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Notes -
A dash of optimism: preliminary plans for Canadian high-speed rail
Canada has had an awful recent history of infrastructure projects, especially transit projects. Delays and cost overruns are typical, which is very bad because the costs that are being inevitably overrun are themselves inevitably on the order of 3-5x more expensive per km than comparable projects in Europe. Toronto's first new rapid transit line in 20 years (the Finch LRT) has turned out to be somewhat-less-than rapid and has sparked genuine public backlash, and the soon-to-open Eglinton LRT has become a punchline for government incompetence given the long, ridiculous saga of its construction (I wrote about it before, here).
So part of me has always been skeptical about the high-speed rail project underway in Canada. It originally had life under Justin Trudeau's government as a "high-frequency rail", which promised slow but frequent service in the Toronto-Québec corridor, but when they engaged actual experts they rightfully told the government it was ridiculous to spend $20 billion on a slow and not-entirely-electric train service that would not be able to compete against air travel. So it got revived at the very end of JT's tenure to be a genuine high-speed rail project. I had reasons to be skeptical: there are a couple of questionable partners in the project, including Air Canada who has a somewhat glaring conflict of interest given that HSR is meant to be the airplane killer. The budget was expensive for a system of this type, and with Canada's record you know it's bound to get worse. And more than anything else rail transit in Canada has been crippled for decades by an overbearing urge to think small and find a "made in Canada solution", as if we aren't the global laggards. It's bad to have poor transit. It feels insulting to spend so much money on it and have it still be so bad.
But ahead of public consultation ALTO (the consortium of planners for the project) have released their initial plans and it actually... looks good? There are various things I take issue with, but in general they seem to be avoiding all the classic mistakes these kind of plans get saddled with in North America. It certainly seems that this is a practical-minded group that is intent on replicating the best practices of existing HSR systems rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.
I always worried that Canadian HSR would turn into a mirror of Californian HSR: a gargantuan exercise in pork barrel politics, meant primarily to allow every private concern to feast at the public trough and somewhat secondarily (or tertiarily) deliver a functioning rail network. That's still possible, and the projected budget still seems high for what we'll be getting, but I have an actual genuine spark of optimism. This is something very important to both the little boy and the big boy in me, so I'm trying not to get too emotionally invested... but it would be a genuine sign of changing times if Canada was actually able to properly deliver a new infrastructure megaproject. We need it really really badly; not just because Toronto-Québec is maybe the most obvious use case for HSR and it is frankly absurd it has taken this long, but just to show that as a nation we can actually build something real again.
Something that YIMBY/Abundance types occasionally trot out to explain the exorbitant costs, incessant delays, and general fecklessness of big infrastructure projects in the Anglosphere, especially HSR, is the idea that common law property rights and eminent domain make it exceedingly difficult for the state to claim all the land necessary for development, as every landholder bargains individually and has an incentive to hold out as long as possible for the highest price.
I have no idea if this hypothesis is true; I think the diagnosed phenomenon—viz. that English-speaking countries are terrible at building HSR, even compared to much poorer European countries like Spain and Italy—is real, but a priori my vague sense is that eminent domain considerations are at most a rounding error compared to the sheer volume of regulations that must be followed, as well as, in some jurisdictions, labor unions fleecing the unsuspecting taxpayer.
Could an Ontario to Québec railway be a natural experiment for this hypothesis? That is, since Québécois law is derived from continental-style civil law, they should, per this hypothesis, be able to build their side of the railway cheaper/faster than the Anglophones can. But here again, my vague sense is that public-sector construction in Québec (and perhaps the Francophonie in general?) is subject to even more graft and corruption than in the English-speaking world (cf. L’affaire SNC-Lavalin).
But if the project is to be carried out under the aegis of the federal government, I guess this is all a moot point.
But French infrastructure is also much cheaper than Anglosphere infrastructure; it’s possible that the graft and corruption is a form of paying thé piper due to it being much cheaper than delays, or the whole problem is way overblown.
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