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by scabbycakes
854 days ago
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Mass transit sounds utopian but is mostly nonsensical to Canadians who live outside of the few big cities and understand how goofy it would be to put thought into it. Toronto and Ottawa and Montreal don't represent the rest of the country, but unfortunately their voices steer policy in ways that don't serve the rest of the country very well. Buses are a thing of the past in Canada, they're far too slow and the countryside is too spread out to make feasible routes. They also used to cost almost as much as a plane ticket and take 10x the time. When intercity lines outside dense population centers DID exist they were pretty much empty all the time, hence their extinction. High speed rail could only serve major centers across the country. Other than the Toronto to Montreal corridor, population centers along the rail lines are too far apart. For example the distance between Toronto Ontario and Kenora Ontario is roughly 1500+km, so a high speed rail trip would still take 6-8 hours between them at best. The train would be mostly empty too because there's just not a lot of people going between non-major cities. It's not like just because a rail line appears between places people are going to start going between those places all that much more. There's just no way the operation costs for high speed rail would be covered by fares from a handful of people. Air transportation is only good for longer trips between two major centers in Canada. If you're going to/from
smaller regional centers for most of Canada the commercial airports don't even exist, and if they do the flights are infrequent and the costs to fly in/out of them are absurd and the flights might even take far longer than just driving. For example to fly between Kelowna BC and Kamloops BC, a 150km drive, costs $300-$500+ for the ticket and takes about 5 hours (not including travel to/from the airport, check-in time + waiting at the gate + waiting for luggage) due to a stop in distant Vancouver. It's just not feasible to airlines to have short direct routes, so they don't. But again you're not going to find airports with commercial flights for about 90% of the towns in the country because the towns are small and don't have airports (except if they don't have roads to connect them like in the north). To summarize, unless you don't go anywhere or you're only going between Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal by train or flying between distant cities or in a remote village, you're likely going to want to use a car otherwise the alternatives can be absurd. |
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Connecting just the majoriest of cities, the Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto/Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, and Halifax metro areas would cover, by some quick math, over half the country's population already. You'd get a good chunk more if you add in the rest of the Golden Horseshoe - Waterloo/Kitchener, London, Windsor, Kingston - and a few other major regional centres (your Sudburys or what have you) to break up the trip.
A hub-and-spoke model - with high-speed rail connecting those major centres, conventional rail connecting those to smaller - but still regionally significant - large cities like Kelowna and Kamloops, and then buses from there to further flung places would easily cover a more-than-sizable majority of the country's travel needs.
On the one hand - part of the reason for poor ridership - and thus poor cost efficiency - of buses and trains is a consequence of a 20th century planning mindset that prioritized car infrastructure. And it was a vicious cycle. Service was infrequent and slow, so people preferred cars; people preferred cars, so more infrastructure was built for cars; fewer people road the trains or buses, so economies of scale got worse, service was made even more infrequent and funded even less...so more people buy cars. More people will ride trains and take buses if they run more frequent and are faster, especially as the cost of operating a personal vehicle has gone up. If you build it they'll come and all.
But on the other hand, to me much of your cost analysis is moot. Trains and buses won't make much money in ticket sales - well, so what? How much do roads for cars make in "ticket sales"? The governments have happily funded car-related infrastructure for decades despite the fact that they don't, directly, get a penny back from it. Why do rail and bus have to play by different rules?