It's time for a lot of things, infrastructure-wise.
Here's an idea: let's bring back 1960s-level marginal tax rate. That'd fund a bus service, a lot of affordable housing and quite a lot of healthcare. Add in much higher capital gains and estate taxes and we'd be there.
It would be a good start towards having rails service in the big urban corridors. Especially Toronto-Montreal and even Calgary-Edmonton. The latter not being as densely populated, but super easy to build.
Hell, I wish we had a nice train service along the Windsor-Québec corridor.
The Windsor-Québec corridor, aka where almost half of all Canadians live, should become Germany levels of train infrastructure.
Travelling long distance by bus is akin to torture so ideally in the medium term I think we should be building a network that combines both. A bus network that could bring us into rail hubs where we could hop on a train for longer trips. Longer term we should be transferring over to high speed rail generally.
We could learn a lot from the coach busses of South America. The full sleeper booths are so luxurious. Even the semi sleepers are great.
The greyhound was complete and utter trash.
Yeah, part of the problem here is how things are setup to be as profitable as possible so cram as many people as possible into the space.
There's no financial benefit to having such a network in Canada given airplanes exist for quick travel. There simply isn't a need to move a large number of Canadians across the country on a regular basis, and the country is HUGE. Building that much high speed rail would be a waste of resources.
We'd be far better off investing in a connection for Vancouver down the west coast of the US, and Toronto/Montreal down the east coast of the US.
Infrastructure is an investment. When the original rail across Canada was built it created it's own value by allowing the land around it to be developed into towns, cities, and other productive uses. The same would be true here.
As for your second paragraph I couldn't disagree more. We should be investing in developing and connecting our own country, not subsuming ourselves into the USA.
We already have a rail line across the country that works just fine for freight which doesn't care as much about travel time. The only added benefit to a high speed rail line across the country would be faster travel of humans which is currently handled by road based vehicles or airplanes, there's no significant value addition in a high speed rail line that would make up for the astronomical cost over such a distance.
Unless you plan on turning Canada into a 300 million person country, the size to population ratio simply doesn't provide for a use case for "connecting our own country". We barely use any of our land for people right now, even along the US border where we are mostly tightly grouped. Half our population is in Southern Ontario/Southern Quebec, with only a half dozen other major cities worth mentioning across the entire country.
Economies of scale matter, and Canada simply doesn't have enough people to reach those for transportation networks across the country.
Busiest highway: Highway 401 in Ontario, Canada, has volumes surpassing an average of 500,000 vehicles per day.
That paragraph is straight out of google. Saying that we don't need high speed rail because we do not have the volume is blatantly untrue.
Highway 401 doesn't even go "across Canada" its literally a small section of the most populated area of southern Ontario.
We could certainly use high speed rail for specific links in Canada, just not a cross country link.
You mentioned further down the thread that Canada doesn't have the population for significant passenger rail development, which gets brought up a lot in this discussion. I can't directly dispute that point, but doesn't around 90% of the population live within 100km of the US border? We don't need a network across the entire land mass, just hit at least one major city in each mainland province (sorry territories & maritimes) to start. One line for 90% seems like it would be a good deal unless I am missing something.
One line from Vancouver to Halifax is 5800km
It's currently estimated to be between $20-40m dollars per kilometer. That puts it at at least $120 billion at the low end to build but probably closer to $200 billion in reality. Then there are costs to actually run it.
That's about 1/6th of the entire national debt just to build a train service that would still take 2 days to get across the country, and there are operating costs on top of that each year.
How would it be a better value that just continuing to use airplanes?
Thanks for your reply. That cost definitely puts it into perspective, especially if it doesn't factor building stations and buying land in or around cities, delays & screwups, etc
The Toronto to Quebec City corridor certainly merits high speed rail. Maybe a line from Whistler down to Chilliwack. There's a few places.
Make Air Canada a crown corporation.
If they're fully electric (and power stations are built for them accordingly), sure, but I'd rather have that be a temporary thing as (and take a back seat after) passenger rail services are expanded.
Let's focus on transit where the people are instead. In the GTA, if you're more than a couple minutes from a GO Station, getting somewhere takes an order of magnitude more time than driving. In Montreal, a 20 minute drive can take more than an hour on bus / metro, and force you to cover 2x-3x the distance.
For smaller communities, focus on carpooling instead... If I had a dollar for every car with one person in it on the highway, I'd have enough money to fund... a... uh... national bus service.
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