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Originally Posted by MattyC
See you're just dismissing these ideas with little information about what the actual impacts would be.
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I am dismissing it because the information I have available tells me it is impractical. It is up to this idea's advocates to convince me I am wrong.
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Cost would huge, no doubt. What about the jobs created by a now nation-wide transportation system that didn't exist before. $100 m to maintain, well there have to be people paid to maintain it. It could be a mix of private and national funding. Maybe the government loans the funds to a private corp so any of the jobs created don't just end up being government jobs. There are a lot of questions surrounding it, absolutely. I'm not saying any of this is necessarily feasible. All I'm looking for is serious consideration for the ideas. This "manifesto" isn't a serious anything.
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You are right that the manifesto is not serious in any way. But to repeat myself on the rest, I would need to see some serious examination of how such an HSR would work in a massive country with a very low population density before I seriously considered it further.
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As for the bold, not everyone can afford that. You can, and good for you. Airplanes will still exist. Just because you can say, "well I'd rather pay $600 to get to Toronto in 5 hours than train for 15 hours, or drive for 30+" doesn't mean the majority can and it's not a sentiment to base these types of projects around.
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Except it is. It is, because air travel is the competition. So the price for HSR needs to be low enough to justify the extra time, otherwise you still lose to other methods. Also... The cheapest flight from Calgary to Toronto next month, according to Google, is $230, one way. So if we're looking at a 1/5 cost on the HSR, that is $46. And that is for a long distance trip. When considering a shorter trip, consider that VIA Rail between Montreal and Ottawa is $33. Edmonton to Toronto is $305. So, despite the massive infrastructure cost to build, you are essentially proposing to sell tickets from the prairies to Toronto for 1/2 the current cost of rail (using your $150 figure) or 1/6th the cost (basing off the idea of rail costing 20% of airfare).
To pay for operations alone, you're looking at requiring 3-5 million people travelling between Calgary and Toronto annually using this route. That's not realistic. Which means you are asking taxpayers to heavily subsidize a transit option that will not be used enough to justify its existence.
And that doesn't even touch the political shenanigans that would impact a project such as this. To wit: When VIA had to axe one of its cross country routes, it chose to eliminate the route that goes through Calgary in favour of the one that goes through Edmonton - despite Calgary's route having much higher ridership and much better revenue per passenger - because the Edmonton route happened to pass through the ridings of three Cabinet ministers.