Why are so many people obsessed with the Montreal-Toronto travel times? I don't know about the actual number of passengers but before COVID VIA was only running 6 trains a day between Montreal and Toronto but 10 trains a day between Ottawa and Toronto, so assuming the trains are the same size and equally full, that means Ottawa-Toronto had close to double the passenger volume (1⅔ times to be exact). The travel time on that route will drop from
approximately 4 hours and 30 minutes to as low as 3 hours and 15 minutes. Montreal-Ottawa also had 6 trains a day (though I believe the trains were shorter), so that route also had significant traffic and its travel time will drop from 1:58 to 1:33.
Yes, if they achieve their stated travel times, they will certainly be quite respectable improvements over the current Toronto-Ottawa times. But that certainly not a given: VIA's statement was "
reducing travel times from Ottawa to Toronto to as low as 3 hours and 15 minutes ". My point (and a couple others here) has been that in the event that it appears that their current strategy would not reliably achieve that travel time in practice, the scope of the project should be expanded to include bits and pieces of new high-speed infrastructure, rather than scaling back or eliminating the goal of improving travel times.
By the way, as
I pointed out before, the current travel time isn't 4 hours and 30 minutes, it's 4 hours flat and has been as low as 3:48 in the recent past.
There is also something to be said about the frequency of the service. Going from 6 to 15 trains a day means you will have to wait significantly less time for a train.
Yes there is something to be said, but not much. With a long-distance intercity trip such as Toronto-Montreal, increasing the frequency actually has no effect on how long people wait for a train, because they don't just randomly show up at Union and hop on the next train to Montreal. Given that the trip takes nearly 5 hours, people have likely made plans in advance to stay in Montréal for at least a few days. They have booked a specific train in advance, and will show up at the station accordingly.
The benefit of frequency in an intercity market is rather that there is a greater chance that a train arrives around the time you want to arrive. People staying at the destination city for at least a few days will tend not to be particularly picky about the exact minute they arrive there. Six trains per day is already approaching the resolution with which people plan such long-distance trips: e.g. "arrive in the early afternoon" vs "arrive in the late afternoon" etc. Adding more departures would be nice, but it's certainly not a game-changer. The real game changer would be to start chipping away at those 5 hours in the train.
Take for example the following two hypothetical schedules:
If you want to specifically arrive in Montreal at 13:00, you can't do so in the left schedule, and instead need to arrive an hour earlier. But even in that case you're still no worse off since you end up departing at the same time anyway in either schedule (08:00).
Travellers are always better off with the left schedule than the right one, regardless of when they want to arrive.
The right schedule costs also more than twice as much to operate. It has twice as many trips, and the operating cost per trip is higher because each train + crew can't do as many trips in a day.
This is why I and some others are so serious about the need for travel time improvements as part of HFR, not just reliability and frequency improvements.
