A Via Rail train passes over the Lachine Canal in Montreal.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
John Rapley is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. He is an author and academic whose books include Why Empires Fall and Twilight of the Money Gods.
Criticism of Canada’s ambitious high-speed rail project is piling up, with many now joining the call from the Leader of the Opposition to scrap the project.
Shelving a project to modernize Canada’s antiquated transportation infrastructure would be a mistake. Nevertheless, the critics are onto something: As currently conceived, the existing Alto plan doesn’t look like it will deliver the returns a good HSR project would do. It appears to be the right idea, done the wrong way.
Opinion: On Canada’s high-speed rail plan, the numbers just don’t add up
In the 21st century, economies of agglomeration are ever more vital to a nation’s economic success. Cities are not only factories of ideas, but they produce most of the growth in labour productivity, with some research finding an increase of 2 per cent to 5 per cent for each doubling of a city’s population.
Nearly half of Canada lives in the corridor between Quebec City and Windsor. However, as things stand, the population is spread out among different nodes between which movement is time-consuming and costly. An ideal HSR project would join not only the major cities in the corridor together but integrate the population centres along the axis in such a way as to create an agglomeration of nearly 20 million people, putting it on a par with the major megacities of the world economy.
You can see the economic impact such a project could have in a recent addition to London’s public transit system. Whenever I return to the city and land at Heathrow Airport, I pop downstairs and hop on the city’s new underground train, the Elizabeth Line. After a few minutes wait, I board a train that whisks me from one end of the city to the other in 45 minutes, a distance similar to that between Mississauga and Pickering. If I happen to catch it at rush hour, there’s no waiting in traffic, the carriages just get a bit more crowded.
By reducing travel times across London, the Elizabeth Line has allowed people in one end of London to look for jobs in the other. For workers, this translates into better job offers; for employers, the best available workers are found. The effect translates into an increase in the city’s labour productivity that has added an estimated $3-billion to the city’s output, an increase of roughly 0.5 per cent in the city’s economy.
Similar boosts in labour productivity have been observed in other cities to have been connected to HSR systems, and one study has found that an HSR system along the Montreal-Toronto corridor could add as much as $60-billion to annual output, or 2.5 per cent of GDP. This added output could then be taxed and redistributed to help develop other parts of the country outside the network.
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But there’s a catch. Where high-speed rail projects have delivered the greatest returns, like in France and China, they have not simply reduced travel times between cities, but made movement among them so easy and seamless that, in effect, a new megacity emerges. Prof. Eric Miller, an expert in transportation demand-modelling at the University of Toronto, points out that to be effective, any HSR system thus requires integration with high quality urban transit networks.
It’s not clear that the Alto project will do this. It is being set up separate from Via Rail, not as a complement to it, and may even have separate stations. Nor is it certain that the new network will connect into existing urban transit systems.
A better solution would certainly involve high-speed rail, but it might not be the fastest option on offer. Upgrades to existing infrastructure, as explored recently in this paper, could enable existing train to operate at much higher speeds than they do now. At their destinations, these trains would then connect into urban networks so that it is not only easy and fast for people to get between cities, but to also move within them.
Such a system would make it possible for someone from Ottawa to apply for a job in Toronto without necessarily expecting to have to relocate (while going to the interview and back could be done in a day). Academics could go back and forth to seminars and conferences, also within a day, greatly encouraging knowledge transfer. Businesses spun out of universities would have access to other similar businesses on the network, and so forth.
No ambitious transportation project is going to please everyone, and everywhere HSR has been built, a few eggs have had to be broken – particularly when it comes to route mapping. The problem with the Alto project in its current conception, though, is that it may not succeed in boosting Canada’s output much at all. It looks like an engineer’s dream, its vision animated by what the technology makes possible. But urban planners and economists, concerned instead with what the economy requires, might like a word.