It would be a good start towards having rails service in the big urban corridors. Especially Toronto-Montreal and even Calgary-Edmonton. The latter not being as densely populated, but super easy to build.
Travelling long distance by bus is akin to torture so ideally in the medium term I think we should be building a network that combines both. A bus network that could bring us into rail hubs where we could hop on a train for longer trips. Longer term we should be transferring over to high speed rail generally.
There’s no financial benefit to having such a network in Canada given airplanes exist for quick travel. There simply isn’t a need to move a large number of Canadians across the country on a regular basis, and the country is HUGE. Building that much high speed rail would be a waste of resources.
We’d be far better off investing in a connection for Vancouver down the west coast of the US, and Toronto/Montreal down the east coast of the US.
You mentioned further down the thread that Canada doesn’t have the population for significant passenger rail development, which gets brought up a lot in this discussion. I can’t directly dispute that point, but doesn’t around 90% of the population live within 100km of the US border? We don’t need a network across the entire land mass, just hit at least one major city in each mainland province (sorry territories & maritimes) to start. One line for 90% seems like it would be a good deal unless I am missing something.
It would be a good start towards having rails service in the big urban corridors. Especially Toronto-Montreal and even Calgary-Edmonton. The latter not being as densely populated, but super easy to build.
Travelling long distance by bus is akin to torture so ideally in the medium term I think we should be building a network that combines both. A bus network that could bring us into rail hubs where we could hop on a train for longer trips. Longer term we should be transferring over to high speed rail generally.
There’s no financial benefit to having such a network in Canada given airplanes exist for quick travel. There simply isn’t a need to move a large number of Canadians across the country on a regular basis, and the country is HUGE. Building that much high speed rail would be a waste of resources.
We’d be far better off investing in a connection for Vancouver down the west coast of the US, and Toronto/Montreal down the east coast of the US.
You mentioned further down the thread that Canada doesn’t have the population for significant passenger rail development, which gets brought up a lot in this discussion. I can’t directly dispute that point, but doesn’t around 90% of the population live within 100km of the US border? We don’t need a network across the entire land mass, just hit at least one major city in each mainland province (sorry territories & maritimes) to start. One line for 90% seems like it would be a good deal unless I am missing something.
That paragraph is straight out of google. Saying that we don’t need high speed rail because we do not have the volume is blatantly untrue.
Hell, I wish we had a nice train service along the Windsor-Québec corridor.
The Windsor-Québec corridor, aka where almost half of all Canadians live, should become Germany levels of train infrastructure.