News   May 10, 2024
45 Storeys Proposed to Replace 10 Storeys in Islington Village
 1.1K     0 
News   May 10, 2024
Crane Comes Down at Menkes' Festival Condos as Phase 2 Breaks Ground
 1.6K     0 
News   May 10, 2024
LCH Developments Launching Cliffside Condos Above the Scarborough Bluffs
 1.1K     0 

Rail: Ontario-Quebec High Speed Rail Study

i feel proud to have voted for prop 1A yesterday in san diego. and as much as prop 8 pains me, i have faith the it ultimately won't go through since it requires serious constitutional rearranging which cannot be done without 2/3rds legislative approval. since the house and senate are democratic and even schwarzenegger doesn't approve of 8, i don't see it really going anywhere.

that said, 1A is on it's way! the planning has been done for ages now and they really ought to be able to start work on the SF-LA segment as soon as the bonds are sold. this one really excites me the most because with obama entering the white house at roughly the same time as construction, what looks like the beginnings of a paradigmatic change in thinking about transit and the environment might really take shape. not to mention that it paves the way for other examples like the quebec-windsor corridor.
 
AnarchoSocialist said:
I think like a lot of things last night this is encouraging, and a step in the right direction, but hardly something to jump for joy about. In the end I still think that HSR will start to be planned and built in Canada before the US. Despite issues surrounding airlines, unmotivated governments (especially in the past), and a general disregard for rail travel in the past decades, these problems will be easier to overcome here.
Click to expand...

I don't think so. Not only have they passed a proposition, but HSR is also supported by a Republican governor and they also have determined a preferential (although not exact) alignment. Even before it was pitched to the public, the California HSR was a serious proposal with solid financial backing and a very splashy PR campaign. Right now, HSR in Canada is still just water cooler talk for a few dreamers, with an amateur advocacy group.

Compare: California vs. Canadian HSR advocacy groups.
 
^ I know most people are not going to agree with my position. It is understandable. But now what happens that this has made it this far? What will the airline or auto industries in the US have to say or do? How will the current economic challenges affect it? There are lots of things that could derail or delay this project and it is just a hunch that this is just what will happen and the project will not start as soon as some might like. When you start getting into mega-projects like this what matters and what says that it is a go is when shovels and machinery start clearing the land. Until then, it is still anyones game.
 
I'm still skeptical about the California proposal. Didn't Florida pass a referendum like this only to pass a referendum repealing the referendum the next election? Given that this is a mega-project, the 10b price tag will probably inflate substantially (20-70% tends to be pretty standard for these projects). I still support HSR, but it might be simpler for California to simply privatize it's obscene highway network. I don't see how subsidizing yet another transit technology will fix anything.

(but damn do they have a nice website!)
 
Whoaccio said:
I'm still skeptical about the California proposal. Didn't Florida pass a referendum like this only to pass a referendum repealing the referendum the next election? Given that this is a mega-project, the 10b price tag will probably inflate substantially (20-70% tends to be pretty standard for these projects). I still support HSR, but it might be simpler for California to simply privatize it's obscene highway network. I don't see how subsidizing yet another transit technology will fix anything.

(but damn do they have a nice website!)
Click to expand...
Subsidizing? It's expected to make a handsome profit. Enough to pay off the construction costs. It's not a subsidy, it's an investment into a money-making operation.
 
MisterF said:
Subsidizing? It's expected to make a handsome profit. Enough to pay off the construction costs. It's not a subsidy, it's an investment into a money-making operation.
Click to expand...

A public sector investment into any firm is a subsidy, even if it the project does make money. That aside, mega-projects (of any kind) routinely underestimate their costs and overestimate their benefits. I, personally, don't believe the CHSRA claim that the railway will enjoy higher passenger mile per route mile ridership than the French and Japanese TGVs & Shinkansens by 2030. They project between 88 - 117 million riders per year by 2030, which seems shockingly high. The Tokaido Shinkansen currently has about156m passengers per year, on ALL of it's services (Nozomi + Kodama+Hikari). I don't see California, with all of it's free highways, approaching that kind of ridership in the next century. Maybe I am to cynical.
 
I am skeptical of their cost calculator on their trip planner. $55 from SF to LA. Will they really sell tickets that cheaply? How do they plan to make money if that's the case?
 
Just to be clear, I am for HSR. I think we should make a distinction between transit policy and Schwarzenegger trying to brush up his green credentials with a 50b dollar train though. Spending 50b on a train to reduce congestion, while continuing to provide thousands upon thousands of km of free road is nonsensical. I imagine France and Japan have such high train ridership because they actually operate highways on surprisingly free market basis. This is like spending millions on a lung cancer center while subsidizing cigarettes.
 
Whoaccio said:
Just to be clear, I am for HSR. I think we should make a distinction between transit policy and Schwarzenegger trying to brush up his green credentials with a 50b dollar train though. Spending 50b on a train to reduce congestion, while continuing to provide thousands upon thousands of km of free road is nonsensical. I imagine France and Japan have such high train ridership because they actually operate highways on surprisingly free market basis. This is like spending millions on a lung cancer center while subsidizing cigarettes.
Click to expand...

Perhaps their theory is that you cannot charge for roads until there is a viable alternative.....once the HSR is operating, will the roads still be free? I have always felt that the reason Europe is so far ahead of us on allocating cost to motor vehicle use (like the London congestion charge) is because they have a far more developed alternative...so the charge actually has the ability to reduce motor vehicle use.....without the alternative in place, the charge is just a tax grab and road congestion is unaffected....if you presume that the people on the road are actually going somewhere that they need to get to.
 
it's not a $10 billion project--the total cost is more in the area of $35-40 billion (sacramento-SD). the $10B bond is only a way to get the project started so that the state can eventually put it into the budget as a line item. also, now that obama is in the whitehouse with biden, one of the biggest train supporters there is, we can probably expect the california HSR to get significant federal support.
 
Heres a thought, and I'll admit I dont have much knowledge in this area....

With the looming collapse / bankruptcy protection of GM, and the slowing of the economy, why doesnt the government take over a couple of those planets, convert them into production plants for HSR train sets, get a production license from TGV, Bombardier or whoever to build the train sets in Oshawa, and in order to save face on the environment issue start funding a line from Windsor to Quebec (in baby steps, first Toronto to Montreal, and then Montreal to Quebec and Toronto to Winsdor or maybe even Detroit), and to keep the west happy, one from Vancouver to Edmonton via Calgary. With the train sets being produce in Canada (specifically Oshawa), and the set up of a supply chain to make and maintian the parts needed, it could be a real boon to the Ontario economy in terms of jobs created, and also the potential profit the line could make in 10 to 20 years if the price point is set up nicely and tolls are set up on some of the highways. And dont think the Ontario government is afraid of tolls on the 400 series highways - they where willing to explore the idea of tolling parts of highway 400 to help finance the extension into Sudbury - thankfully that was shot down rather fast.
 
^^ Yes, the Oshawa GM plant is closing very soon and in any case a massive factory wil excellent road/rail connection will just be idle.

My brain says that within a few years every facility in the world that makes rail vehicles will be booked full as governments scramble to improve railways. Bombardier can pick up the Oshawa plant during the GM divestment process and massively increase capacity.

Also, Vancouver/Calgary high speed rail isn't going to happen, ever. The population is way too sparse and the entire line will require expensive boring and viaducts through pristine wilderness, though I can see frequent passenger rail service being introduced on the CP line.
 
Kitsune said:
With the looming collapse / bankruptcy protection of GM, and the slowing of the economy, why doesnt the government take over a couple of those planets, convert them into production plants for HSR train sets, get a production license from TGV, Bombardier or whoever to build the train sets in Oshawa
Click to expand...

I'm not sure how practical that idea is. Ignoring the issues that come up when governments try to build things like cars or trains (CLRVs, ICTS, the Lada, the Trabant, ect...), I'm not sure if a plant built to construct a Chevy Camaro could be converted to build a TGV like train set. For reference, it is quite a capital intensive job to switch a plant from assembling one model to another. From what I have seen, car companies tend to just build new facilities. A TGV is an entirely different beast as well. It would probably have as much in common with a kei car as a jumbo jet. Plus there is the whole supply chain issue. Given that no plant on earth could turn a ton of steel into a TGV, you inevitably need to find subcontractor plants to build it's constituent parts (boggies, cabins, seats, engines, toilets...). If those are mainly European made, as I imagine they are, it might be problematic to ship them to final assembly in Oshawa.

It would probably be cheaper for us to buy second hand cars from the SNCF or JR Central. Obviously I have no idea what the headways on any kind of QC-Windsor route would be, but I doubt we would have a large enough demand to justify having a local factory. It will be interesting to see what happens with the California HSR. Most of the conceptual renderings I have seen look TGV inspired. I wonder if they will load up the proposal with local content requirements. Doesn't FTA have a policy where any system qualifying for it's funding has to pursue a 50% local content rule? I'm sure that would produce at least a generation of lemon trainsets.
 
Last edited:
^I don't think it is a good idea to subsidize a plant just for the purpose of building TGV train sets for the Q-W corridor. The cost of shipping train sets from overseas is probably not going to add that much to the total cost of each set.

However, if suddenly the three most important potential HSR corridors in North America (Quebec-Windsor, Northeastern seaboard, and California) all began planning and construction at roughly the same time then a company like Bombardier probably would find it in their best interest too open a North American plant to construct them (assuming all the corridors where going to buy their equipment from them). In a situation like that then it might make sense to offer Bombardier some help in setting up shop in Oshawa. And in terms of supply chain issues, it wouldn't be easy for a lot of the companies to retool their factories, but business can be tough and some would adapt, some would sink, and there is also a chance that some aeronautics suppliers would find themselves with a new market.

Having said all that I am not sure that even if all 3 corridors came online together if that would still be enough to really create an enterprise in Oshawa even close to the scale of GM. I think that if the goal was too replace it with something at a similar scale then the market that would probably make the most sense would be commuter trains. Think of how many major North American cities could suddenly become potential customers of Bombardier if they were too start offering more commuter fleet options and had the capacity to do it in North America. To me this is a more likely scenario since the market for TGV's, under the best of circumstances, over the next 15 years is probably not very large, but the potential for commuter and some intercity rail services is far more immediate and greater.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to post here.

Back
Top