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

[TOareaFan]

but if you are going to spend billions with the goal of people leaping over the boundry....what impact does the boundry really have?

eg. travel times between Union and KW on this service will now be roughly equivalent to what travel times are on rail from DT Brampton to Union....so people can now just avoid the density requirements on the urban growth centre that Places to Grow identified as DT Brampton.

It seems a very strange investment for an anti-sprawl government.

 

[steveintoronto]

No mention of fare-pricing anywhere in the report, when we know how senesitive commuter-style travel behaviour is to travel pricing. We also know that large amounts of people aren't travelling along the Windsor-Toronto corridor for pleasure, so commuter-style travel behaviour is what we are looking to accomplish here. I'm not too impressed of the cited maximum speeds of 300km/h, I don't think that is enough to make the service worthwhile for commuting.

If you ask me, this just seems like a rail fantasy map commissioned by the Ontario government chasing David Collenette's HSR delusions. The only thing they got figured out is the alignment. The report fails to provide a convincing business case for HSR on the Windsor-Toronto corridor.

I'm having trouble reading it, I just can't overcome the feeling that it's manic, and like trying to accept what a maniac is touting as reasonable. Not to mention the King's Clothes...

The elephant in the greater room is where is the co-ordination of this with the REAL need, the HFR project? If nothing else, this exercise in...Oh look squirrel!...will make HFR seem like a slam dunk for the approx $5B in comparison, and HFR doable in just over five years by all accounts.

Knowing Guelph very well, I found the description of how it's (gist) 'just going to fit into the historic hub there' beyond bizarre. Quite the contrary. I've yet to check the Guelph press as to how that will be received, but all that most want isn't something out of the Simpsons (in all fairness to HSR schemes successfully implemented elsewhere in the world) but what HFR has to offer, and at a price, both real cost and ticket price, that fits everyone's sensibilities.

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

Me too.

However, I'd prefer to have a direct Toronto - Montreal line available actually.

To offer a quick defense of Ottawa;

I don't think a direct Toronto-Montreal line would save that much time over Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal. Ottawa is a hefty trip generator and population centre on it's own right, providing a critical mass of travel needed for the success of HSR (Personally, I often have more cause to visit Ottawa than Montreal, though I can't say that is true for everybody?). Other HSR service have Ottawa-sized cities between routes connecting Toronto and Montreal-sized cities, especially in Germany.

Finally, the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City corridor is not a commuter-travel corridor. The idea for this corridor would be to compete with air travel. For instance, I personally would be fine with taking a longer (HSR) train ride to Ottawa or Montreal over a plane ticket, if it costs me just $40.

Back to Windsor-Toronto however, I wouldn't be surprised if the fare for that commuter-travel HSR corridor ends up being $40 itself. This is going to be a repeat of the UPX pricing situation.

 

[Haljackey]

2014 election: 300km/h line, built in 10 years. Turned out to be another study.

This announcement is for yet another study, scaled back to a 250 km/h line.

The Liberals are thinking they might be able to fool us twice.

I won't believe any of this until there are shovels are in the ground. I'll take a 250km/h line over nothing, but that's like a 1960's high speed line.

We have the technology today to get 350+km/h and Ontario's topography isn't really that challenging. No mountains to tunnel through or large navigable rivers to bridge high above or tunnel below. It's still costly though.

 

[TOareaFan]

According to the above posted travel times....does this mean the end of UP?

I mean, what is their advertising slogan now "slower than the other train and slower than the car!"

 

[steveintoronto]

It's time to revisit what Desjardins-Siciliano has been touting, and I specifically choose the NatPost (FinPost to be precise) coverage since it's slanted from the right:
High-speed rail not the right solution for Canada: Via CEO

Kristine Owram | November 3, 2015 7:11 PM ET

That the push for new high-speed train systems in Ontario and Alberta is gaining momentum just as the federal Liberals prepare to take office with plans to double infrastructure spending is surely more than a coincidence.

But the head of Canada’s dominant passenger rail service, Via Rail Canada, says high-speed rail is a tremendously expensive proposition, and it makes little sense to invest in it until the serious existing congestion problems on Canadian railways is solved.

“Back in 2012, there was a report published that pegged the cost of high-speed rail between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal at $10 billion, and for $10 billion it would get you 10-million customers,” said Via CEO Yves Desjardins-Siciliano. Simply providing dedicated passenger lines at conventional speed, he said, “will cost $3 billion for seven million (passengers), so it’s a third of the cost for two-thirds of the benefit.”

If Via had a dedicated track to use in the busy corridor between Toronto and Montreal, Desjardins-Siciliano estimates the railway could increase its annual passenger load on the route from 2.1 million currently to 6.8 million within 15 years of construction using what he calls “high-frequency rail.”

Just last week, Ontario appointed a former federal cabinet minister, David Collenette, as a special adviser for high-speed rail, which the provincial Liberal government envisions running between Windsor, London, Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto. The same week, Alberta’s NDP government said it was in the early stages of studying a high-speed rail link between Calgary and Edmonton, something previous governments have mused about but never bought into.

Advocates of high-speed rail point out that the largest untapped market in the world is North America, where, for a variety of reasons, people have not embraced the concept in the same way their European and Asian counterparts have.

This means there is tremendous potential to develop ultra-fast railways here, a major infrastructure conference in Toronto heard Tuesday. But the first challenge is winning over travellers who are used to driving or flying to their destinations, said Tim Keith, CEO of Texas Central Partners, a private company that’s developing North America’s first-ever high-speed rail link between Houston and Dallas.

“It’s not easy to create a high-speed-rail system in an economy that doesn’t accept high-speed rail as a mode of transport,” Keith told the conference, put on by the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships.

“The biggest challenge I have is introducing a product to market that isn’t used to the product.”

Desjardins-Siciliano has been drumming up interest among Canada’s major pension funds in building a new dedicated track between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal that would allow the Crown corporation to improve its deteriorating on-time performance.

Currently, 90 per cent of the track that Via uses is owned by Canadian National Railway Co., and is susceptible to regular bottlenecks as freight trains and passenger trains vie for the same space. In the second quarter, Via’s trains were on time 70 per cent of the time, down from 79 per cent a year earlier.

“Freight trains today are longer and heavier and therefore slower than ever,” Desjardins-Siciliano said in a recent interview. “That’s why growing (our service) requires an alternative track that would be dedicated to passenger rail.”

He noted that regular-speed rail also has the benefit of being able to stop at points in between the major cities, which meets Via’s objective of replacing travel by car, not travel by air.

And Sebastien Sherman, senior managing director for the Americas at Borealis Infrastructure, pointed out on Tuesday’s panel that high-speed rail plans “need a degree of population density,” more common in Asia and Europe than in a more sparsely populated country such as Canada. Borealis is an arm of the OMERS pension fund that owns 50 per cent of HS1 Ltd., the U.K.’s high-speed line that runs through the Chunnel. He noted that any high-speed project comes with its construction risks, demand risks, regulatory risks and political risks.

“The last thing we’d want to do is spend many years trying to advance a project if it doesn’t have community support,” he said.

http://business.financialpost.com/n...ail-not-the-right-solution-for-canada-via-ceo

 

[steveintoronto]

Back to Windsor-Toronto however, I wouldn't be surprised if the fare for that commuter-travel HSR corridor ends up being $40 itself. This is going to be a repeat of the UPX pricing situation.

I think you're being an optimist! It will be $40 one way from London to Toronto, perhaps even K/W to Toronto.

Desjardins-Siciliano has already investigated probable pricing, and he's deep in the biz. To further your prior point, the reason that fare pricing wasn't mentioned is because it would immediately put a kibosh on the manic fantasy. Collenette was better off hiding with Waldo. Now he's going to be hanging out with Schabas.
Ontario high-speed rail study was rushed ahead of election
Consultants calls Toronto-Kitchener-London line 'unusually easy'
By Andrea Bellemare, CBC News Posted: Dec 12, 2014 7:11 AM ET Last Updated: Dec 12, 2014 7:11 AM ET
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitch...-study-was-rushed-ahead-of-election-1.2866591

 

[Eug]

To offer a quick defense of Ottawa;

I don't think a direct Toronto-Montreal line would save that much time over Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal. Ottawa is a hefty trip generator and population centre on it's own right, providing a critical mass of travel needed for the success of HSR (Personally, I often have more cause to visit Ottawa than Montreal, though I can't say that is true for everybody?). Other HSR service have Ottawa-sized cities between routes connecting Toronto and Montreal-sized cities, especially in Germany.

Yet, Via already has a dedicated Toronto-Montreal line. Going through Ottawa with a stop at Ottawa would delay things considerably. Others have predicted that a 260 km/hr direct Toronto-Montreal express HSR line would be a 2.5 hour trip. This would essentially be impossible from what I gather if it went through Ottawa with a stop there. In a way, it makes it a lot less attractive. Why would we need a HS line that takes over 3 hours when the regular Toronto-Montreal train takes 4 hours at much less cost?

That is not to say I think Ottawa doesn't deserve a high speed link to Toronto (and Montreal). I would hope it gets one, but not at the expense of a separate Toronto-Montreal direct high speed link.

In fact, a more practical approach might just be to build a dedicated rail line direct between Toronto and Montreal and just use regular trains at higher speed. That makes a HS line involving Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal with a stop in there at Ottawa even less attractive for those not needing to stop in Ottawa. In fact, this direct Montreal-Toronto rail line is exactly what Via proposed with a projected trip time of only 3.5 hours, using existing non-high-speed technology.

Finally, the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City corridor is not a commuter-travel corridor. The idea for this corridor would be to compete with air travel. For instance, I personally would be fine with taking a longer (HSR) train ride to Ottawa or Montreal over a plane ticket, if it costs me just $40.

No, not a local commuter travel corridor. But yes a Toronto-Montreal link would kill a lot of short haul flight travel between those two cities.

 

[MisterF]

There are almost as many flights and almost as much travel demand to Ottawa as there is to Montreal. The bonds between Toronto and Ottawa are very strong. Bypassing Ottawa for the sake of taking 20 minutes off the trip to Montreal would cost the line close to half its intercity ridership. Building two separate lines for Ottawa and Montreal would be incredibly wasteful. HSR lines routinely stop in cities like Ottawa, especially if they only have to go slightly out of their way to do so.

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

Yet, Via already has a dedicated Toronto-Montreal line. Going through Ottawa with a stop at Ottawa would delay things considerably. Others have predicted that a 260 km/hr direct Toronto-Montreal express HSR line would be a 2.5 hour trip. This would essentially be impossible from what I gather if it went through Ottawa with a stop there. In a way, it makes it a lot less attractive. Why would we need a HS line that takes over 3 hours when the regular Toronto-Montreal train takes 4 hours at much less cost?

That is not to say I think Ottawa doesn't deserve a high speed link to Toronto (and Montreal). I would hope it gets one, but not at the expense of a separate Toronto-Montreal direct high speed link.

In fact, a more practical approach might just be to build a dedicated rail line direct between Toronto and Montreal and just use regular trains at higher speed. That makes a HS line involving Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal with a stop in there at Ottawa even less attractive for those not needing to stop in Ottawa. In fact, this direct Montreal-Toronto rail line is exactly what Via proposed with a projected trip time of only 3.5 hours, using existing non-high-speed technology.


No, not a local commuter travel corridor. But yes a Toronto-Montreal link would kill a lot of short haul flight travel between those two cities.

I appreciate the reply, has given me some more things to think about.

I am still skeptical about how much Ottawa would delay things. Just playing on Google Maps, the difference between Toronto-Montreal and Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal would be a 30km detour. I find it difficult to think that a 30km detour + 10 minute stop delay would equate to an hour difference in travel time. Maybe I just need to see the math and the figures behind these claims.

As for the utility of the line, I still maintain that there would be enough people stopping and getting on in Ottawa between Toronto-Montreal to warrant a stop. A rail line is only as useful as the destinations it connects to, and Ottawa is a major trip generator. I also would be as bold as to claim that the difference of an extra half hour would not be so consequential from the perspective of a travelor, as the difference in the trip taking 2.5h or 3h is inconsequential, since either is still substantially longer than flying by air (1h15m) but still significantly cheaper (let's say $40 compared to $300 for air). (I would also comment that HSR is more comfortable and productive, and time perception is minimized when people are allowed to use their time productively.)

 

[Eug]

I appreciate the reply, has given me some more things to think about.

I am still skeptical about how much Ottawa would delay things. Just playing on Google Maps, the difference between Toronto-Montreal and Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal would be a 30km detour. I find it difficult to think that a 30km detour + 10 minute stop delay would equate to an hour difference in travel time. Maybe I just need to see the math and the figures behind these claims.

As for the utility of the line, I still maintain that there would be enough people stopping and getting on in Ottawa between Toronto-Montreal to warrant a stop. A rail line is only as useful as the destinations it connects to, and Ottawa is a major trip generator. I also would be as bold as to claim that the difference of an extra half hour would not be so consequential from the perspective of a travelor, as the difference in the trip taking 2.5h or 3h is inconsequential, since either is still substantially longer than flying by air (1h15m) but still significantly cheaper (let's say $40 compared to $300 for air). (I would also comment that HSR is more comfortable and productive, and time perception is minimized when people are allowed to use their time productively.)

It may not be an hour delay, but it would be a 30+ minute delay or over 3 hours total trip time, which would make it rather uninteresting for those traveling between Toronto to Montreal, when a much cheaper solution for a dedicated direct line from Toronto to Montreal would only take 3.5 hours.

Remember, high speed trains need time to ramp up speed and then slow down. Multiple stops make high speed trains much less high speed.

There are almost as many flights and almost as much travel demand to Ottawa as there is to Montreal. The bonds between Toronto and Ottawa are very strong. Bypassing Ottawa for the sake of taking 20 minutes off the trip to Montreal would cost the line close to half its intercity ridership. Building two separate lines for Ottawa and Montreal would be incredibly wasteful. HSR lines routinely stop in cities like Ottawa, especially if they only have to go slightly out of their way to do so.

I think that's why Via is recommending dedicated lines on some of those routes, but using regular trains. Right now a lot of the delays exist because these lines are not owned by Via. They are freight lines, and freight trains often get priority.

Personally, if I am going to support high speed trains, I want to see them appropriately implemented with dedicated express lines when needed, with healthy speed improvements over alternatives such as dedicated lines for regular trains.

Your 20 minute savings estimate is an interesting one, cuz that's approximately what we are talking about here, comparing a high speed rail line going from Toronto to Ottawa to Montreal vs. regular express train on a dedicated track going from Toronto to Montreal directly. In that context, building that high speed line may actually be the more wasteful endeavour.

The more I think about this, the more I think some at Via have a point. Perhaps the better solution is just to give them the multiple dedicated train tracks some want, to let them run multiple 180 km/hr trains per day, instead of forcing all traffic on a high speed line through Ottawa.

EDIT:

Here is the article:

http://business.financialpost.com/n...ail-not-the-right-solution-for-canada-via-ceo

Basically, the Via CEO argued that a single high speed rail line on the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor would cost $10 billion, for 10 million customers.

However, a regular speed (with regular meaning 150-180 km/hr) rail line on the Toronto-Montreal corridor would cost $3 billion, for 7 million customers. If they electrified it, it'd be $4 billion for those 7 million customers.

 

[steveintoronto]

I think that's why Via is recommending dedicated lines on some of those routes, but using regular trains. Right now a lot of the delays exist because these lines are not owned by Via. They are freight lines, and freight trains often get priority.

but not at the expense of a separate Toronto-Montreal direct high speed link.

But a High Speed Line between Toronto and Montreal isn't on the cards. It remains to be seen if this present exercise of an "EA" is anything more than a crayon drawing as it is. I highly suspect the latter.

Here's an idea Ont Min of Transport: Electrify GO corridors before having wet-dreams about someone else's lovely trainset. Concentrate on electrifying the corridors that VIA can then share with HFR and we'll all be better off for it. Not to mention that...Look! Squirrel!

As for HFR, Urban Sky has already posted in the VIA string the expected speed/timing of a dedicated track Montreal/Ottawa/Toronto service and shows no advantage to doing it 'along the lake'. It is more advantageous in a number of ways to do it as Desjardins-Siciliano proposes.

I would agree with you, that if High Speed is to be built, that all changes, as HSR *has to have* it's own dedicated corridor, and completely grade separated the entire length run as high-speed. If private enterprise wishes to make that case to the Infrastructure Bank (and Collenette and colleagues agree on the need for "private financing" then so be it. But for Queen's Park to be promoting this when the GO system still abjectly needs investment is Squirrel again, over there!

 

[Eug]

But a High Speed Line between Toronto and Montreal isn't on the cards. It remains to be seen if this present exercise of an "EA" is anything more than a crayon drawing as it is. I highly suspect the latter.

Here's an idea Ont Min of Transport: Electrify GO corridors before having wet-dreams about someone else's lovely trainset. Concentrate on electrifying the corridors that VIA can then share with HFR and we'll all be better off for it. Not to mention that...Look! Squirrel!

Yeah, concentrate on things that can get funded and actually built.

Somehow I'm thinking though it'd be potentially easier to fund a dedicated regular rail line between Toronto and Montreal for $3 billion than high speed at $10 billion through Ottawa.

A this point, I'd take what we can get... but I'm just afraid that these are empty promises.

 

[steveintoronto]

it'd be potentially easier to fund a dedicated regular rail line between Toronto and Montreal for $3 billion than high speed at $10 billion through Ottawa.

It's $3B est for HFR via Ottawa.

I suspect we're going to have a slew of articles in the next while in the media on how manic this whole proposal is. Hopefully, by doing so, it boosts the HFR case.

 

[Eug]

It's $3B est for HFR via Ottawa.

I suspect we're going to have a slew of articles in the next while in the media on how manic this whole proposal is. Hopefully, by doing so, it boosts the HFR case.

OK, now I'm confused.

I have read it was $3 billion for a direct Toronto-Montreal link, or $4 billion if electrified. Ridership would be 7 million in 15 years.

I am now reading there is a plan for a $4 billion Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec link, or $6 billion if electrified, but with ridership at 10 million in less than 15 years.

I had assumed these were different, but are they actually the same thing? Or has a Toronto-Montreal dedicated plan been scrapped? If it does have to go through Ottawa, would there be an express train that bypasses the Ottawa stop, to shave 20+ minutes off the trip?