is an issue; at least at larger stations, having to wait around not on the platform, bag weighing, ticket checking, and all this other crap, it's like Via is trying to copy the inconvenience of flying.
More frequent trains serving earlier into the day and later into the night would be needed to service a wider variety of workers and tourism. Removing barriers of entry like bag weighing and multi-stage boarding would be part of modernizing and refining the train's comeptitive time. Canada is really the only place where trains are trying to emulate airlines, it does not need to be that way.
As for costs, the highway system is already heavily subsidized, the same mindset should go for the transit system. Tickets should be cheaper than driving, this paired with competitive commute times will influence a larger shift to use the infrastructure. The train shouldn't exist to make money, it exists to serve communties and connect workers and consummers to economic centers, much like a highway tries to.
WestJet would have blown the doors off any car, but as the article points out is backing away from service because of poor performance. The business need to travel has diminished greatly, particularly since COVID, as a lot of that work has moved online. That leaves mostly just vacationers. Is the train going to induce enough vacation demand between Toronto and Montreal to support mass transit?
Sure.
Are we going to pay for it? No. The current situation suits the powers-that-be just fine.
A great video on the subject of high-frequency vs high-speed rails for Toronto-Quebec: https://youtu.be/zqaIJc39ExI
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https://piped.video/zqaIJc39ExI
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Ho hum. Wake me up when the rest of Canada exists.
Turns out when half of the country's population lives in an area, it gets a lot of attention
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_City%E2%80%93Windsor_Corridor
Yes. Next question.