GO Transit Electrification | Metrolinx

[urbanclient]

It would have taken maybe 6 months to replan the REM in a way which would have accommodated transportation priorities which had already been known since decades and should have been treated as base requirements.

The same people which laughed VIA out of the negotiations about tunnel access negotiations with the words „You don‘t have a project! Come back when you have a project…“ (CDPQ infra‘s CEO) now being truseted with that same project and with building a new $10+ billion tunnel only necessary because of their ignorance really adds a staggering anount of insult to a grave injury…

Pardon my ignorance, would those 6 months have allowed the relevant parties to leave passive provision for a wider Mont-Royal tunnel shared with future HSR? Without that provision, the only choice is to dig a completely separate tunnel, potentially using a TBM? That's unfortunate, but not unexpected given what appears to be a chronic lack of corridor safeguarding in Canadian infrastructure planning.

 

[Urban Sky]

Pardon my ignorance, would those 6 months have allowed the relevant parties to leave passive provision for a wider Mont-Royal tunnel shared with future HSR? Without that provision, the only choice is to dig a completely separate tunnel, potentially using a TBM? That's unfortunate, but not unexpected given what appears to be a chronic lack of corridor safeguarding in Canadian infrastructure planning.

Listen, if the promoters of the REM had made their minimum diligence, they would have reached out to exo and VIA Rail well before the grand reveal of the project to the public on April 22, 2016, to enquire their requirements to not preclude their future plans. It should have never become the problem of exo and VIA that the CDPQinfra has zero competencies in strategic transportation planning and should never be trusted with making such decisions which could (and in the case of regional and intercity rail radiating around Montreal: have) upend known and pressing transportation infrastructure priorities.

Regardless of this, the CDPQinfra even refused to participate in an assessment of what minimum modifications would need to be made to the planned designs to include future provisions so that at least one intercity train per hour and direction can be inserted, which would have of course needed to be built within a reduced vehicle width and the same electrification system (1500V DC) and CBTC version chosen by the CBTC, which would have probably forced a tiny speciality fleet for MTRL-QBEC HFR/HSR services.

Given that the same secrecy and reluctance to share the infrastructure seems to exist within ALTO and Cadence, I fear the worst for the pending grand reveal of the ALTO route. The hinted decision to enter Montreal via Laval from Quebec City (of course!), but also from Ottawa (rather than via Dorval) seems to be the next extremely short-sighted decision made by the CDPQinfra without any public discussions amd will effectively preclude that ALTO can serve as a replacement of feeder planes into YUL. A puzzling and, as with the seizure of the Mont-Royal tunnel completely anachronistic decision which only seems to benefit Cadence-member Air Canada (how have they not been blacklisted from this entire procurement?!?) and virtually nobody else…

Canada (and the Montreal-region in particular) really is the only developped country which has not just outsourced individual projects to private partners, but also the entire process of strategic infrastructure planning, letting unaccountable and rogue players like the CDPQinfra decide how our transportation network will look like in 50 or 100 years…