Quote:
Originally Posted by MattyC
My thought was that the Fed and Prov governments would probably front a decent amount of the cost. And I think its a little off to compare prices to VIA rail. Although the initial cost of the train would obviously be massive, because of its nature the turnoverover of people using the train would far outnumber the people who use VIA rail, and thus the revunues would be higher due to more frequent use. I think this would drive down the cost of the train tickets to something reasonable. At a quick glance it looks like it costs $50-$100 to take the high-speed from London to Paris, and that goes under the freaking ocean. Obviously theres a huge amount of traffic between those two cities, but I would think the high-speed has a lot to do with that. (ie build it and people will use it).
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How much true demand would there be across much of Canada for a transportation system which costs close to or more than flying, takes longer and still doesn't allow you your car in the destination city? People underestimate the size of our country and overestimate the speed of high speed rail. Cities in Europe are relatively close together with large population bases, and have lots of smaller connecting cities between them to add ridership. In a country the size of Canada, no one is going to sit 24 hours on a high speed train to travel from Toronto to Calgary when they can get there relatively affordably for 4 in a plane. On top of that, there is only a couple of cities of significant size to stop at along the way.
High speed rail has potential in small areas of the country. The Toronto-Montreal corridor and area and potentially the Calgary-Edmonton corridor in approx. 50+ years. A national system is a waste of money when we are already covered by an efficient air travel network.
On a side note, the rail networks in Europe are heavily subsidized by the governments. For most of the routes, they can only offer fares as low as they do due to subsidies. So if countries in Europe, with high densities and low travel distances have trouble making profits off of high speed rail, it would be a massive black hole in Canada.