High Speed Rail: London - Kitchener-Waterloo - Pearson Airport - Toronto

[mdrejhon]

your right, small comfort....the point is that these very fast trains are going to be zooming through our city and not stopping......and the minister responsible for all of the province is trying to ram it through just as fast without really stopping.

GO ReR and this HSR are completely different services with different environmental and community impacts....to try and use the EA process of one for both of them is a sham.

Not necessarily if you interpret it in a scoping way.

Catenary can be the same, and the speed limits won't go higher until in the rural areas.

A HSR and RER train going at the same speed (90mph limit of urban track segments) makes about the same amount of noise and community impact. If frequency caps are kept too. If you need to speed them up for a section, yes, an EA and community impacts for that new track section.

You do need an EA for HSR but it can simply be a superset of the existing RER EA.
It's more efficient that way, from a taxpayer perspective.
No sham. (Except for all the vaporware)

*and* not all sections of a HSR corridor necessarily needs an EA if the HSR operates within the constraints (frequency, speed, noise, etc) of a particular section if you drive the HSR as a non-HSR through that section.

Even European HSR services run slow over a big percentage of their corridors (e.g. 50%) and ours would be no different.

By necessity HSR will run at ordinary "Express GO train" speeds until very well past Brampton....

 

[muller877]

I heard a rumour that it was going to go along the Hydro ROW
https://www.hydroone.com/about/corporate-information/regional-plans/london
https://www.hydroone.com/about/corp...nal-plans/kitchener-waterloo-cambridge-guelph

But it was recently squashed. Was a preliminary route an nothing is finalized. Hydro doesn't care about gradient changes so of course it won't be the final route.

Does anyone have the Hydro ROW as a Google Map/Earth overlay? So I can look at the topography

 

[Allandale25]

A sign in along Highway 8, at Walker Road, just West of New Hamburg.

 

[CapitalSeven]

Ya, people who go everywhere in trucks against electric mass transit.

 

[crs1026]

That's a pretty well-constructed sign. Not mass produced and doesn't point to a group or web site.

I'd guess that it's a one-of, although I have heard there are more popping up. I drove all over Oxford County last week but didn't see any. Kind of like the guy on Highway 115 with the 'Back Off Government" sign that has been there for decades.

Anyways, it does suggest there will be a political reckoning before HSR actually goes anywhere.

- Paul

 

[SunriseChampion]

Pardon my ignorance but what would prompt someone in that area to be against HSR?

 

[Urban Sky]

Pardon my ignorance but what would prompt someone in that area to be against HSR?

Farmers' concerns about loosing valuable farmland and the ease of accessing it, for instance:

Farmers not on board Ontario's plan for high-speed rail
Say proposed route would sever farmland, frustrate travel across township
By Melanie Ferrier, CBC News Posted: Aug 30, 2017 5:33 PM ET Last Updated: Aug 31, 2017 12:16 PM ET

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne's promise to build a high-speed rail corridor between Toronto and Windsor by 2025 is receiving push back by a group of farmers in the Township of East Zorra-Tavistock, east of London, Ont.

The farmers are concerned that the proposed route, which runs in a straight line from Kitchener to London, will sever hundreds of acres of farmland and make travel in the township a nightmare.

"This is going to cut off all the back roads. They're going to dead head them, just like the 401 is down there," said Harold Bickle, who farms crops on 4,000 acres in East Zorra-Tavistock. "Maybe there's going to be two crossings all the way across the township here. We'll have to drive way out of our way to get to the other way of the rail line."

[...]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitch...il-kitchener-london-windsor-toronto-1.4269202

 

[Garuda]

I bet that same farmer would jump the gun and sell their land to a developer if they got a sweet offer at the first given opportunity if the price was high enough.

 

[SunriseChampion]

Thanks.


I now have to take some time to assess whether or not I think that's a reasonable worry.

The farmer behind my parents' place in Durham is having one of his fields cut in half for an exceptionally unnecessary road. He doesn't have any signs though.

 

[crs1026]

The other issue is potential dead ending of existing roads, which affects emergency vehicle response time and general inconvenience.

The land required for a rail line is much less than that for even a modest roadway. It pales compared to the land required to build even one modest subdivision. If anyone is concerned with loss of farmland, they should oppose local development more than HSR.

- Paul

 

[MisterF]

The other issue is potential dead ending of existing roads, which affects emergency vehicle response time and general inconvenience.

The land required for a rail line is much less than that for even a modest roadway. It pales compared to the land required to build even one modest subdivision. If anyone is concerned with loss of farmland, they should oppose local development more than HSR.

- Paul

Dead ending of local roads is routine for freeways so I don't see it being any more of a concern for an HSR line. Fire departments calculate response times from fire halls for development applications, which would play a role in determining which local roads can be dead ended.

 

[Urban Sky]

Dead ending of local roads is routine for freeways so I don't see it being any more of a concern for an HSR line. Fire departments calculate response times from fire halls for development applications, which would play a role in determining which local roads can be dead ended.

Every Highway and HSR project can be built in a way that does not cut off any local roads. It's just a question of costs, but that doesn't seem to be much of a constraint in Ontario at the moment...

 

[steveintoronto]

The concern expressed by some has always been the case and always will be. What new rail line or highway was ever welcomed by everyone?

Not Ontario High Speed, but an omen none-the-less, not on the technology, but the *implementation*, something Ontario had best learn from, Even the Brits (although this is politics, not economics) haven't learned from the Crossrail model, their example to the world on how to finance and build massive infrastructure projects:

[...]
Sky News has learnt that Carillion, which is building the HS2 high-speed rail link and other big Government infrastructure projects, could crash into administration as soon as Monday.

Its fate hangs on the outcome of emergency talks due to take place on Sunday with ‎Whitehall officials.

:: What does under-threat Carillion do?

The company has drawn up a plan that would see it being able to borrow significant amounts of new funding from its existing lenders if the Government agrees to guarantee payments at certain stages of public sector contracts.

One insider said it was "a make-or-break weekend".

"Without that commitment of support from the Government, administration is all but inevitable," they said. [...]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/b...cue-plan-lenders-loan-contracts-a8146026.html

Every major UK newspaper has this headlined, although Google News search is showing remarkably little unless juggling the tags.

This search parameter nets many hits:
"HSR2 carillion"

 

[steveintoronto]

Not Ontario High Speed, but an omen none-the-less, not on the technology, but the *implementation*, something Ontario had best learn from, Even the Brits (although this is politics, not economics) haven't learned from the Crossrail model, their example to the world on how to finance and build massive infrastructure projects:

They've failed, and it's hit the Cdn news now. Today's Globe:

One of Britain's largest construction companies, which has extensive operations in Canada, has been put into liquidation, throwing the future of 43,000 workers worldwide into doubt and raising troubling questions for Prime Minister Theresa May.

Carillion PLC is involved in more than 400 government projects in the U.K. including construction of the new £1.4-billion ($2.4-billion Canadian) high-speed rail line. It also manages schools, prisons, military houses and provides maintenance services to Network Rail. In Canada, the company employs around 6,000 people and provides a variety of services in the energy, health care and transportation sectors. Its Canadian operations include maintaining housing at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa, building roads in Ontario and Alberta as well as hospitals in Toronto, North Battleford, Sask., Sault Ste. Marie, Ottawa and Nunavut. It's not clear what impact the liquidation filing in the U.K. will have on the Canadian division.
[...]
However the government will be under pressure to explain why it continued to hire Carillion for work even as the company ran into financial issues. The government is expected to make a statement in the House of Commons on Monday, and some opposition MPs have been calling for a public inquiry.

"The fact such a massive government contractor like Carillion has been allowed to go into administration shows the complete failure of a system that has put our public services in the grip of shady profit making contractors," said Rebecca Long-Bailey, a Labour MP and business critic. "What we don't want to see happen is the government to take on those contracts which are making a loss, while those contracts that are profitable are simply sold onto another company. That's not good enough. We want all those [public sector] contracts to be brought back into public control."

Added Rehana Azma of the labour union GMB: "The fact such a massive government contractor like Carillion has been allowed to go into administration shows the complete failure of a system that has put our public services in the grip of shady profit making contractors."

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/rep...dian-workers-future-in-doubt/article37601698/

In Canada's case, there were some parallels to Aecon, but besides some flak that P3 is going to run into, and this was just one bad incident where many are very successful, more questions are going to be asked about Bombardier, not a construction company per-se, but very much involved in P3 projects.

If Ontario does want to push ahead with HSR, besides the obvious symbiosis with HFR. it will have to be a P3 project. There are lessons to be learned from the Carillion example.

 

[crs1026]

^The press hasn't spelled out yet why Carillon failed. The simplistic answer is, because they ran out of money....but that's trite. There must have been mistakes, mishandling of money, poor performance, unforeseens, bad practices, or competitive activity that caused the company to burn up money faster than its revenue, and irrevocably so. It will take some digging into business articles and maybe some hindsight to understand all of that.

What I take positively is that the writers of the article highlighted Carillon's involvement in HSR as the first fact about what that enterprise was up to. That's saying that people know what HSR is and can relate to it, and it's actually an attention getter.

There may be a downside to what I just said.... potentially the message delivered, intentionally or otherwise, is that HSR is risky and maybe unprofitable......but the authors wouldn't have put it first if it was obscure and unheard of. It just may be sexy to the Globe's readers after all.

- Paul