ksun
Senior Member
^And lots of bus routes I'm sure.
Yes of course the way the airlines and airport authorities make their plans is influenced by government policy, which makes total sense. No government has committed to high speed rail to Montreal so airport plans will continue to be based on its absence. Of course, airport development plans are being updated all the time and would no doubt be updated to respond to any significant investment into rail. They're already responding to all the transit expansion in the GTA by building a multimodal transit terminal, as rbt mentioned.
I was curious about how our corridor compares with others so I did some browsing. Pearson is the 15th busiest airport in the world based on number of flights. Wikipedia also has a table showing busiest city pairs based on number of flights. Although Toronto isn't there, the table appears to be wildly incomplete (not entirely surprising on Wikipedia). The source is quicktrip.com and it seems like someone just entered a bunch of city pairs and put the data into Wikipedia. Here's what I found for number of flights tomorrow on some key routes.
Sao Paulo-Rio: 276
Sydney-Melbourne: 188
New York-Chicago: 176
Toronto-Montreal: 110
Shanghai-Beijing: 104
London-Edinburgh: 94 (planning high speed rail)
Toronto-Ottawa: 80
Madrid-Barcelona: 50
You can't really draw a whole lot of conclusions from that obviously, but the Toronto-Montreal route has more planes in the air than you might think.
True but you can travel between Madrid and Barcelona in 3 hours and Shanghai and Beijing in 4.5 hours by high speed train. Of course fewer people fly.