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

[nms]

Aside from the Chinese who are miles ahead of everyone, the next eight countries ranked by operational length are functioning democracies. Number 9, Turkey has a more autocratic government, and number 10, South Korea is debatable given the current political turmoil at the presidential level.

[danbrotherston]

Aside from the Chinese who are miles ahead of everyone, the next eight countries ranked by operational length are functioning democracies. Number 9, Turkey has a more autocratic government, and number 10, South Korea is debatable given the current political turmoil at the presidential level.

I'd look more about the railway built a fixed recent time period (say the last 20 years). Straight length also speaks about the history of the country, and also doesn't speak to the effectiveness of their governments in the more recent era.

[ac3r]

Design and development for a Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec line will proceed under a $3.9-billion budget on a 5-year timeframe. Construction could begin soon after (pending whatever government is in charge at that point, I would presume).

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau...-1.7462538

Lmfao, I can tell it's election time again!

4 billion dollars just for "planning and bureaucracy" is hilarious. Good god this country is pathetic hahah.

[KevinL]

Design and development for a Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec line will proceed under a $3.9-billion budget on a 5-year timeframe. Construction could begin soon after (pending whatever government is in charge at that point, I would presume).

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau...-1.7462538

Lmfao, I can tell it's election time again!

4 billion dollars just for "planning and bureaucracy" is hilarious. Good god this country is pathetic hahah.

Those with experience with this sort of thing will tell you that's a reasonable budget for detailed design - over 1000 km of corridor, which must be aligned very accurately to permit the speeds they wish to reach. Every hill that must be leveled or embankment installed needs to not only be designed out, but have its environmental impact confirmed. Then there's all the support infrastructure, such as motive power substations and the like. A big project has big budgets for all of its stages.

[SammyOES]

I can accept that the design costs are reasonable. But isn’t it weird to do this expensive and detailed design all up front?

It just seems that if we want to build this, there has to be a way to get it built in 5-10 years. Rather than 10-never years which the current approach results in.

How do places around the world build so much so fast? I know there are legal/individual rights issues that we shouldn’t copy, but that can’t be the only difference. They’re not spending 5 years doing studies and their trains still seem pretty safe.

[ijmorlan]

Lmfao, I can tell it's election time again!

4 billion dollars just for "planning and bureaucracy" is hilarious. Good god this country is pathetic hahah.

Those with experience with this sort of thing will tell you that's a reasonable budget for detailed design - over 1000 km of corridor, which must be aligned very accurately to permit the speeds they wish to reach. Every hill that must be leveled or embankment installed needs to not only be designed out, but have its environmental impact confirmed. Then there's all the support infrastructure, such as motive power substations and the like. A big project has big budgets for all of its stages.

$4M/km?

That is approximately 10 times a number I found for building (not designing) a 2-lane road in a rural area:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-qu...0a-eng.htm

Now, I know there is a difference between a 2-lane road and a high speed railway line, but I think there is still something wrong here. Essentially, if you design a 2-lane road subject to an extreme constraint on curves, grades, and ground conditions, you have really designed a high-speed railway line, except for the detailed part where things like signal locations and power substations are figured out. How much does it cost Sweden or France to design a railway line?

[danbrotherston]

Those with experience with this sort of thing will tell you that's a reasonable budget for detailed design - over 1000 km of corridor, which must be aligned very accurately to permit the speeds they wish to reach. Every hill that must be leveled or embankment installed needs to not only be designed out, but have its environmental impact confirmed. Then there's all the support infrastructure, such as motive power substations and the like. A big project has big budgets for all of its stages.

$4M/km?

That is approximately 10 times a number I found for building (not designing) a 2-lane road in a rural area:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-qu...0a-eng.htm

Now, I know there is a difference between a 2-lane road and a high speed railway line, but I think there is still something wrong here. Essentially, if you design a 2-lane road subject to an extreme constraint on curves, grades, and ground conditions, you have really designed a high-speed railway line, except for the detailed part where things like signal locations and power substations are figured out. How much does it cost Sweden or France to design a railway line?

That’s a replacement value, not a construction value. The cost of asphalt + a grinding machine isn’t relevant to building a new alignment. 

Also, the cost of a two lane road is also not that relevant to HSR. It is exactly the restrictions on turns and grade that make the project expensive.

But either way HSR is still cheaper in France or Germany I think.

[nms]

For those countries that previously did not have operating high speed rail, the concept to first service varies. For example, in the case of France, TGV was first proposed in 1966, approved in 1974, and the first train rolled in 1981. Japan first proposed high speed rail in the 1930s, approved Shinkansen in 1958 and the first train rolled in 1964.

[KevinL]

It is very important to have the design work complete up front to avoid costly corrections.

We can learn from California here, whose federal funding for one stage required a portion of work be done by a particular date. They started construction when only preliminary design had been done, only to realize the alignment would not precisely work out once they had detailed specs; it was very costly to adjust the work already built to fit.

[SammyOES]

It is very important to have the design work complete up front to avoid costly corrections.

We can learn from California here, whose federal funding for one stage required a portion of work be done by a particular date. They started construction when only preliminary design had been done, only to realize the alignment would not precisely work out once they had detailed specs; it was very costly to adjust the work already built to fit.

Except, we can also learn from all the projects we've spent time doing designs and studies on only to abandon any follow up. And when the projects gets revived we end up with needing a whole of new design and studies.

I'm not saying we don't need to have a good idea of where everything goes, but I'm very skeptical we can't come up with a good enough idea for large chunks of the route and figure out the details later. We certainly don't need to know *how* each hill is going to be levelled or embankment installed. There have to be a large number of cases where we can say "Yup, we've seen this before and know that we're able to make this work" and then figure out the details exactly as we build. I'm sure this is our approach for a lot of highways. We've built enough overpasses that we can figure out a route for a highway without knowing exactly what each overpass looks like.

[bravado]

Part of our costs for everything is that none of our governments do this stuff 24/7 anymore. The skills to manage projects are just gone, outsourced to the private sector. Now we build everything as singular mega-projects when we could just be slowly building 24/7, learning skills and keeping costs down.

[ijmorlan]

$4M/km?

That is approximately 10 times a number I found for building (not designing) a 2-lane road in a rural area:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-qu...0a-eng.htm

Now, I know there is a difference between a 2-lane road and a high speed railway line, but I think there is still something wrong here. Essentially, if you design a 2-lane road subject to an extreme constraint on curves, grades, and ground conditions, you have really designed a high-speed railway line, except for the detailed part where things like signal locations and power substations are figured out. How much does it cost Sweden or France to design a railway line?

That’s a replacement value, not a construction value. The cost of asphalt + a grinding machine isn’t relevant to building a new alignment. 

Also, the cost of a two lane road is also not that relevant to HSR. It is exactly the restrictions on turns and grade that make the project expensive.

But either way HSR is still cheaper in France or Germany I think.

Thanks, that is an important distinction I had missed. There is definitely a huge difference between building something entirely new through a wilderness area and just replacing all the road materials (or rail structure for a railway).

At the design stage I’m a bit unclear on why the restrictions would cause such an insane escalation of cost. Obviously, at construction time HSR requires way more fill and digging, in general, not to mention bridges or tunnels to keep the track straight and level regardless of topography. And I can see how this increases design somewhat: you need to map in more detail a noticeable fraction of all the land between the terminal points. But at some point one has enough detail and I’m really having trouble understanding how we get to multiple millions per kilometre. What does it cost the French to design a kilometre of HSR?

Maybe they need to take a crazy number of core samples to evaluate ground conditions? That could add up. Actually, maybe that is a big portion of it. In the old days they would just start dumping fill in a marsh, and if an engine left on the new track sank overnight they would just dump more fill until it stopped showing signs of instability. That construction procedure obviously wouldn’t be used now.