Quote:
Originally Posted by frinkprof
-You mentioned High Speed Rail to Banff. Honestly, the only high speed rail corridors that will ever make sense in Canada are Quebec City to Windsor and Calgary to Edmonton. Rail to Banff is a good idea, but it need not be (super) high speed rail for the traffic it will see and the distance it will cover. Rail to Banff, a return of Via rail, and commuter rail to the satellite communities can do with agreements and upgrades to the current surface heavy rail corridors. Land for station locations in Edmonton and Calgary and some right of way has been purchased by the Province of Alberta for a high speed rail line.
|
Between your drawing and looking at the video again, I see now that Red Line is plug and play in the east (I had made a false assumption that the tunnel ran perpendicular to the existing line, when it's clear in the video that they have already smoothed the corner out from 8th ave).
So it sounds like City Hall station is the only one bored out and remotely close to becoming a functional station? That was part of my thought process on the tunnel being a possibility for a long distance 'rail-like' option to escape the densest part of the core...no additional stations would be needed.
I should have been more specific that my mention of HSR was not at all specific to what we know today as HSR. As you've rightly said, the economics of neither HSR nor conventional passenger rail make much sense today or in the near future. What I'm imagining is a future where we determine that autonomous vehicles are safe, effective, and efficient as lower speeds in higher densities, but cannot guarantee the necessary safety at the higher speeds and extremely variable conditions involved in distance travel. Something like a hyperloop will likely have the same huge infrastructure costs that preclude it from being effective anywhere HSR is not already viable...
I'm wondering if there will be a middle ground - where something perhaps as simple as an enclosed 1 lane road (perhaps with a physical connection to vehicles instead of or in addition to tires/asphalt) would permit an autonomous vehicle (whether it could be a personal vehicle, or a conveyance specifically designed for this purpose) to travel at faster speeds because it would have almost no other variables to worry about (very limited opportunities to enter/exit the system). Adding a couple of 3M wide lanes parallel to existing train tracks could probably be achieved in a lot of places without a ton of disruption or expense (proportional to a full blown HSR...it's still going to cost a lot, but it would likely fit into most existing underpasses and need comparatively simple bridges)
Basically I'm talking about building a simple long distance toll highway (or BRT route, if you will). If personal vehicles could use it, then the exact place that it starts and ends isn't terribly important, as you would simply rejoin the regular system at that point.
To go further into this sci-fi land, I could imagine this being a situation where you are forming your own 'train' with other users. Once you enter and 'entrance zone', you are probably sitting for 5-10mins as other vehicles accumulate. The system arranges the vehicles in the most aerodynamic order, and they physically link up. The system finds the appropriate slot for your train to join the 'fast lane' (ie. the only lane for most of it, aside from form up/accelerate entrance points & decelerate/disengage exit points). Within each lane, everything is moving at the exact same speed and direction.
Two big challenges might be: you can't take the next exit to go pee, and you can't turn around to grab the ski boots you managed to forget. The former is solved with a low-tech wide-mouthed nalgene bottle; for the latter, you ask your robot butler to have a drone fly your ski boots to your destination, because it will be the future and that will all be easy.