EnviroTO
Senior Member
The comparison always needs to emissions per passenger and comparing trains and buses created in the same era. I have a hard time believing the new VIA fleet will have higher emissions per passenger per trip than a bus.
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VIA Rail
- Thread starter ehlow
- Start date
Urban Sky
Senior Member
I was referring to emissions-per-service-km. The environmental advantage of trains (expressed as emissions per passenger-km or ton-km) comes from its superior capacity, but that requires you to transport more people (or goods) than what a single car/bus/train/airplane can transport. That's why I'm so skeptical of restoring passenger rail service in Western Canada: because the passenger loads one can expect would easily fit into one bus...
Northern Light
Superstar
I'm not sure about that assumption.
On what is it predicated? Current/recent bus travel? Plane travel?
I would suggest there is likely latent demand for a lower price point, w/less hassle than a plane, and for service that can be faster than a bus.
I would certainly be amenable to the argument that simply restoring past services, at past speeds/price points may not be a commercially viable or ridership heavy option.
But in so far as we're talking about serving major urban centres (or connections to them) I suspect that there is a material market.
Now, whether that market can be accessed at a reasonable cost to the state is a fair, and different question.
Whether its Edmonton-Calgary, or Regina-Saskatoon or Winnipeg-T.Bay; such services would almost certainly have to be better their best historic travel times to be competitive and drive a material benefit
both in public utility and environmentally.
Whether the cost in upgraded track conditions, second track/longer passing tracks etc. and new rolling stock/power is justified is an open question.
But I certainly think its one worthy of study in due course.
Though perhaps, we can get HFR in the corridor up and running (or at least under construction) and then go from there.
EnviroTO
Senior Member
You need to be running the train service with the goal of carrying a significant number of passengers to compare it to buses with the goal of carrying a significant number of passengers. I don't think they have ever run the cross Canada services in a way where maximizing the number of passengers was a priority. In the corridor VIA is clearly a green option. Riding the Canadian in steel bodied cars from the 1940s and 1950s on a train that is constantly stopping and starting with most of the passengers being tourists in bedrooms, dining cars, and observation cars doesn't strike me as a service where the goal is green transportation. If you tried to deliver the service of the Canadian using buses (i.e. meals at the dining room table hot out of the kitchen, beds, and lounge seats) then you would probably need a huge fleet of buses to replace the Canadian and that would obviously be less green.
TerryJohnson
New Member
There I disagree with you. There were at least 14 daily YYC-YEG flights in 2019. That's a lot of people putting up with all the added hassle of airports, plus a good half dozen bus frequencies including Red Arrow's 2+1 business class bus, and of course everyone driving. I think Aecom and Ellis Don are absolutely correct that a high speed service would attract enough passengers, and I'm fairly sure a high performance service would win enough market share from those aircraft and the highway to start making a significant dent in emissions. A HPR service might achieve a better net carbon balance before 2050 because it could have beltway stops to pick up suburban passengers who wouldn't be keen to backtrack to downtown, wouldn't require so much carbon-intensive new concrete, and could be open in time to make a difference.
Massive mode shift to rail is low hanging fruit with very little if any economic downside, and decent passenger trains along existing corridors between major cities in western Canada are the lowest of all the low hanging fruit in the climate change mitigation tree, plus a necessary direct investment in a region that will feel more and more pain as fossil fuel assets become stranded. The "area under the curve" - total CO2 emitted before we finish the transition - matters a great deal, so low hanging fruit should be harvested quickly to create a longer runway for harder to mitigate sectors of the economy.
Urban Sky
Senior Member
I can unfortunately only respond to this one point, as I don't want to lose on the rare chance to for once be in bed only a few minutes after midnight (a challenge for which Friday might sound like an odd day to chose, but those with small kids will understand), but just for the records:
When I rather carelessly wrote "passenger rail services in Western Canada", I actually meant to refer to "daily non-corridor intercity passenger rail services in Canada", i.e. any daily intercity services outside the Quebec-Windsor and Edmonton-Calgary corridors...
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Bordercollie
Senior Member
Are you talking about a high speed service in Canada to go from Toronto to Vancouver?
Assuming we can do that, what kind of trip times where you expecting?
3 days? And at what expense?
I think a more frequent Canadian with.a 90+% on time performance would help serve a lot of communities.
It would need to be twice daily in each direction at least.
Connections would be needed at stops for buses to take customers to other destinations.
For this we will need a national transportation mandate which we don't have today. It will require subsidy from all levels of government. And this goal of getting people out of cars this is the direction we need to go towards.
Flying is great if you want to o travel from Toronto to Winnipeg or Edmonton. But what about everything in-between?
At the very least twice a day service from Edmonton to Calgary and then from Calgary to Vancouver. And or Edmonton to Vancouver.
wopchop
Building Toronto
Let us all encourage the Federal government to provide funding to setup the Snowpiercer, which will continuously circle Canada ,and connect all communities
DirectionNorth
Senior Member
I think that there's never going to be enough demand in Western Canada for more than daily or twice daily trips on most routes. I made a map, red is multiple daily trips/HFR-style service, blue service is daily service at a speed comparable to driving, and black would probably have minimal demand (outside of tourism).
TerryJohnson
New Member
Getting any sleep with small kids in the house is an achievement... but getting to be before midnight becomes even less likely once they become teenagers.
Talking of getting sleep, I would also argue that city pairs like Saskatoon-Edmonton could do reasonably well with a service that doesn't involve going to the station at 11pm and eventually boarding at 7am next morning when the dispatcher has run out of places to hide the passenger train and therefore lets it finally get to the station. However, we have very little data for reliable corridor-style passenger rail services in western Canada or the western US to base any decisions on.
If I wanted to fly from Medicine Hat to Calgary and back next week, WestJet would relieve me of $650. I suspect a train service that offered a ~2hr ride at least three times daily at a price most people could realistically afford would sell a reasonable number of seats, and then have a significant impact on Medicine Hat's economic and population growth over the following decade as an alternative to living on the sprawling fringes of Calgary. It would cost a small fortune - $100 million or more - to put in enough extra track capacity to allow CP to dispatch such a service reliably, but the true cost of continually adding to Calgary's urban boundary is similarly high.
roger1818
Senior Member
I’m not sure what the frequencies were before COVID, but today there is only 1 flight a day using a 34 seat,, Saab 340 (less capacity than even a bus). Even if prior to COVID, there were triple that number of flights, that would still only be 102 seats a day. Even then, most taking the flight are likely connecting to/from another flight and not traveling to/from Calgary. They also likely aren’t booking with only 1 weeks notice.
Given that Medicine Hat is about 300 km from Calgary, the train would need to have an average speed of about 150 km/h (which would likely mean a top speed over 200km/h) to achieve that “~2hr ride.” Getting speeds up that high on CP’s main, transcontinental line would be extraordinary expensive, and building a greenfield, dedicated track even more so. More likely it would be the 4+ hours it takes to travel the similarly distanced Sarnia-Toronto route, especially considering Sarnia is larger than Medicine Hat, Toronto is significantly larger than Calgary, and there are significant cities between Sarnia and Toronto (unlike between Medicine Hat and Calgary).
Even if the service you suggested was provided, a round trip commute that is over 4 hours long is hardly desirable for a small city like Calgary.
The thing about GHG reductions in Alberta is there are much lower hanging fruit than passenger trains. Unlike Ontario transportation isn’t their number one emitter. That belongs to the oil and gas industry at 50%). It isn’t even their distant number 2 emitter (which is electricity generation at 16%). Transportation is their number 3 emitter of GHGs at only 11%.
Allandale25
Senior Member
Urban Sky
Senior Member
Before I finally find the time to respond to this and similar posts in more detail, I'm cross-posting from a post I made in February 2020 on Skyscraper Page:
[Start of cross-post]
Approximating the environmental footprint of VIA's services
Roger1818 said:
Well, it's not that difficult to work out VIA's overall fuel consumption and carbon footprint from the passenger-mileage, passenger-km-per-litre-of-fuel and CO2-equivalents-per-passenger-km figures and I believe that 2.9 litres per 100 km travelled and 89 grams of CO2-equivalents per km travelled are pretty decent values once you consider that the 41 grams reported for "domestic rail" in the UK are achieved with multiple units or fixed-length trainsets (locomotive-hauled variable-end passenger trains are virtually non-existant in the UK), which are much more energy-efficient, especially where operations are electric:
Compiled from: VIA Rail Social Mobility Report 2018 (p. 62)
Truenorth00 said:
In order to estimate the environmental footprint on a per-route basis, we will need a metric to allocate the fuel consumption and emissions. The most obvious (and easiest-to-calculate) metric would be train-mileage, which I have calculated in the following table:
Compiled from: VIA Rail Annual Report 2018 (p. 9)
Note: 2016 figures used for Winnipeg-Churchill, as this is the last available year with data unaffected by the closure north of Gillam between May 2017 and December 2018.
Calculating the route-by-route environmental footprint based on train-miles results in 78 g CO2-equivalents per passenger-km and 2.6 liters per 100 passenger-km for Corridor services, only slightly higher values for the transcontinental services and dramatically higher values for the Mandatory services, given their significantly lower passenger load:
Compiled from: VIA Rail Annual Report 2018 and previous table
However, above table assumes that all of VIA's routes have the same footprint per train-km operated, which is quite an over-simplification once you consider that vary considerably between 2 RDCs (Sudbury - White River) and 2 locomotives with more than 20 cars (a typical Ocean or Canadian during peak season). Therefore, a much more appropriate metric to allocate the environmental footprint would be gross-ton miles (GTMs), which is the product of train-mileage and the train's weight. Using average train lengths somewhat arbitrarily set at 1 locomotive, 5 cars for Corridor services and 2 locomotives and 15 cars for transcontinental services and typical train lengths for the various mandatory routes, results in a footprint of 64 grams of CO2-equivalents per passenger-km and 2.1 litres per 100 passenger-km for Corridor services and about 3 times that for transcontinental services and 6 times that for mandatory services, with the latter showing much more uniform values than under the previous metric:
Compiled from: VIA Rail Annual Report 2018 and previous tables
So, to answer your question, I would estimate that the footprint of the Winnipeg-Churchill service is 416 grams per passenger-km or 13.6 litres of fuel per 100 passenger-km. However, I wouldn't be surprised if we would find a comparable range among the UK routes as with VIA Rail (i.e. the worst route producing 7 times as many emissions as the best route and 5 times as many as the national average). A hot contender for being the "worst" route would be the ScotRail service from Inverness to Kyle of Lochalsh or Wick, which is a highly scenic, but gruesomely slow service in the sparsely populated Northern Scottish Highlands. Also, one should keep in mind that mandatory services like the one to Churchill operate precisely because there are no other ground transportation modes available year-round to communities along the way and that there therefore are no less carbon-intensive alternatives available to the service currently offered.
Truenorth00 said:
As I just wrote in my last big post, VIA's non-Corridor routes operate because the government is obliged to running them and expecting them to operate year-round with a load factor of 70% on at least 6 inventory cars is simply unrealistic. That said, Corridor services should of course be less carbon-intensive than all competing modes and I believe that the new fleet and HFR will substantially reduce the carbon-intensity of VIA's Corridor services and that even if it wasn't electrified at all...
[End of cross-post]
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innsertnamehere
Superstar
Alberta's per capita emissions are so crazy inflated from the Oil and Gas industry that it makes it's transport emissions seem tiny. The reality is that transport emissions are likely still higher in Alberta per-capita than basically any other province beyond maybe Saskatchewan or the territories.
Another big reason Alberta is so high in per-capita emissions is that it is younger and wealthier than any other province, and younger, working people and wealthier people produce more emissions than older retirees and poorer people.
Outside of Canada's Oil and Gas industry, per capita emissions are actually relatively low. Ontario (11.2 tonnes per capita) is well below that of Alberta, a whopping 63 tons per capita, and roughly half-way between the US and european emissions averages. Lots of room for improvement all around though, countries like France post emissions averages at roughly half that of Ontario and well below the Canadian average. There are a lot of reasons for this from larger heating needs in Canada to larger transportation emissions and larger dwellings to different economic products like larger resource based industries, etc., that make it unrealistic for Canada to acheive a ~5 ton per capita emissions range like Europe largely has, but there is clearly still a lot that can be done.
Urban Sky
Senior Member
My assumption is predicated on the fact that intercity coach travel struggles on these non-corridor routes (i.e. excluding Calgary-Edmonton) and you seem to concede yourself that a train has no chance under the current operational and legal environment to develop any competitive advantage on anything else than price (which is not commercially viable). As I've shown at the beginning of the "Lack of meaningful Passenger Rail service outside the Quebec-Windsor Corridor" thread, Ontario Northland's direct operating costs were $3 per schedule-km in 2017/18. For VIA Rail, that figure was between $17 (Remote services) and $57 (Canadian), thus between 6 and 19 (!) times as much:
Compiled from: second graph in my previous post and from VIA Rail's Summary of the Corporate Plan 2019-2023
Given how much lower the population numbers and the highway traffic flows are between any population centers outside the Corridor (again: excluding Calgary-Edmonton) than inside it, do you really see any chance that 1 train-km can attract more revenues than 6 or more bus-km?
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The first thing I had to learn when I started working at VIA was that it isn't a "train company". Its industry is mobility (weather for business, leisure or as a means by itself) and it offers train services because it believes in the value they offer to its potential customers in the markets it serves. We won't tackle the climate crisis if we don't start understanding that the goal is to reduce the environmental footprint of all human activities and that increasing rail ridership is merely a strategy, but not a means by itself.
The point I was trying to make is that running a train has massive fixed economic and environmental costs, which are often larger than even that of an airplane. In order to make offering train services worthwhile (both, from an economic and environmental perspective), you need to attract enough riders to exploit its massive economies of scale.
To provide an example, let's take VIA's Winnipeg-Churchill service:
- As per the second table in my previous post, I calculate a scheduled annual train mileage of 449,889 km.
- As per the last table in my previous post, I calculate the annual carbon footprint at 5824 tons CO2 emissions.
- Therefore, every time a VIA train travels the 1499 km from Winnipeg to Churchill, it emits approximately 19.4 tons of CO2 emissions (5824t CO2 / 449,889 km * 1499 km)
- According to the ICAO Carbon Emissions Calculator, a flight by the airplane type AT4 or AT7 burns 1609 KG of aviation fuel over the distance (as the crow flies) of 1003 km (see spoiler below).
- According to this report from the International Council on Clean Transportation, 1 kilogram of jet fuel consumed = 3.16 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions.
- Therefore, every time Calm Air flies one of their ATR 42 ["AT4"] or ATR 72 ["AT7"] from Winnipeg to Churchill, it emits approximately 5.1 tons of CO2 emissions (1.609t CO2 * 3.16)
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Damn, I should have known that before...!
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To compare: HFR seems to aim for a travel time of 3:15 between Toronto and Ottawa over a travelled distance of almost exactly 400 km, which would translate to an average speed of 123 km/h...
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