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

[kEiThZ]

But I thought K-W and London were booming?

I've never said they were booming. I've long maintained that they need this for sustainable growth.

And this mentality that it's a "white elephant" because it doesn't 100% pay for itself (as some allege) is really going to bite us in the six politically when SWO goes the way of Pennsylvania.

 

[ssiguy2]

This province. I swear. 20 years from now when SW Ontario becomes an even worse rustbelt shithole, they are going to to be scrambling to spend double the amount to build this HSR.

SWO is not a shithole. KWC is a decent place with a booming tech sector and London is a lovely and vibrant city with a solid regional centre for the entire SW and has a growing tech sector. Both cities have unemployment of under 5.5% and growing faster than the provincial and national average. At 1.8% London is growing faster than at anytime since the mid 80s. Most of the large manufacturing job losses have already taken place and both cities have adapted well.

 

[WislaHD]

I've never said they were booming. I've long maintained that they need this for sustainable growth.

And this mentality that it's a "white elephant" because it doesn't 100% pay for itself (as some allege) is really going to bite us in the six politically when SWO goes the way of Pennsylvania.

It is a white elephant because nobody will be using it. It would be the equivalent of the UPX line but for approximately 45x (forty-five times over) the cost.

As for SWO.... K-W is going to grow rapidly regardless of HSR. Hamilton and Niagara Region is showing signs of strength despite the fact that HSR is not being planned for it. London is a decently sized city that never depended on heavy industries like Rust Belt cities, and will continue to be a strong university city. Hardly a collapse.

Places like Chatham-Kent (if it doesn't stop there) or Sarnia are not going to be aided by HSR.

 

[rbt]

Interesting addition to the story of HSR in Ontario.

The person in charge of HS2 (Britain) seem to be coming here. I haven't seen an announcement from Metrolinx yet.

https://www.ft.com/content/6ed43b94-b02a-11e8-99ca-68cf89602132

 

[jje1000]

Interesting addition to the story of HSR in Ontario.

The person in charge of HS2 (Britain) seem to be coming here. I haven't seen an announcement from Metrolinx yet.

https://www.ft.com/content/6ed43b94-b02a-11e8-99ca-68cf89602132

Paul Griffiths will step down in December as managing director of phase two of the scheme. This covered the development of lines from Crewe to Manchester and from the West Midlands to Leeds. He joined in 2015.

Mr Griffiths will move from the UK to Canada at the end of the year to become programme director on the $40bn Metrolinx scheme in Toronto, the largest public transit investment in Canadian history.

Looks like he's getting involved with RER? If so, encouraging to see that it's not cancelled as feared.

I think that HSR is unnecessary in Ontario, but frequent rail service to Windsor plus a strong rail-to-town bus transit system is better use of resources, and a must in economically connecting the region to the Golden Horseshoe.

 

[mdrejhon]

That's some serious heavy duty management being brought in.

Something appears to be going to to get electrified to Kitchener and still be faster than today's GO trains. Just by merely doing that, will feel like highspeed trains even if the rail speed limit is merely 225kph or 200kph or 177kph in the fastest section.

But, hello elephant in the room:
The Freight Bypass (near 407) will be a very big pre-requisite.
What's up there? It's one helluva of a big domino.

 

[Allandale25]

This columnist in KW believes HSR is dead. Column here.

 

[hw621]

This columnist in KW believes HSR is dead. Column here.

And this time there is not even a book?

 

[Allandale25]

^ Book? I don't get the reference.

 

[hw621]

^didn't we get a huge report(book) every time we had an HSR study?

 

[Allandale25]

^ Oh, that's what you mean. The PCs have said in the past they'd continue with the EA process and see it through, but I can see them changing their mind on this when they get the provincial line-by-line financial review back. Why spend money on an EA for train speeds higher than GO RER if you don't intend to build it?

 

[jje1000]

This columnist in KW believes HSR is dead. Column here.

Lots of extrapolation, but not much in terms of detail beyond the removal of Collenette.

I wonder though if HSR presents enough of a "shiny toy" that Ford might look at retaining it in some form- perhaps not on the same route or speed, but something that resembles a fast train.

 

[Streety McCarface]

Having just travelled on almost every shinkansen line in Japan over the past 2 weeks (highly recommend it for any railfan), I honestly do not see why high-speed rail here cannot be a success, especially if travel times are within 4 hours. Windsor, a city of 218,000 people (and more importantly, Detroit, with a pop of 600K) takes over three hours to drive to from Toronto. Compare this to Niigata city on the Joetsu shinkansen (810K), and populations are fairly similar for a similar distance. Trains on the Joetsu Shinkansen run at speeds of 240 km/h, and see 43 million passengers annually. With a line length of 270 km, it's pretty similar to that of the proposed HSR. What has to be noted that in both scenarios (tokyo-Niigata/Toronto-Detroit), the driving times are at least 4 hrs without traffic, while high-speed lines would take 2 hrs to traverse. While the population of Tokyo is much larger than that of Toronto, it's still fair to say that there is a lot of potential benefit that can arise from building this line, especially since unlike the Joetsu shinkansen, the HSR requires almost no tunnels here.

 

[steveintoronto]

^There's this trifling and bothersome factor called "cost":
https://www.economist.com/the-econo...hy-japan-leads-the-world-in-high-speed-trains

 

[TOareaFan]

Having just travelled on almost every shinkansen line in Japan over the past 2 weeks (highly recommend it for any railfan), I honestly do not see why high-speed rail here cannot be a success, especially if travel times are within 4 hours. Windsor, a city of 218,000 people (and more importantly, Detroit, with a pop of 600K) takes over three hours to drive to from Toronto. Compare this to Niigata city on the Joetsu shinkansen (810K), and populations are fairly similar for a similar distance. Trains on the Joetsu Shinkansen run at speeds of 240 km/h, and see 43 million passengers annually. With a line length of 270 km, it's pretty similar to that of the proposed HSR. What has to be noted that in both scenarios (tokyo-Niigata/Toronto-Detroit), the driving times are at least 4 hrs without traffic, while high-speed lines would take 2 hrs to traverse. While the population of Tokyo is much larger than that of Toronto, it's still fair to say that there is a lot of potential benefit that can arise from building this line, especially since unlike the Joetsu shinkansen, the HSR requires almost no tunnels here.

I know nothing about Japan or it’s high speed rail.......so your posting here intrigued me....you made a compellling argument that our proposed HSR was very similar to Jōetsu Shinkansen.....so I thought i’d look it up and the first thing I saw was this map and I have to ask, what are populations of all those dots in between the two terminal stations and how are they able to have so many dots in between when we were told that station spacing was so crucial to HSR that we need to skip the biggest municipality outside of Toronto in the corridor?