Ottawa Dodges A Bullet Train: EVERSON

By Warren Everson

The federal government was supposed to announce the winner of a competition to build a high-speed rail connecting Toronto with Quebec City and including Ottawa.

But given the chaos that has overwhelmed the government, perhaps it won’t get a chance.

Supporters will be disappointed; the train is supposed to reduce our dependence on airlines, slow the need for new highways, and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But the rest of us should breath a sigh of relief. A high speed train is a terrible idea. Here’s why:

First, since this is Ottawa, let’s start with politics. People in Winnipeg, Yellowknife and St. John’s will certainly resent spending a vast amount of public money ($80- to $120-billion according to recent news articles) on a project serving just a few large cities.

Myriad smaller communities in Ontario and Quebec will be doubly angry; they’ll lose their existing train while paying for faster service for the big cities. Mostly Conservative ridings, but still …

Beyond the politics are some serious questions about the utility of a high-speed train.

All transport technologies offer something unique to the market: Formula 1 race cars, dump trucks, helicopters … you name it. They each do something no other device does.

What is the unique contribution of high-speed rail? Read the label; it’s fast. In fact, it’s effectively an airplane that flies on the ground. (Almost. Airplanes go 500 km, the train will go 300 km. That’s why airplanes become more and more competitive as distances increase.)

Speed is great, of course. But it carries a penalty: you can’t stop. A train that stops at Cornwall, Morrisburg, Coburg, Trenton, Coteau, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue etc. is not high-speed. Most of those communities will lose their service. And a high-speed train is again like an airplane insofar as it needs people from a big catchment area to come to it, not the other way around. So, travel times include the time it takes to get to the station, parking, etc.

Who is taking this train? Like airplanes, this train leaves the passenger without a car. Most passengers will depend on the same taxis, buses, limos as they do at the airport.

(Hilariously, supporters always mention the hassles of airport security, which they imagine won’t apply on a train. But following the 2004 bombings in Madrid, which killed 200 people and wounded another 2,000, Spain introduced passenger screening. And in 2020 Japan did the same on the shinkansen.)

The consortia bidding on this project will have extensive passenger models and obviously believe the business model can work.

But it seems likely that a majority of people currently driving into Montreal or Toronto will continue to do so because the train won’t offer enough time-savings to justify the cost and the need for urban transportation once they arrive.

If the traffic isn’t coming from the highway, it must be coming from the sky. The passenger models rely on a lot of people deserting the airlines to take the train. The principal way a high-speed train can contribute to environmental goals is if it significantly reduces air travel.

Of course this raises some ethical questions; the government would compete directly against private industry, funding this huge project with taxpayer’s money.  (This presumably explains Air Canada’s participation in one of the bidding groups.)

Moreover, if you need to entice a major share of airline traffic away to make the rail option work, doesn’t that have some serious consequences for the rest of Canada, as well as the aviation sector? Losses in the corridor would cause a sharp reduction in flight frequency as well as airline profits.

Of course, the public already paid for a huge aviation infrastructure. Duplicating it is bad policy.

We all have some frustrations with air travel, but with more activist policies and for far less money, a government could create a lot of competition in the airline sector.

So, the target audience seems to be point-to-point travelers who don’t need a car at the other end. Lawyers from Etobicoke? Bureaucrats from Ottawa?  All nice people, I am sure, but do we want to spend $80 billion on them?

But the worst thing to say about the “high-speed” rail plan is this: it would kill the rail plan that the government already has underway. Confusingly called “high frequency rail” this clever project was proposed by VIA Rail in 2016 and since has slowly gathered approvals from the governments involved. Until it was suddenly overtaken by the new project, this was a very interesting transportation initiative.

This “high frequency” project is attractive for many reasons:

Like the high-speed model, it’s a separate network. It would get the passenger trains off the freight lines, where congestion adds significant delays because the freight trains have right of way.

The VIA planners brilliantly found un-used corridors which would accommodate an entirely new passenger network, without expropriation, at shockingly low costs even with the inclusion of a long extension to Quebec City.

“High Frequency” is just that; a plan for an expandable, flexible network. It would feature some fast trains – Ottawa/Toronto in 2 hours 50 minutes – but keep the “milk runs” to serve the smaller communities.  Properly designed and managed it could serve as a growing alternative to more highways and ever- increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

To be clear: the alternative to the high-speed train shouldn’t be to do nothing, it should be doing something more pragmatic and useful.

If there’s a government announcement about passenger rail my guess is it will be to recommit to a project which actually does serve the majority of communities.

Warren Everson is President of Saramac Consulting Services. He is a former chief of staff to a federal Transport Minister.  He was Executive Director of the National Transportation Act Review Commission and Commissioner of the Transportation Safety Board Review Commission.

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