High-Speed Rail (HSR) - Toronto/Pearson/Kitchener/London

[tomh009]

I'd still like to see better figures, but the Via Rail CEO claims that dedicated tracks ($2B) + new trains ($1B) cost $3B in all, plus $1B for electrification, while HSR costs $10B. The passenger estimates are 7M for dedicated tracks and 10M for HSR.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/11/04/...73342.html

I saw passenger numbers out of YYZ somewhere, and it does seem like there really is a lot of air traffic between YYZ and YUL. I think it was 2M/year?

I also noticed that we slowed down to 100km/h around Brockville. Level crossings, of course. Those slowdowns are probably the main reason we don't make 3h30 for Montreal-Toronto.

Thanks for the link.  The difference seems huge (not all the new infrastructure spend can go into this single rail corridor), but those might be apples and oranges as the $10B is an earlier study, and $3/4B is a VIA number.  Not sure whether the latter number includes the elimination of level crossings, either.

One note of caution when looking at YYZ-YUL air traffic numbers: there is a lot of connecting traffic, especially YUL pax connecting to an overseas flight in YYZ.  Most of those people would not switch to rail even if we had HSR, simply because AC can sell them an entire (reasonably convenient) journey on a single ticket.

But more departures requires a dedicated track, and once you build a dedicated track you might as well go HSR. So we are back to square one.

The question is whether sufficient funding is available for HSR.  Even with additional federal infrastructure funding, the purse won't be bottomless.  The point several people have made here is that it's better to have good medium-speed rail service than a beautiful concept of HSR that cannot get funded.  Bird in hand and all that.