Recent content by Urban Sky

As valid as your concern for scope creep is, may I ask you where you and all the other ones suddenly voicing this concern were hiding when the scope was exploded by including Montreal-Quebec, going from 177 to 300+ km/h, going from electrification-ready to fully-electrified, going from sharing...

With none of the meetings’ speeches and presentations been made public, I have to go with the little information that has been recorded for the public - and it’s exactly this lack of open, transparent and consistent communication which undermines the credibility of this project… Stations can...

You can always explain what the constraints for adding new stations are, but to just declare that they are not interested and will not consider it under any circumstances is an unprovoked own-goal and rightly riles up local communities and taxpayers. Similarly, the entire mandate the liberal...

If I had to come up with a communications strategy to derail any project from within, I’d definitely poach ALTO’s communications and stakeholder relations teams. Stressing at every occasion that hell would rather freeze over than them considering any additional stations is just mindnumbingly...

It’s in the very nature of negotiations (at least between partners with somewhat similar leverage over each other) that you only get something you desire if you accept at least some of the demands raised by the opposite side of the negotiation table. With Europe having a strong rail rolling...

From what I recall from discussing the Corridor procurement, the CETA trade agreement precludes any buy-Canadian and local requirements which would constrain European manufacturers in their ability to offer any trains from their domestic production lines. There are excemptions, but they only...

The only way to drive down costs is to gain experiences and to learn from early projects. The ALTO way of hiring a consortium to tell us what kind of HSR technology and network we want and letting them build it as a single project is the exact opposite of that tried-and-tested approach (and of...

To provide some (Spanish) figures for HSR which I discussed previously here on UT: It depends on what you build: GO Expansion is basically a full rebuild of the entire GO network, with a complete replacement of signals amd realignment of tracks - all of which under the moving wheel and under...

I believe they once said 4000 km of steel rails, which would be in line with 850 km of double tracked lines (400 km TO + 180 km OM + 270 km) plus additional platform tracks, sidings and yard tracks… It is awefully expensive once you compare the cost and benefits per passenger or per minute...

Again, these benefits disproportionally fall onto metropolitan rather than urban rural dwellers, who currently live far from highways or airports… Consultations are only meaningful if all details of planning are on the table and there is a willingness to assess any suggestions of the public on...

It is a poor attempt to phrase a very valid concern: that local folks are expected by (overwhelmingly) metropolitan folks to sacrifize some of their lands for a project which is deliberately designed to provide close to zero benefits for their communities. If my job was to stir up local...

I think it’s much more likey that the federal government procures enough long-distance fleet to replace the White River fleet than to provide the capital (fleet) and operating subsidy required to operate a separate Capreol-Winnipeg train like VIA did it 1981-1990 and which bled a multiple of...

Not sure we are looking at the same Highways 407 and 15 or how you could reach such conclusions after reading the blog post I was sharing or the points Paul was raising:

It’s relatively easy to build railways within a highway corridor if both are designed at the same time, but very challenging to retrofit an existing highway with a new railway, especially one with a design speed two or three times as fast...

“We are still keeping you in the dark about whether your house is among the properties we will expropriate with virtually no legal recourse or accountability for keeping local impacts low, but we will finalize our route before the end of this year and we will under no circumstances consider any...