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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.
When you put the population density maps of Canada and the US together, there's no real reason why Windows-Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City is a good HSR corridor that beats anything in the US. Yes, it's a straight chain of cities, but it's not as populated as BosWash. You could easily build a Midwestern HSR or even better, a Piedmontese HSR that goes from Birmingham to Raleigh with the same number of passengers in the catchment area.
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Purely as a use case for HSR, the Canadian set-up is more an ideal case because the cities are spread out: HSR's use case is travelling between city pairs of 150 - 700 km apart, so Canada having a series of its biggest cities lying along a single line each perfectly spaced for HSR is perfect. It lowers build costs and raises average speeds. The US eastern seaboard is in this sense almost too dense: Baltimore is 50 km from Washington, Philly another 150 km further, Princeton and NYC 40 and 100 km more... it's really the NYC-New Haven-Boston side that has more classic HSR stop spacing. The DC-NYC portion would be better served by more frequent and reliable 200 km/h service than 325 km/h HSR.
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