VIA Rail

[Urban Sky]

Much as it pains me to say so, Micheal has a point here...........

In this way.

Highways do nothing but lose money. No tolls (for the vast majority).

We must, at the very least, be orthodox and apply the same standard to each mode, otherwise everything being discussed is a misconception/lie.

Either we charge back each mode for the cost of maintaining its track/travel lane, or we charge nothing back of either.

In which case the cost is solely that of operating the vehicle over 'x' distance.

While a proper calculation may not actually change the result, it might, in select cases.

****

Lets equally add, while we discuss that fixing the Toronto-Sudbury rail alignment as entirely unreasonable due to cost; that highway 69 has been, is being and will be systematically re-aligned, re-engineered and widened to become Highway 400 along its entire length at a rather substantial cost.

****

The above is not an argument for Toronto-Sudbury or any other rail service; it is for a fair, consistent standard of evaluation; even if that doesn't change a single business case.

The way to address this is to expand the farebox-recovery rate to a Benefit-Cost ratio, by adding all external costs and benefits to the calculation: A road may very well yield benefits which exceed costs (despite not charging any user directly), if it relieves residential areas along the existing roads from pollution, reduces accidents and saves its users time (which often also reduces fuel consumption with the associated environmental benefits).

The baseline is always the „Business-As-Usual“ (or: „Do-Nothing“), whereas all impacts of any project are to be captured as projected benefits or costs. I generally feel uncomfortable about road-upgrades, but whether approximately 170 people every day use a new passenger train or any existing mode of transportation won‘t push in the slightest the needle of the BCR for upgrading Highway 69 to Highway 400…

 

[micheal_can]

The metric to assess how dependent a transportation service is on subsidies is commonly referred to as „farebox recovery rate“, which describes what proportion of a service‘s operating costs is actually covered with passenger revenues. Here a few examples from pre-Covid times:

VIA‘s Remote services: ~10-20%
VIA‘s Ocean: ~40%
Transit networks: ~50% (typical value)
Ontario Northland‘s bus services: ~75%
VIA‘s Canadian: ~95%
VIA‘s Corridor services: ~130%

Why invest in the „Northlander“ which is projected to loose more than $3 for every $1 earned in ticket revenues, when Ontario Northland‘s buses only loose one-tenth of that ($0.33 for every $1 earned)?

Why invest in the Northlander when it costs more than half-a-billion in start-up costs, when buses have considerably lower start-up costs as they use the public road network?

Why invest in passenger rail on low-ridership corridors if its per-train-km operating costs are approximately ten (!) times that of an intercity bus?

The way to address this is to expand the farebox-recovery rate to a Benefit-Cost ratio, by adding all external costs and benefits to the calculation: A road may very well yield benefits which exceed costs (despite not charging any user directly), if it relieves residential areas along the existing roads from pollution, reduces accidents and saves its users time (which often also reduces fuel consumption with the associated environmental benefits).

The baseline is always the „Business-As-Usual“ (or: „Do-Nothing“), whereas all impacts of any project are to be captured as projected benefits or costs. I generally feel uncomfortable about road-upgrades, but whether approximately 170 people every day use a new passenger train or any existing mode of transportation won‘t push in the slightest the needle of the BCR for upgrading Highway 69 to Highway 400…

It is interesting. You answered the "Why" without me even saying why. The reason we should invest in services that will require a subsidy is the benefits to the population who live along it. To me, if the intangible benefits exist that warrant it,then it should be done. Those intangible benefits cannot be fleshed out by the 'bean counters', but can be expressed by those that would use the service. Things like not wanting to park or drive in Toronto, not having their trip canceled due to snow, or not spending multiple nights in a hotel are all intangible, but are things that should be considered.

You talk of city pairs as a means to talk about service to them to justify them. Connecting SSM and Sudbury and North Bay to each other, and to Toronto should be the next thing that the province looks at if,compared to their planning, the Northlander becomes a success.Via won't, and really shouldn't. So, the next logical group would be the province. This isn't fantasy if you live here any more than the GO extensions to Bolton or Peterborough are. For here, a fantasy would be HSR, or even HFR.

 

[Urban Sky]

You talk of city pairs as a means to talk about service to them to justify them. Connecting SSM and Sudbury and North Bay to each other, and to Toronto should be the next thing that the province looks at if,compared to their planning, the Northlander becomes a success.Via won't, and really shouldn't.

Thank you for acknowledging that this discussion doesn’t belong in this thread. You can find my response here:

Lack of meaningful Passenger Rail service outside the Quebec-Windsor Corridor

Lets have a serious discussion about the Northlander returning and how we can learn from that to expand passenger rail across the country. It started in 1979 with the TEE trains. At the time, those trains were almost 20 years old. They were retired in 1992. In 1992, they used refurbished GO...

urbantoronto.ca

 

[reaperexpress]

@Urban Sky I recommend trying out UT's Ignore function. I've started using it and it's quite helpful to avoid futile arguments

 

[Urban Sky]

@Urban Sky I recommend trying out UT's Ignore function. I've started using it and it's quite helpful to avoid futile arguments

Thank you for reminding me that the reason I created a seperate thread was to seperate these endless Sudbury discussions from the discussions which actually belog here!

 

[micheal_can]

Thank you for acknowledging that this discussion doesn’t belong in this thread. You can find my response here:

Lack of meaningful Passenger Rail service outside the Quebec-Windsor Corridor

Lets have a serious discussion about the Northlander returning and how we can learn from that to expand passenger rail across the country. It started in 1979 with the TEE trains. At the time, those trains were almost 20 years old. They were retired in 1992. In 1992, they used refurbished GO...

urbantoronto.ca

I actually talked about on the Ontario Northland thread, but when something here is related to it, I mention it. Notice,I don't bring that up.

 

[C_Johnson_1995]

The metric to assess how dependent a transportation service is on subsidies is commonly referred to as „farebox recovery rate“, which describes what proportion of a service‘s operating costs is actually covered with passenger revenues. Here a few examples from pre-Covid times:

VIA‘s Remote services: ~10-20%
VIA‘s Ocean: ~40%
Transit networks: ~50% (typical value)
Ontario Northland‘s bus services: ~75%
VIA‘s Canadian: ~95%
VIA‘s Corridor services: ~130%

Why invest in the „Northlander“ which is projected to loose more than $3 for every $1 earned in ticket revenues, when Ontario Northland‘s buses only loose one-tenth of that ($0.33 for every $1 earned)?

Why invest in the Northlander when it costs more than half-a-billion in start-up costs, when buses have considerably lower start-up costs as they use the public road network?

Why invest in passenger rail on low-ridership corridors if its per-train-km operating costs are approximately ten (!) times that of an intercity bus?

I had been considering this earlier, but this discussion has reignited my interest. I'm considering organising an advocacy campaign to fight the return of the Northlander. It could be politically unpopular, but there might be a chance to get the government to back down on this. Perhaps if other advocacy organisations like Transport Action get involved it could go somewhere. But it would be unwise to allow this mistake of massive proportions go unopposed.

 

[Urban Sky]

I had been considering this earlier, but this discussion has reignited my interest. I'm considering organising an advocacy campaign to fight the return of the Northlander. It could be politically unpopular, but there might be a chance to get the government to back down on this. Perhaps if other advocacy organisations like Transport Action get involved it could go somewhere. But it would be unwise to allow this mistake of massive proportions go unopposed.

I would strongly advise against running a negative campaign which puts preventing a rail service at its heart. Instead, I would emphasize the need for better bus services which provide stronger connections within the region and how much more bang-for-the-money reinvesting the funds set aside for the Northlander into the general Ontario Northland network would have. However, even that discussion probably belongs into the other thread (or more pertinently: the „Ontario Northland“ thread)…

 

[crs1026]

I had been considering this earlier, but this discussion has reignited my interest. I'm considering organising an advocacy campaign to fight the return of the Northlander. It could be politically unpopular, but there might be a chance to get the government to back down on this. Perhaps if other advocacy organisations like Transport Action get involved it could go somewhere. But it would be unwise to allow this mistake of massive proportions go unopposed.

While I agree with everything that has been commented about the non-economic nature of the Northlander, I would oppose an outright "kill it" campaign because of the collateral damage. While we here on this thread may notice the fine details, the public would only hear "passenger trains are bad, period" and that would cost us more than the Northlander price tag. Virtue signalling is not all bad even if it's built on theory and not practicality.

Statistics such as any sort of cost-benefit ratio are not "truth" or scientific discovery - they are simply models that help us describe a situation in numerical terms so we can make informed decisions. These numbers are never precise and they require considerable subjectivity in some of the underlying parameters. And they need to be read in context.

The danger in applying cost-benefit numbers rigidly to anything in Northern Ontario is that, if we went strictly by the numbers, we would probably shut down the North entirely in favour of better-scoring projects in Southern Ontario. Or, we would be pushed to use a metric that is so weighted by intangible "benefit to society" variables that we would digress into pointless discussion of what those measures ought to be and what values to assign to different projects. This is not rocket science and the numbers have no appropriate precision.

As @Northern Light pointed out, we (unfortunately) use vastly different mindsets and accounting to compare the wisdom of rail and highway investments, and that leads us to make bad decisions. So here we are debating whether the Northlander is throwing good money after bad when we might better be discussing whether the 4-lane Highway should ever have been built in the first place.

At the end of the day, tax dollars are finite, even for a government that hides behind deficit spending. It's clear that the Northlander has attracted some degree of political support from folks like Michael. Rightly or wrongly, this is how the North has asked QP to spend a fixed envelope on their behalf. The choice may puzzle some of us, and I don't accept his specific arguments, but one has to let the North be itself. Just so long as it's clear that the North has chosen this train over more doctors and nurses and teachers for example that could have been bought with the same investment. Eventually Ontario will say no to some other Northern need because we said yes to the Northlander. (Maybe that is the train of thought that one might better use to kill the train... compare the train to cost benefit of an expanded hospital in say North Bay?)

Leaving numbers aside, a suitable comparator might be the services to northern Sweden and Norway. These lines thrive, in somewhat comparable context of population density and distance. The highway investment is different (although not less in quantum, the highway may be 2 lanes but the road tunnels and bridges up there are stunning). A lot of the Northlander price tag will go to preserving and maintaining the rail corridor to the North, and that's justified even if the passenger train does not cover its above the rail cost.

My beef with the Northlander is that the slavish attention to cost-benefit is resulting in an undernourished service model of only a few days per week and convoluted hours of operation. For the extra money I would prefer to revert to the original 1978 Northlander model of one train daily to North Bay and a second train daily to Timmins/Cochrane. Same infrastructure cost, moderately higher abovethe rail cost. The business case has been drafted to meet a bare minimum break even and not a growth or ridership development strategy. If we are going to do this, let's maximise its utility.

- Paul

 

[Urban Sky]

My beef with the Northlander is that the slavish attention to cost-benefit is resulting in an undernourished service model of only a few days per week and convoluted hours of operation. For the extra money I would prefer to revert to the original 1978 Northlander model of one train daily to North Bay and a second train daily to Timmins/Cochrane. Same infrastructure cost, moderately higher abovethe rail cost. The business case has been drafted to meet a bare minimum break even and not a growth or ridership development strategy. If we are going to do this, let's maximise its utility.

- Paul

I tend to agree that the funding is stretched too thin by operating less than-daily trains over such a long distance. Instead, they should have focused the capital cost on providing a more frequent rail service (e.g. 2-3 trains per day, which is possible with the same 2 sets in service and a third in maintenance) on the most popular (and most time-competitive against the car) segment (i.e., Toronto-North Bay) and then reorganize Ontario Northlands‘ network into (mostly) a hub-and-spoke network focused on North Bay, with ideally two-hourly service in all directions (think of rail as a trunk and bus as branches). And if the rail service proves really popular, it might get extended further Northwest one day, though I suspect that Sudbury would be a much more viable terminus than Timmins or Cochrane…

 

[crs1026]

I tend to agree that the funding is stretched too thin by operating less than-daily trains over such a long distance. Instead, they should have focused the capital cost on providing a more frequent rail service (e.g. 2-3 trains per day, which is possible with the same 2 sets in service and a third in maintenance) on the most popular (and most time-competitive against the car) segment (i.e., Toronto-North Bay) and then reorganize Ontario Northlands‘ network into (mostly) a hub-and-spoke network focused on North Bay, with ideally two-hourly service in all directions (think of rail as a trunk and bus as branches). And if the rail service proves really popular, it might get extended further Northwest one day, though I suspect that Sudbury would be a much more viable terminus than Timmins or Cochrane…

My conspiracy theory is, the proposed schedule with the slow overnight timing north of North Bay is less about generating ridership than about mitigating (ie avoiding having to spend money to fix) just how slow the track has become north of North Bay.

If so, a more logical plan would indeed be to make track investments south of North Bay and build bus connections from there north.


- Paul

 

[micheal_can]

My conspiracy theory is, the proposed schedule with the slow overnight timing north of North Bay is less about generating ridership than about mitigating (ie avoiding having to spend money to fix) just how slow the track has become north of North Bay.

If so, a more logical plan would indeed be to make track investments south of North Bay and build bus connections from there north.


- Paul

Many people were up sent when the train changed their schedule from the night time to the day time. This new schedule gives those people what they want. I have heard ridership dropped when this change was made. I do not have any data on it to back it up. We shall see whether this change will be what is wanted.

 

[micheal_can]

Serious questions....
If radios can work, why did all trains stop?
Could they not have just given clearance to the next station/switch?
Those automatic switches, could then not be manually thrown?

 

[Admiral Beez]

I went to Quebec for an extended weekend and had the good fortune to ride much of the VIA fleet. We took a nicely refurbished Budd Car train pulled by a P42 locomotive from Toronto to Ottawa. From Ottawa we took a very worn-out Renaissance P42 set to Quebec City. On the return trip, from Quebec to Montreal we had the new Siemens Venture, which was really neat to experience - a taxpayer project I can fully support. From Montreal to Toronto it was a refurbished LRC set pulled by either an EMD or GMD loco.

I didn’t know about the Renaissance trains, and found them strange, with the needlessly raised seats and angled under seat luggage stowage, plus the suspension was clapped out, giving a rough ride, while the Venture was “almost“ Euro-smooth. Our favourite was the Budd Car, with wide seats with tons of foot space. The reason we went to Quebec via Ottawa was that the train from Montreal to Quebec was the same train we would have taken from Ottawa, meaning we‘d have a long layover in Montreal when we’d rather be moving on the train. All four trains had excellent wifi - I got to stream the World Superbike races. On the return trip we had a 90 min layover in Montreal so saw the shops and got some good food at the food court for the final train home.

Our train arrived at Union last night around 7pm, about 30 mins late, but seemingly unaffected by the big CN switching system issue.

 

[Urban Sky]

Serious questions....
If radios can work, why did all trains stop?
Could they not have just given clearance to the next station/switch?
Those automatic switches, could then not be manually thrown?

Imagine having twenty or thirty RC-cars parked next to each other, so that they block, but not touch each other.
Now imagine you have a remote control for each car and you are told to drive every single car away without touching another car.
Now imagine that you are asked to do the same, but with having to ask a friend to describe to you the exact position of each car, as you can’t see them yourself.
Now imagine that there are humans on board every car, which might get injured if two cars collide, even at low speeds.

What you describe might work totally fine if you have half-a-dozen trains per day, but not if you have dozens per hour…