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

[ookpik]

And yet both the Ontario government and the new federal government are very friendly to large-scale transit infrastructure investment.

Hardly applicable to Canada.

I can boil down all your differences to "they have a head start on us". The only way to fix this is to, guess what, get started.

Absolutely! I'm not against HSR as I've said more than once already. I'm very much in favour of rapid deployment of medium to high-speed passenger rail. Where we may differ is over how much longer we're willing to wait and how much more we're willing to pay for true HSR.

Lastly the UK is also a late comer to HSR. They opened their first high speed line only in 2003 when the Dover-London Eurostar line became high speed. Since then they have created plans to expand their network extensively, thus confirming the need for HSR.

That's a crucial difference. The Eurostar has been heavily used for more than a decade by people who do business or vacation all over the continent. They already understand the need to expand HSR within the UK and are prepared to pay for it. If we already had something like a Toronto to Montreal HSR line here then extending it to this region and points west would be a no-brainer. But we don't. It's going to be a hard sell to get HSR here notwithstanding the enthusiasm of all levels of government. I'm willing to compromise if it gets people off the 401 substantially sooner and/or with significantly less hissing.