Posted: Feb 03, 2019 11:02 pm
felltoearth wrote:There are a number of issues that challenge high speed rail in Canada.
I’m not sure about Australia but one of the challenges of high speed rail in Canada are temperature extremes. We can go from -20/25 in the winter to 30/35 in the summer. A two week to one month heat wave in the summer would adversely effect rail speed and travel time. Also temperature stress effects maintenance cycles which is more frequent.
Yeah, that's a consideration, but Japan's shinkansen operate brilliantly in the same temperature range, so it's clearly doable. Air travel is also subject to weather-related delays or cancellations.
felltoearth wrote:Cost. This cost of high speed rail due to the fact that we would be starting from scratch is enormous. All infrastructure would have to be renewed. Hundreds of thousands of square miles of land would need to be expropriated which would be difficult for about 100 km on either side of most city centres the rails would pass through (most of Southern Ontario is low density development planned around the automobile.) New stations would have to be built to accommodate the increased load. Toronto’s Union Station and Montréal’s central station could not handle the increased passenger load. As a result cost per trip would go way up which leads to the final point...
Yeah, same in Australia. We'd need to tunnel under suburbia to clear the cities, and acquire new alignments as the old early 20th century rail alignments are far too curvy for high speed rail. So, it would be expensive, and so it doesn't get done. But once built, it would be very effective at reducing air miles. The party likely to win the upcoming federal election here has yet again promised to fund feasibility studies. Nobody expects things to go further though.
felltoearth wrote:Attitude of the average voting Canadian. As cost goes so too would the required subsidy to keep the seats full and system running. There is the attitude that travel between cities by air and rail is an elite luxury of city dwellers and shouldn’t be subsidized. Ironically, it’s the same attitude on display here from KIR and tuco, about judgement of other people and how they live, that is preventing a lot of needed public transport infrastructure from being built. We currently have about 250 Billion in public infrastructure backlog in the province that is needed to meet current demand and state of good repair. If a subsidized high speed rail line was added to that price tag it would be untenable to most Ontario voters as it would be seen as a benefit for rich city dwellers.
Not such a problem here. Travel between major cities is accepted as pretty normal, and the high-speed rail would be a relatively bigger benefit for the regional centres along the route - giving faster, more frequent links to major cities - than for the major cities themselves, who already have good air links. Western Australia would bitch about all that investment on the East Coast, but they do that all the time anyway.
