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Originally Posted by you&me
If the basic goal of increased immigration is so the government can have a larger tax base just to keep the lights on, I'm not sure if spending 100s of billions on nationwide high speed rail connectivity is in the cards.
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I don't know if it would cost hundreds of billions. I think you'd incentivize CN and CP rail outside of the inner city and use those lines (likely raised) to build the high speed rail. But what you're saying is fair too. I was just saying what about ideas with less density added to our major cities.
Another idea that I've seen often, is that malls and apartments are often stacked on top of train lines in Asia. Many people transit only for work and everything else they need is self sustained in a small area. Chinook mall isn't even a passable concept of it. Here, we typically drive 2-3 minutes across loosely stacked retail segments of the city. There's gotta be a better way to do things.
I get that many Canadians will be pissed about less houses and more condos, but I honestly do think that mini retirement/care home cities and telework cities (sometimes corporation subsidized) would be a future that would make sense from an economy of scale situation. As much as I love the way we can do everything in our city, there are certain things that probably need to be spun out in an economies of scale situation to address issues and scalability issues for the major urban centres of Canada.
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Originally Posted by Fuzz
OK, then those small communities burst at the seams. Okotoks is out of water already. Resources are scarce, and that's what gets ignored so often.
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Sure, but that's why it needs to get figured out. Canada can't say no to growing populations going forward. We can't rely solely on maxing out education and have a ton of white collar population making $100K+ per year in Canada WFH remotely. That just incentivizes a large population to emigrate from Canada putting us back to step 1.
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Originally Posted by you&me
Well duh.
If anything, high speed rail to Okotoks would cause the population to explode, which it simply can't... So between that, and the ridiculousness of spending billions to connect a community of 30k, it's simply not feasible. (The example of "some places in Asia" conveniently ignores the fact that those cities connected by high speed rail are all larger than Calgary)
The far more likely scenario is for the government(s) to pull the zoning lever and let private developers build build build...
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Obviously the long term goal is to set it up so that 30K population is more like 80-130K population. Not something grander like connecting Medicine Hat and Lethbridge to Calgary via bullet train.
Private developers will build anyways. I'm saying, maybe incentivize ways of creating Calgary bigger and wider like how Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby etc. are cluster cities. I've always assumed that Calgary CMA in 30-50+ years will be "Calgary" but have a 100-300K regions for Airdrie, Chestermere, Cochrane and 30-60K regions for Okotoks, Bragg Creek, Langdon etc.