Spain has the same population density as the Quebec-City-Windsor corridor and has had 300km/h High Speed Rail for over a decade. France can build surface-LRTs for a tiny fraction of the astronomical costs we see here in Canada – for example, a recent 8km tram line in Paris cost under $60m CAD per KM, while here in Ontario lines like Hamilton and Hurontario are projected to cost around 4 times as much per KM. Are the Spanish harder workers than us? Are the French better engineers? Is Paris an easier city to build in without history and density and infrastructure to get in the way? What gives?
With the degredation of regional rail in Canada. Many people have poor opinions on it as they don’t know that it could be significantly better. It is not uncommon for driving to be faster than the train between urban centers. This has contributed to a NIMBYism approach to a lot of rail projects. Even the REM faced pushback for elevated tracks in some downtown areas and that portion of the plan is still being reworked, with more expensive tunneling being pushed as a better solution. They claimed the elevated rail would be too noisy and ugly (but a 6 lane road packed with traffic is fine).
Theres also the issues that our developers and zoning laws prioritize building car centric suburbs and strip malls, which are nearly impossible to service with local transit and degrades the quality of regional connections to those areas. If we want good rail transit, we’ll have too approach it from a wider perspective than just building the tracks.
Did you read the article? This was a service disruption, which can be expected on the opening day of a new service. What does investments in track km have to do with first day operations?
More a complaint about the generally atrocious track (ha!) record of commuter/urban rail construction in Canada. Even if this particular incident is relatively minor, it’s hard not to notice the pattern.
How are we so bad at this?
Spain has the same population density as the Quebec-City-Windsor corridor and has had 300km/h High Speed Rail for over a decade. France can build surface-LRTs for a tiny fraction of the astronomical costs we see here in Canada – for example, a recent 8km tram line in Paris cost under $60m CAD per KM, while here in Ontario lines like Hamilton and Hurontario are projected to cost around 4 times as much per KM. Are the Spanish harder workers than us? Are the French better engineers? Is Paris an easier city to build in without history and density and infrastructure to get in the way? What gives?
With the degredation of regional rail in Canada. Many people have poor opinions on it as they don’t know that it could be significantly better. It is not uncommon for driving to be faster than the train between urban centers. This has contributed to a NIMBYism approach to a lot of rail projects. Even the REM faced pushback for elevated tracks in some downtown areas and that portion of the plan is still being reworked, with more expensive tunneling being pushed as a better solution. They claimed the elevated rail would be too noisy and ugly (but a 6 lane road packed with traffic is fine).
Theres also the issues that our developers and zoning laws prioritize building car centric suburbs and strip malls, which are nearly impossible to service with local transit and degrades the quality of regional connections to those areas. If we want good rail transit, we’ll have too approach it from a wider perspective than just building the tracks.
Did you read the article? This was a service disruption, which can be expected on the opening day of a new service. What does investments in track km have to do with first day operations?
More a complaint about the generally atrocious track (ha!) record of commuter/urban rail construction in Canada. Even if this particular incident is relatively minor, it’s hard not to notice the pattern.