That would certainly be a welcome step forward, at least on the day-of customer experience side of things. I'm thinking more for the booking side of things though. Right now when you want to book a trip from Aldershot to say Ottawa, VIA's website offers you the option of using GO to get from Aldershot to Union, in addition to a VIA-only option trip. If someone was on Air Canada's website and looking to get from London, ON to London, UK, it would be nice if the London ON - YYZ leg gave the option of VIA HFR, in addition to whatever short-haul flight is being offered.
That requires a codeshare. How willing airlines are to play ball on codeshares with VIA remains to be seen. Also, codeshares will require a lot on VIA's end. The airlines will insist on a level of reliability, customer service and baggage handling systems that ensure their own operations aren't adversely impacted.
Can it be done? Absolutely. But I think it'll be baby steps and not a day one feature. VIA will need things like the hub at Pearson and a connection at Dorval. VIA will need an HFR track record which they can show the airlines.
IMO, the train-plane market is where a majority of the new ridership (as compared to VIA's current ridership) will come from.
Disagree. Those 12 daily flights to London are all 50-80 seat turboprops. About 700 pax per day. So two trains worth. If were talking about adding half a dozen trains beyond today's combined NML and SML services, I don't think Pearson feed will be the bulk of riders. A lot of traffic is going to be folks who drive, who just like the convenience, comfort and reliability of rail. Factors which way more heavily with each year, as GTA traffic gets worse.
One of my complaints about VIA is that it is a train company when it, if it REALLY wanted to serve Canadians, should be a transportation company. To use London as an example, someone from St.Thomas a city of 42,000 that actually borders the City of London, has absolutely no access to VIA service because there are no buses that connect the 2.
Until HFR, nobody has had a proposal to make the Corridor profitable. This means that every service addition simply increases the subsidy cheque to be cut. Exactly why successive governments (Liberal or Conservative) have been uninterested in growing VIA. Once you have a frequent and profitable operation, the math very much changes. And bus services become much more feasible. Running a bus service to pick up a handful of pax to feed half a dozen trains requires lots of subsidies. Running a bus to feed an hourly train service might just have a business case. Heck, might not even need VIA to run it. Some local private operator might just run a shuttle van service on their own.
Out here people view VIA as a transportation option as much as people in Niagara Falls view the Maiden of the Mist as one.
People out west also view electric cars as some strange and foreign idea. And think you're less manly if you don't drive a pickup with truck nuts on your tow hitch.
VIA's failing out west is not servicing small towns or even larger cities that are far part. There's no business case for connecting Medicine Hat to Moose Jaw. There's no business case for running trains from Winnipeg to Regina or from Kelowna to Vancouver. The real rub is that VIA doesn't serve the other major corridor which actually has demand: Calgary-Edmonton. If VIA had HFR on Calgary-Edmonton, I would bet my next paycheque that a lot of Albertans would suddenly become staunch defenders of VIA. I am hopeful that success in Southern Ontario gives VIA both the financial capacity and experience to tackle Calgary-Edmonton next. There's no way they aren't thinking about it.
If VIA wants to become truly irrelevant to all Canadians and not just the ones in the big cities of Ontario & Quebec then a connecting VIA bus service is essential.
Connecting bus service to a line which run one train a day (the Canadian) would be a massive money sink. Not happening unless the government wants to spend tens/hundreds of millions more annually on subsidies.
If VIA wants to be viewed as a truly national transportation system then someone in St.John's should be able to buy a single ticket to Campbell River.
This is moronic. There's no practical reason anyone would buy such a reason, beyond a tourist trip. And facilitating such a service as transportation, not sight-seeing, would be massively expensive. Why would anybody take a train for days to travel that far when they can fly?
Long distance trains exist as tourist runs. Simple as that. There's some social value in servicing some small hamlets en route. But their primary purpose and revenue comes from tourists. The only exception to that maybe the Ocean. Longer than driving, but plenty of people who don't wan to drive and can afford more than the bus (but don't wan to spend on airfare) take it.
Just look at trains like Prince Rupert-Jasper, where every passenger gets a $519 subsidy, or the $596 for every passenger on the Canadian or the $544 per passenger on the Ocean.....or the really mind-blowing $1227 per passenger subsidy on the Winnipeg-Churchill route. This is on top of the fares they pay. We could literally save money as taxpayers subsidizing the airfare of these passengers. But the government insists that VIA offer these services and then gives them a meager budget to do this, and yet you expect them to offer even more budget crushing bus services on top?
The idea that what defines a national transportation service in a country the size of a continent, but with the population of Poland, is coverage, is mind-bogglingly simplistic. And unfortunately, it's this very mentality that stops VIA from aggressively pursuing ideas that make them profitable. Personally, I'd be quite fine with the government privatizing VIA. I can envision them achieving a lot more with private investors who'd cancel or cut all the other services and focus exclusively on the Corridor and probably a Calgary-Edmonton HFR service: the only two corridors that offer any profitable potential for intercity rail.
