jks
Continuous Lurker
Exactly WHY are connections to Buffalo, Windsor, and Ottawa/Montreal shown as regular rail?? Couldn't they have coordinated this with the Ontario-Quebec Study??
Exactly WHY are connections to Buffalo, Windsor, and Ottawa/Montreal shown as regular rail?? Couldn't they have coordinated this with the Ontario-Quebec Study??
Take a look at the rail systems of other countries with similar sized towns and cities and similar densities. Most towns Orillia's size have rail service. It's a lot more attractive when you consider that it would be one stop on a line to North Bay, going through Barrie, Gravenhurst, Bracebridge, and Huntsville instead of the current line around the east shore of Lake Simcoe. If anything it would be more cost effective than what we have now.
Barrie alone has that many people. The whole corridor is double that easily. Regardless, ONR and VIA's Canadian already use that corridor, they're not going anywhere. Both trains completely bypass Barrie and Orillia, a flaw that should be fixed regardless of commuter rail. Going through those two cities would consolidate ONR, VIA, and GO on one corridor and maximize ridership and cost recovery. The fact that it presents the opportunity for commuter rail to Orillia (40,000 in the CA) is another benefit.No country has 'hsr' (even of the 140-160km/h variety) to towns the size of Orillia unless they are a.)en route to a substantial metropolis or b.)so ridiculously subsidized that normal circumstances don't apply. Not Japan, not England and not France. As the crow flies, Toronto-North Bay is about 300-320 km. Excluding the Toronto area, that corridor has a year round population of, maybe, 150k. As far as potential rail customers go, there might as well be 100 people there. The last time I took the ONR to North Bay, literally, about 20 people got off. Would that number increase with better rail service? Probably. Would it top a few hundred people a day? Doubt it.
Though one other problem with rail to those towns, versus a lot of those foreign jurisdictions where "rail works", is that there isn't much of a backup/connective public transpo infrastructure, i.e. decent interurban bus networks. Ideally, if things worked "the Euro way", you wouldn't just have regular rail to Bracebridge, you might have a whole slew of regular local/postal/whistle-stop bus routes going to Port Carling, Windermere, Bala, Dorset, wherever--the sort of stuff which might conceivably justify going to Muskoka sans automobile...
All this talk about rail. Yet we keep forgetting that *buses* might be essential, too--and in a way that North American culture is so terminally unaccustomed to considering...
^In an indirect way this is part of an Ontario-Quebec HSR project. If a HSR project for the corridor were proposed tomorrow, a lot of these upgrades proposed would have to be done anyways to ensure that the trains did not lose a lot of time in the urban areas. And if for example a similar plan were proposed for Montreal and its surrounding environs then those projects would suddenly make an HSR line in the corridor a lot easier as the project would not have to worry about urban centers and would only have to focus on building HSLines (at TGV speeds) outside the two urban areas which reduces the overall costs directly related too the project which always helps when it comes to public support.
Edit: The same is also true, too a lesser extent, of proposed commuter rail in the Ottawa region, especially a line east of Ottawa, towards Montreal. The existing line (or a configuration close to it) could concern itself with providing access to the smaller communities between Ottawa and Montreal to the two cities that is currently served by VIA and a HSR service could simply focus on Ottawa-Dorval-Montreal.