micheal_can
Senior Member
So, people are able to show you other countries have a national parking standard, and you want to ignore it? It is relevant, even if you choose not to pay attention to it.
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VIA Rail
- Thread starter ehlow
- Start date
So, people are able to show you other countries have a national parking standard, and you want to ignore it? It is relevant, even if you choose not to pay attention to it.
kEiThZ
Superstar
The national parking standard mentioned has to do with parking at housing and businesses. And exactly zero to do with parking at rail stations. In fact, if we're going to use foreign precedent, they'd probably have less parking than we would build at a comparable station.
If you read my subsequent posts, I've said that VIA should build parking structures at stations that have traffic to support it. But there has to be the ridership to support this and it can't be the primary last mile solution or they will never have the traffic to actually make HFR successful.
kEiThZ
Superstar
Agreed. But there's a real limit to what VIA can do and what can be tossed into the HFR budget envelope. Parking isn't exactly cheap. A while back, @ShonTron wrote a great piece on the cost of all that "free" GO parking. Most notable was the cost of building all these parking structures. If VIA has to start building massive parking structures at $40 000/spot, at every HFR station, the price tag of the whole project is going to go up pretty quickly. This is not all that dissimilar to the dilemma faced by the GTAA which is now pushing to have the modal share of transit at Pearson increase because they don't want to have to build quarter billion dollar parking garages.
The logical solution is to leave the downtown stations at Union and Gare Centrale as they are, and have them focus on transit, taxis and rideshare for last mile. But build up the suburban stations (and Ottawa) with garages and car rental counters. Don't think the Lakeshore centres could support auto rentals, but several of them may end up with large lots or even parking structures, as they largely focus on lots of daytripping and commuting. The real challenge will be convincing local authorities to build a transit node at some of these stations (Kingston and Belleville particularly come to mind for me).
Darwinkgo
Active Member
The CIB expanded the exploration of the Calgary-Banff business case to include an international airport link. Would be interesting to see if they are that adventorous for HFR!
micheal_can
Senior Member
Well, one train a day is a much more higher frequency than now....
lrt's friend
Active Member
I hope they consider allowing for possible future extension to Edmonton in any plans.
Darwinkgo
Active Member
The feasibility study looked at 8 round trips, plus 3 commuter runs from Cochrane. The inclusion of the airport link would change that significantly.
Darwinkgo
Active Member
Unlikely as part of this. But I have heard there is a private proponent starting a process for HSR process soon. The province set up an 'unsolicited opportunity' framework for freestanding infrastructure projects.
kEiThZ
Superstar
Is that one of everpromising Hyperloop proposals?
Darwinkgo
Active Member
No. Conventional HSR.
kEiThZ
Superstar
Link? All I can find is the Hyperloop proposals.
That's insane if they think there's a business case for HSR between two metros of 1.3 million that are 300 km apart (centre to centre) in Alberta.
Darwinkgo
Active Member
Still private alas. Demand is significant because Calgary and Edmonton aren't near anywhere else. So in Ontario where demand from Toronto is split between Niagara, Detroit, Buffalo, London, Waterloo, Guelph, Sarnia and Windsor, for Calgary, it is really just Edmonton.
Here is committee testimony on it:
Attachments
micheal_can
Senior Member
What is the existing daily traffic on the existing freight lines between Calgary and Edmonton?
HSR or HFR, pick one.
Darwinkgo
Active Member
Between 15-20 trains on single track CPR, and about the same on the much less direct single track CN route. Neither have capacity for speed or frequency for passenger rail. VIA ran on CPR for years, but reliability was poor, speed wasn't even competitive with the bus and the route directly parrallelled the highway and the Greyhound route, so they switched to CN to try to serve non-served towns but reliability kept getting worse, then the route was cancelled.
HS&FR
kEiThZ
Superstar
This was in 2013. Is it still relevant today? I thought this was all fed into the various studies the Government of Alberta did.
I'll be happy if something like this can happen and I've long maintained that they probably have a case as good as Toronto-Kitchener-London or Ottawa-Montreal or Montreal-Quebec City. But what has me skeptical is that Calgary-Edmonton is longer than all of these making the costs higher and the business cases tighter, even if there is higher traffic.