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

[ijmorlan]

12 minutes is too much? I’m having trouble imagining a scenario in which that can be a reasonable position, given the size of Ottawa.

Absolutely unreasonable.
And yet, you can find people of that very position.

It occurs to me they may be making fundamentally the same mistake as the “mall-to-mall” and “obviously it should just go up King St.” complainers in our town. Proper design isn’t just a matter of picking two endpoints and minimizing the time between them but instead finding a set of locations can be reasonably and usefully served by a line or set of lines. For HSR or LRT that means finding the appropriate intermediate destinations that are worth diverting the line from a shortest path. Diverting to Ottawa is similar to diverting our LRT to the University of Waterloo — both are high-traffic destinations that warrant a significant deviation from a shortest route.