Canada is great at high-speed rail studies — but not at actually building high-speed rail. So why is it the only country in the developed world considering a new conventional-speed passenger network?
Created by Paige Saunders with special guest Reece Martin
I agree when it comes to transporting goods, but low speed rail isn’t good enough to transport people. Remember, isn’t actually that insanely fast. They start at 200km/h, so aren’t anything too amazing at the lower end.
That said, if we can get some more low speed rail for goods installed, the tax revenue from that alone should give the governments more than enough to set up high speed rail lines soon after. Canada has a serious internal trade problem. Every single province trades more with the US than their neighbouring province. More cargo rail would help fix that.
In addition, since cargo and passenger rail is combined right now, passenger trains need to wait hours for cargo trains to pass through sections of it because they have priority. Just building a new cargo line would significantly reduce this one problem even if cargo trains are still allowed to use the old lines.
I agree with you mostly.
But I’ll point out that 200km/h is still ~50% higher than highway speeds, with no traffic, and you can still focus on other things. So even low end rail is still better than driving.
I just don’t feel like 50% faster is enough. People are just so attached to their cars that they’ll just rent one if they can’t afford to own one. People in Canada compare things against planes if they talk about riding, so I think 200km/h is still a bit low unless if it’s a short trip, which I doubt it would be. Most likely it’ll be something like between Toronto and Ottawa, or Ottawa and Montreal.
200km/h isn’t quite enough to make the trip feel short. I think you’d have to be closing in on 300km/h before people take high speed rail seriously, as then you’d be doing less than 2 hours including boarding for a trip like that, where boarding on a plane alone would take much of those 2 hours, though the flight itself would be quite a bit faster.
100% increase, if you’re talking about 100kmh roads. You’d need to be doing 130 for it to be a 50% increase.
For a fair comparison I’m assuming that most people will speed on the highway
I assume you mean 150 unless I’m misunderstanding something.
130 to 200 would be an increase of 50%, ish, 65 being 50% of 130.
I thought you meant 100 to 150. My bad.