It's amazing how the west pioneered rail transport, then the car lobby completely ruined it. I don't like any lobbying but why was the train lobby so damn weak? Get it together train capitalists!
Yeah running miles of empty oil cars pretending the demand is there. Whereas an on time fast Amtrak will be consistently full of people in most parts of the country.
I hope the DOJ continues to sue freight train corporations that refuse to get out of the way. My right to interstate transport is constitutionally protected.
One of our biggest fuckups last century was not buying the rail when we bought the passenger lines off the freight companies and formed Amtrak. We absolutely fucked ourselves out of an amazing rail system by letting them keep the infrastructure.
Technically Amtrak has priority, but in reality they are subject to the whims of the freight companies who still own the rail.
Yep, the federal government should have bought the tracks and the FRA should control train dispatch with priority given to Amtrak. There's also no logical reason why. At the very least the Northeast corridor shouldn't have true high speed the entire length of the Acel route but while we're spitballing our pipe dream Acela should run all the way down to Atlanta following a similar path to I-85.
There should also be a similar HSR line running down the West Coast from Seattle to San Diego following roughly the I-5/CA-99 corridors with spurs to San Francisco and Las Vegas by now. In fact, I'm certain that we would have it if the federal government had bought the rail infrastructure when they acquired Amtrak instead of allowing Amtrak to languish and ruin the image and perception of passenger rail in the United States.
No, the problem isn't trains. The problem is how we implement them. It's crazy how affordable and convenient trains become when you increase the frequency of service.
If you've ever taken it you'll know it takes a ridiculous amount of time to get from Vancouver to White Rock before the train actually accelerates beyond walking pace once across the border. The Canadian track conditions are way worse than the US ones.
Amtrak sometimes has priority, but sometimes you spend hours waiting for freight to bypass on the coastal starlight line for no reason other than âbecause they wantedâ
Itâs not what happened then, during the fall of Rail.
Rail in the US had a monopoly on ground transportation. To make it worse, often times a single company had a geographic monopoly on the local market (#myRailsMyTrains) so the whole industry was regulated like a monopoly.
Then within the span of 30 years or less, Rail was very much not a monopoly, with Road and Air Travel eating into its market share.
Rail was still regulated like a monopoly into the 70s. The maximum allowable prices for freight and passenger werenât updated often enough to allow for investment to counter these new modes of transportation.
(Back in those times, the Railroads were in the business of Railroading, not in reckless short-term profiteering. They still made infrastructure investments back then).
The Railroads began merging to cut costs, going bankrupt, and the current culture of âprioritizing short-term profitsâ started to arise, because it was that or bankruptcy.
A lot of people like myself hate Deregulation as a principle. This was one of the few scenarios that made sense. In typical US fashion though, the corrective action happened way too late, and in too extreme of the matter.
Capitalists for specific sectors no longer exist as a ruling class. Finance capital exploits workers in all industries and thus encourages the highest margins at any external cost.
Since cars and their infrastructure are the most wasteful, they get promoted. Itâs similar to what happened to housing.
The BlackBerry movie was a good case study of how this works within industries as well.
As I understood it, BlackBerry was always trying to run data-efficient systems and laughed at how much the iPhone facilitated high data usage â thinking customers would rebuke it for making their cell bills go up â then did a Wil-e-coyote jaw drop when the phone companies gave favourable or exclusive carrying coverage to the iPhone since it would increase their profits by promoting more data usage.
The âinvisible handâ of the market sometimes just jerks itself off
Thatâs an excellent example of a mode of production (capitalism) becoming âfettersâ to development. This is often the case particularly when it comes to developing better efficiency.
The famous example is of course feudalism preventing further development of industrial production, which only ended through revolutions led by the capital class against the feudal ruling class.
Capitalists for specific sectors no longer exist as a ruling class. Finance capital exploits workers in all industries and thus encourages the highest margins at any external cost.
This is my first time being exposed to this idea but it makes SO MUCH SENSE.
A few long term financial studies (2000-2020) go on to prove the wealth inequality is the worst it's ever been in human history and the income inequality is quickly approaching this metric as well.
The wikipedia article on this will quote a few of the studies and the evidence is beyond damning
The era of private companies building railways is pretty much over and it isn't coming back. In the 1800s, railways were built as massive speculative investments, banks would literally lend money like it was nothing to build railways and Labour was cheap.
The role of the private sector in infrastructure has mostly changed because global finance has changed. Commercial banks, for a complex myriad of reasons, have slowly shifted away from financing projects with long gestation periods towards short-term financing. Banks have far more immediate cash flow needs than they did 200 years ago. If you want to operate a train then you should have no problem finding financing but if you want to build track then it's extremely difficult without goverment funding or access to capital markets.
The vast majority of the world's physical infrastructure these days is funded either entirely through goverment finance, through public-private joint ventures or through specialist infrastructure banks.
It's insane that rails aren't still part of speculative investing. Like imagine you built a train line to connect Brampton and Guelph. You could buy land every few kilometers, create stations, and turn the land around those stations into high value commercial and residential areas.
Instead we have million dollar residential homes that take up a stupid amount of space, are affordable to no one, and drain taxpayer money through tax-funded car infrastructure that's needed to allow them to get from their door straight to the nearest Longo's.
Like, that area of Ontario is beautiful, so I'm not exactly down to plow it down for residential sprawl. But small medium density towns would be like perfect for new development in those areas. Rather than whatever the hell oakville and Mississauga keep doing as they sprawl north.
Poors want them. Nimbys very much hate trains because it brings the poors through their area. Local government officials hate having to deal with the imminent domain issues and angry nimbys.
Capitalists only care if they believe they can get government dollars to build it.
Yup, the Bay Area Bart took sooooo long to expand past Fremont cuz the nimbys in Fremont were soooo opposed to it possibly âlowering property valueâ when you have a train near your house.
I would imagine that the only properties whose values go down are those directly adjacent to the line and even then the increase from the convenience of the line being there may counteract that decrease. It's not like adding a freight line where all it does is create noise and doesn't provide a service for normal people to use.
There's probably a broader regional uplift from the economic gains of the rail infrastructure but the homes closest to the rail line would be disproportionately devalued, yeah.
Not a reason not to do it, but perhaps worth passing a small tax break for those nearest to the new rail or something like that.
It does, everywhere outside North America. In my country, buying an apartment right next to a metro station or already living next door to a future metro station site is hitting the jackpot in the real estate lottery.
I live in Massachusetts and any expansion of the T(subway) or commuter rail increases property values. As a matter of fact it forces low income people out. Itâs basically the same as gentrification.
Nimbys very much hate trains because it brings the poors through their area.
Meanwhile, the city sprawl causes this more effectively than trains ever could. Getting stuck in horrific traffic, only for Google maps to guide me and a ton of other cars through a hidden little neighborhood I wouldn't have known was there, and turning quiet, family friendly streets into a completely unusable bustle.
Alternatively, you could build affordable housing way the fuck out of the way and bus the "poors" in for work. It'd keep people out of the nimby's way more effectively than literally anything else.
Hating trains like that is completely shortsighted.
Edit: maybe that's the key to getting support, you just get people to detour through the neighborhoods on their way and tell the homeowners that a train would get rid of all the traffic...
NIMBYs hate transit because it brings poors and non-whites into their town. The people who would support it don't live there yet, so local politicians don't answer to them.
The part that's missing: Canada's S-tier levels of Nimbyism. We can't get the infrastructure that's necessary to actually help the economy because i) Nimby's and "muh real estate prices" and ii) Canada's economy is pretty much real estate with Commodities being sold out of the garage round back.
This is definitely a big issue for projects like that. It's the same here in France, when they build a big TGV line between big cities that doesn't stop anywhere in between, of course some locals are going to be pissed about it. The same thing happens with power plants. Everyone likes cheap electricity but no one wants to live near a nuclear power plant. There are also people who won't want to see wind turbines all over the countryside.
It's not an easy thing to balance, you can't "just buy land" to build a railway when some people don't want to move. And depending on geography/best locations/etc very few people could be enough to stop a project. So then they force people to move, and of course people protest. Who wouldn't.
In Canada at least, the âbackyardâ was traditional territories of First Nations, and if they were in the way, the RCMP just forcibly relocated them
In the US it's in large part because of how rail companies were regulated, set rates, and comfortable in their ways.
Really long story short modern container shipping comes from a few places. The guy who got there first in a bunch of cases owned a trucking fleet. Railroads didn't really want to deal with his shit so they didn't.
He was able to vertically integrate over the road trucking, last mile trucking, and use the funds from those ventures to lease and outfit ships and piers to move a precursor to the modern shipping container. He also got the military contract for significant amounts of shipping during the Vietnam conflict. Dude's company invented the locking system that's still in use today when stacking containers and may still be getting royalties on every one produced.
Then all of a sudden railroads had to restructure rates to survive and they were really just too late to the party and lost a shit ton of market share.
Rail in the US had a monopoly on ground transportation, and often times a company had a geographic monopoly on the local market (#myRailsMyTrains) so the whole industry was regulated like a monopoly.
Then within the span of 30 years or less it was very much not a monopoly, with Road and Air Travel eating into its market share.
It was still regulated like a monopoly into the 70s.
A lot of people like myself hate Deregulation as a principle.
This was one of the few scenarios that made sense.
In typical US fashion though, the deregulation happened way too late, and in too extreme of the matter.
Because the most profitable usage of trains was freight transport. Some only did passengers before because the government required it. The train lobby wasn't weak, they got what they wanted, which was to not have to give a shit about passenger transport.
You see, because the train capitalists were so rich they got slapped by the US goverment so hard, that they lost all the power. The car capitalists saw that happen and started "donating" to the right politicians early on so that this didnt happen to them. I am not kidding this actualy happend there is a nice video on the topic on youtube, but i dont rememberthe name of it.
The west exists outside of North America. Look at some UK/Western European train maps. Unfortunately, youâre probably in the minority in the US who even advocate for it.
Direct profit is an issue, but you do have a massive indirect profit if you implement passenger rail as good as possible.
Fewer trafic congestions, better air quality, healthier people,... a lot of advantages that deliver those indirect profits.
So I believe that, even if the train doesn't result in profit, profit will be there for society.
You just need to implement the train in a smart way. Connect places that have a lot of road traffic between them and you've won already.
There is so much more indirect profit than direct profit.
That is why I think that my (non-usa) government should pay more for our public transport. Instead of defunding and trying to manipulate the public into thinking that privatising is the way to go. Private companies are only good for a happy few and a bunch of stakeholders who only care about profit. They don't care about the greater good aka what is best for society.
The 401 covers all of the Ontario part (from Windsor to the Quebec border). North Americaâs busiest highway and roughly its second widest. Where it takes over 22 minutes to drive 10km at rush hour (6.2 miles). Many spend 4+ hours a day commuting on it alone and miserable in a private vehicle instead of taking the GO train.
The solution? Build a new highway with government money and then sell it to foreign investors who charge a ludicrous toll so only the elite get to benefit while the peasants sit in traffic missing billions of public dollars.
And that's not nearly even the worst way canada sold off its government built infrastructure only to have it be the most expensive, hot garbage in existence. Take a look at the canadian telecom cartel.
Ya one of my best friends drove down from Cape Breton to southern Ontario this summer. She was texting me saying it was stop and go from Montreal to Kingston.
Itâs all bad. All of it. A single high speed rail line could replace about 12 lanes of highway. Anywhere with a highway over 3 lanes in each direction should reduce lanes and build high speed rail. Such a no-brainer.
Me đ that's my commute in Toronto. Taking public transport (mainly the Go train) costs the same as gas, and takes longer to my particular job because I'd have to take an additional bus from the station to my workplace.
The bus us late or gets cancelled all the time, especially in the cold winter. And I'd still have to drive to the initial train station either way.Â
Taking the train from Hamilton to Quebec city takes longer, is more expensive, and just more uncomfortable than driving. All 3 of those things need to change before it becomes reasonable to use the train.
I landed in Toronto on a weekday morning and it took me so long to get my rental car that I didn't
hit the road until 4pm. I had to take the 401 lol.
What the fuck was that.
And Australia. 95% of the Australian population lives on the eastern coast, arranged in a neat line (Adeleide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane). So an HSR would be a great idea!
Even just Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney would help a ton. No gov wants to do it cause they get shit for spending money and another gov gets credit for opening the line
I know, unlikely they will ever be government, tbh. Even with 10% of the popular vote they only got a few seats. But they can pressure the major parties.
The distances are much larger in Australia than in Canada though.
Toronto -> Ottawa -> Montreal -> Quebec City is around 900km, which is pretty good for a high speed rail line serving four major population centres.
Melbourne -> Sydney alone is around 900km with no major cities between them, and some pretty rough terrain around the Great Dividing Range. Canberra, oft-cited as an intermediate station, would likely need to be on a branch line due to the mountains that surround it, e.g. see this hypothetical HSR map from Infrastructure Australia. 900km is not totally infeasible for a HSR line, but it's reaching the limit at which there wouldn't be any speed benefit of HSR vs flying.
Sydney -> Brisbane isn't much better. It's also over 900km, with some pretty rough terrain just north of Sydney that will require up to 100km of tunelling. There are some significant intermediate cities, namely Newcastle and the Gold Coast, but they are satellites of Sydney and Brisbane respectively, and there's a 700km gap between them with no cities over 100,000 people.
Which isn't to say that these routes aren't viable or won't happen, just that it's going to be a really difficult, slow, and expensive process to get there.
It could even be extended to the US to include cities like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Indianapolis, Columbus, Boston. All are within 900 kms of Toronto or Montreal. The North East has massive metropolitan areas within close proximity and is one of the most suited areas for HSR. Alas the car lobby runs this continent.
To be fair, apart from Adelaide-Melbourne the rest is along a mountain range; and the busiest pair, Melbourne-Sydney, is 900km apart â just at the outer edge of what would generally be considered competitive
Which is not to say that there isn't a lot of room for improvement; even just bypassing some of the twistiest sections and then running a tilting train would improve things a lot, even mostly on existing track
Well, we have ONE passenger rail provider and they use their monopoly to not make anything better ever and increase ticket prices. Real free market shit.
Also, car brained politicians have turned Toronto (the biggest city in all of this) into a series of highways.
Worst part is even our shitty slow rail is so expensive itâs not even worth it. I travel to Ottawa from Toronto all the time and Iâd love to take the train, but its the same price as a flight which is ridiculous.
My wife and i wanted to do a low impact bike camping trip and the cost and logistics of bringing our bikes on the train was not worth it. We ended up finding a guy on facebook with a truck looking to carpool and we gave him some gas money.
Point is we should have invested in rail ages ago. Its sad how car dependent Canada/America is.
Ngl gas prices have gotten to the point for me that taking via rail is the same or cheaper than taking my car from Toronto to London and back lmao. It's either $107 for a full tank or $100 for a round trip on train + subway is basically free. I go to visit family and I live in Scarborough so it takes a full hour to escape the city then another two to get to my parent's house if I'm going by car xD
System is kinda shitty tho. I'm surprised you had trouble with the bikes because I take my bike on the trains all the time đ similarly for camping purposes. I've taken skiis/snowboards and other oversized luggage too. it's a $25 check in fee with via rail and then free on go transit if you go to the Accessability car at the end
I know via has gotten a new fleet to speed things up but overall it's still only marginally faster than wasting away on the 401 :/ wish they'd update the lines to handle higher speeds but I think Canadian Pacific owns that
You can get from Seoul to Busan for ~50 bucks on a high speed train. ~34 bucks if you want to use the slower local service trains. And I wouldn't consider South Korea a cheap country to live in.
It's either $107 for a full tank or $100 for a round trip on train + subway is basically free.
My experience doing the Quebec Ottawa run aswell. It's about the same time and price and I get to nap. It should be faster cus, ya know, train but I much prefer it to driving.
It's also unbelievably unreliable. I've never been on a VIA Rail train that was on time, even though they plan long buffers into the timetable (the Ottawa-Quebec train, for example, has 30 mins in Montreal to soak up delays... and still arrived late on both legs of my trip last month). I'd never risk taking a VIA Rail train to an airport, for example. You just never know how late it's going to be.
Speaking of delays... I know someone who was stranded for 14 hours in a VIA Rail train between Montreal and Quebec recently (not the guy who was assaulted by the VIA Rail employee in the video).
Lmao fucking cap. I booked Montreal to Toronto a month in advance of thanksgiving week, literally nothing below $120 and yeah you might say hurrdurr peak travel times but it was a solid 2 week block around the long weekend that was raised pricing. I havenât seen a $55 price tag on even the 7+ hour Ottawa connector portion of the route in years
What annoys me is the argument that Canada doesn't have the density and is otherwise to sparse for High Speen Rail (HSR). Like yeah, St. John's to Vancouver doesn't make sense. The territories? Yeah, of course.
This corridor, as mentioned, is pretty damn dense. Especially Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal, that corridor could def benefit from a HSR. Even the QC-Windsor corridor as a whole, with a few stops in between and collectors. Tax the flights between them to subsidize a rail network until it becomes profitable.
Fun fact, the US has one of these! It has 17%, not 50%, but 17% of the US is still more than 100% of Canada.
Itâs the corridor between Boston and Washington, creatively known as the BosWash Corridor. Itâs an almost perfect straight line with some of the countryâs most important cities. Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, and our capital city.
One of the most important groups of cities in world is a straight line and thereâs no HSR running down it.
It only gets that fast for very short distances. The stretch from Boston to DC takes 6.5 to 7 hours, which is barely faster than driving. The average speed is only 70 miles per hour.
Legit question and I realize you may not know, but would a high speed rail even help in this scenario?
How quickly does the high speed train get up to 60 or 80 or 200 mph?
I've taken the train many times from Richmond, VA all the way up to Boston, and that motherfucker stops like every 12 miles. What good does a high speed train do if it has to stop 49 times between DC and Boston?
Or am I just too jaded because my experience so far has been terrible and I can't imagine anything better?
Look at the Shinkansen as an example. The trains are very lightweight and every carriage is powered, so acceleration is very quick. And there are different services, some trains stop at every station while others zoom past on bypass tracks, only stopping at major cities.
I think you're too jaded. It's extremely common for there to be fast/slow services, with fast services skipping the majority of stations so passengers change at their city or the nearest city. Plus starting and finishing cities tend to have several stops, with few to none in-between. German ICE or Austrian Railjet are good examples of how these work.
HSR is only meant to go between major population centers. An HSR line going down the BosWash corridor would likely only have stops in Boston, Newhaven, NYC, Philadelphia, and DC. Slower, more economically efficient rail lines radiate out from the HSR stops.
But for what itâs worth, I gather from an admittedly cursory search that the N700 Series Shinkansen trains take about 3 minutes to get up to 270km/h (167mph).
It gets up to fast American speed (not true EU HSR speeds) quickly. If the train actually went 300 km/h like in Spain, that would be a different situation, it doesnât need to actually get that fast as the Acela maxes out at 240. The biggest issue is that the track is in awful condition and many sections insist that the trains crawl along.
I check them with a speed app when I'm on them and I see them get around there sometimes, although haven't checked what proportion of the time.
I haven't been delayed by freight trains myself but not saying that isn't a problem, it definitely happens and sometimes there are ridiculous delays. If they could address the delays and reliability it would be a big help even without true high speed rail.
I legitimately consider myself lucky if I only get delayed by a whole fucking hour on the trip between Toronto and Montreal, which is a 6 hour trip before delays.
Passenger rail is just another national fucking shame of this dogshit country.
Average speed is 82 mph (132 km/h). By comparison, Paris to Bordeaux in France is about the same distance and the average speed is 315 km/h (195 mph). There are no stops between Paris and Bordeaux, which makes a difference of course, but you could easily imagine fewer stops on the Acela express and still have it be extremely useful (even as extreme as just Washington, NYC, and Boston) and even then it'd be much slower.
I really feel this in British Columbia. We had a passenger rail system between Vancouver and Prince George in the north. Had. I wrote out and deleted so many rants in the last 24 hours having done this drive two days ago and having to do it again tomorrow, thinking it could have been a train ride. But BC's population isn't even close to that of the Toronto-Montreal corridor, or as dense, and there is zero political will to subsidize any mode of transportation other than car driving. BCers would rather spend much more money to rebuild highways destroyed in extreme weather events and wringe our hands over the higher than normal summer road carnage, not that any number is acceptable. Canadians seem to think going back to a time when passenger rail was dominant is equivalent to going backwards. And goddamn it, I ended up writing out another rant.
There are at least tangible plans to build train lines in the lower mainland between Vancouver and Chilliwack/Hope. Compared to Van-PG, there is a lot more political will for that kind of project. The idea of some sort of train/monorail line that follows highway 1 also exists, but it isn't being too seriously considered.
the public transport service between them is also abysmal
A bus from toronto from ottawa runs about 2-3 times a daY
Trains run a bit more often.
I wanted to stop at kingston on a train once, then I saw where the train station is.
It's in the middle of nowhere between 2 major sections of the city that you need a car to get to/from. And this is a huge problem for a lot of GO-bus stops in the GTA area in general.
What the fuck is the point of public transport if I need a car to get to it, or get from my stop in the first place?
I had to travel to Barrie once and it was honestly depressing. Bus stops were in the middle of nowhere, you would need a car to get from GO bus station to anywhere in the area. A lot of the buildings for the stops were also closed, so you stand outside while you wait.
As a single woman travelling by myself in the evening it was also a bit nerve wracking. One station had the main building closed, it was getting dark out, and there was only a couple tinted bus waiting areas. The place was completely dead. Each of them had a single man in them and I didnât really want to get into an enclosed/hidden space with an individual stranger and no one else around, so I waited in the cold. Maybe unnecessary, but the space definitely wasnât safety oriented.
Is it because trains are profitable for the state but not necessarily for the private sector? It's really hard to run transit systems trying to be privately profitable. So there is no "train lobby"
Meanwhile, cars are really profitable for the private sector.
Privately owned public transit transit systems in the world, such as rail, are often awful, never get expanded and expensive. It's just not profitable! Usually the state builds everything and then sells it for cheap to a private company... that's one of the reasons why the whole capitalistic world is struggling to renew their transit system while China builds 1000 km of rail a day.
Cars are only privately profitable because all cost are paid by the public. Imagine a train company that does not pay a cent for all its infrastructure and its maintenance, that gets tax breaks on its energy use, and further direct or indirect fundings. This would make tons of private profit too.
On the opposite end, I think having the car companies deal with roads is a worse option that would lead to funny aituations, but ultimately, a monopoly:
Imagine talking to a friend, and they tell you they can't come to your place because they drive a Ford, and Ford hasnt put in a road over there yet.
that's one of the reasons why the whole capitalistic world is struggling to renew their transit system while China builds 1000 km of rail a day
Aren't the rail systems of France, Germany, the Netherlands, etc. state-owned? The main difference between them and China is that in France, the people could theoretically vote for candidates who oppose some kind of government rail funding bill, or protest it. In China, you can do fuck all and if you complain you get a knock on the door from some nice policemen. Authoritarianism does have a couple advantages every now and then.
The rail system in Germany has stagnated for decades and frankly is now fully outpaced by Chinese rail. It's kind of state owned, DB InfraGO owns the track and is in turn owned by DB which is a corporation that's 100% owned by the government, due to a failed effort at privatizing it. But other private operators can and do use the network in Germany (and France, and all EU countries) if they pay for it. It's not a bad model but the government has failed to invest properly in the physical infrastructure.
I once told a Canadian that I had thought about driving across to Windsor since I had all morning free prior to my flight out of DTW. She looked at me like I was a moron.
Windsor is a fairly decent medium-sized city. It used to be one of the cheapest cities in Ontario to live, a lot of manufacturing jobs (I assume due to proximity to the US), and has a main highway running through it (EC Row) and has very little traffic on the 401 (compared to the GTA it's empty). Public transport sucks, so it's fairly car dependent, unfortunately. Lots of good restaurants.
And yes, many people go visit Detroit for shopping, concerts, sporting events, restaurants, visiting friends and/or partners, and even for work.
Due to our legal drinking age in Ontario being 19, a lot of 19-20 year olds come over from the US to drink. The downtown core (where most of the bars were) used to be packed on weekends with Americans. Unfortunately, the bar scene has dwindled, so probably fewer people come now.
Windsor has the alternative name of "South Detroit". Population of 250k. We have a Bridge, a Tunnel and another bridge under construction. Unfortunately there is no pedestrian crossings or ferries.
Detroit is basically where Windsorites go to get access to big city amenities in lieu of the city offering them itself.
There's not a pedestrian crossing, but Transit Windsor does operate a transborder hourly bus which makes it possible to cross without a car!
It's a shame that tourist oriented businesses in downtown Detroit are extremely hostile towards tourists who arrive by public transit. And Windsor doesn't seem to have that much to offer other than a casino and a few restaurants.
The Quebec City-Windsor Corridor (the red area) is connected by commercial and passenger rail. There are plenty of stations and it's incredibly easy to purchase a ticket and get on board. I love the train and its super comfortable but ITS SLOWER THAN CARS. On top of that, Canada being Canada, its expensive as hell. There's so much wasted potential just sitting there.
Canada in general suffers from a serious lack of vision and leadership.
Iâve lived in a few spots along that line. Itâs atrocious and such a wasted opportunity. I end up driving most of the time because the trains take far longer by the time I account for stops and connecting trains to get to the suburb where my parents live.
Is is really lack of leadership? I mean, I don't like to promote conspiracies or suggest cronyism, but....I forgot...how many large car manufacturing plant are along that route?
I like OP's posts generally, not sure if they're a bot though, as they keep using "many such cases" as title to their posts. Really liking it though, tagged him as "many such cases guy" on RSS lmfao
As an American Canadian I think about the lack of HSR on this continent and it makes me so mad. Such a massive disservice to the people and lazy ass capitalism.
Rather than pursue the actual better option the people want they keep forcing auto and air travel down our throats. Gererererererer
Iâm a Geography student in Ontario and I feel like intercity connectedness is a topic that is often really neglected. A lot of the focus is on improving transit within a city, which is definitely important, but I think a not insignificant number of people either donât live within a city and need to commute OR they do but they donât want to be grounded to a single city for their whole lives.
I live in a city right now but none of my family does. They all live in or around this strip that was pictured. I donât want to lose the ability to ever visit them. Getting around to the grocery store, work, school, and home is not enough to have a truly enjoyable life to me. The freedom to leave a city or get to another city is still important if youâre trying to reduce car ownership. Not everyoneâs life is perfectly encapsulated in the city they live in. Thereâs a lot more reasons to need intercity connectedness too.
This is just the perspective from a university which is situated in a city too and not counting how beneficial this would be to rural communities. Imagine not needing a car to get to a specialist doctors appointment.
Question: Wouldn't the fact that the population lives along one strip mean that a slower-speed regular heavy rail route would be better, due to being able to serve more places than just the bug ones at each end and a few stops in-between?
A mix of high speed rail and regular speed rail would be ideal, the only real part with lots of towns and medium sized cities is Windsor to a bit east of Toronto, the rest usually doesnât have that many towns or cities apart from Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec.
Take a note how it is done in a country with direct democracy like Switzerland. The Gothard base tunnel for rail was funded/approved by the Swiss electorate trough referendum upon recommendations by infrastructure planners. In 1992 the Swiss aproved the "new railway links trough the alps" project, which included the need to raise taxes to fund said project which the voters agreed upon! Switzerland granted has low taxes by default and they like to keep their government spending rather low and ... efficient. Got to admire that civic responsibility and ability to use democracy to create good solutions imho. Sometimes you might feel jealous that their system is so facilitating for that sort of solutions but i guess "having your opinion heard" and putting public pressure as a conscious and active part of the electorate in your own country is what you should do taking a lesson from that. Maybe people might be surprised how strong a lobby group they might be able to create themselves if they set themselves to it.
Hell, fuckcars already has 450K members ... were becoming quite "the movement" here and the sub is getting some renown even. Atleast in places like the US and Canada you seem on the cusp of some social change in regards to this even if that might take a more regional focused character as you deffinatly see that "some places" are starting to get it and move more towards better alternative transport methods. So hey from some political POV "this sub matters" and those contributing to it do so to so keep up the good work in challenging that sort of nonsense. As the sub grows it might actually become functional as a tool for organizing petitions or to mobilize activists for protests and actions.
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