[wk_end]

You're kind of handwaving away the fact that most of the country lives in major centres.

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?

[scabbycakes]

I get what you're saying, in effect a chicken and egg paradox with cars vs public transit. I think that's a fair argument when it comes to commuter transit, but ultimately the horses have already left the barn. The vast majority of the country is now set up for car dependency (except in about 4 cities), and considering the climate it's going to be almost impossible to compel our fat aging population to stand in -20 degree weather waiting for a bus or train to get groceries unless you're 25 years old and have an abundance of time and energy.

To your other point, the hub and spoke trigonometry doesn't apply to Canada, the population's not laid out in that way. It's already for the most part a linear layout produced by a set of parallel competing rail lines running a couple hundred km from the US border. The rail was the factor that made the majority of the country's settlements. In America or other countries I think your point is absolutely fair though, because there's actually vertical girth to the nation that makes an actual hub and spoke system feasible.

Ultimately though I just don't believe anyone would use a train to spend 15-20 hours to get from Toronto to Calgary on high speed rail. Or even 4-6 hours to get from Vancouver to Calgary (likely not possible anyway considering the terrain). They're going to fly.

And almost no one is going to take a train from Regina to Winnipeg when they absolutely need a car at their destination to do anything anyway. Even the proposition of connecting Calgary to Edmonton is massively ridiculed because people understand how exceptionally light-weight your trip must be to forgo a vehicle at either end for the sake of saving maybe an hour by taking a train. It just seems silly considering the realities.