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A train an hour seems reasonable to me at this point. I think a train every 20 minutes would result in a lot of empty trains. Good to have extra capacity for the future though.
I really hope they don't wait decades to build the other half the line once Toronto-Quebec City is done. Windsor itself may not be big enough to drive major traffic, but I'd bet that if you put stops in Kitchener and London, those two would be very busy.
If they build it (well), and make it reasonable cost to use, it will get used. People will adapt to the easier and quicker connections of the cities and the demand will rise to the supply. Unfortunately this means it won't reduce traffic anywhere. But it will be good for business.
Well, I don’t know about reasonable cost. In the EU, high speed rail is more expensive than flying. But it’s also significantly better and faster than flying.
Not the prairies though. Last year I took a VIA Rail train 6 hours west of Winnipeg. I had to wait 6 days until an eastbound train could take me back home. They used to run daily.
Unless there was a breakdown that cancelled a train, that seems odd.
Normally there are 3 eastbound and 3 westbound scheduled per week between Vancouver and Toronto.
Still far from ideal, but not 6 days between trains.
It was over the July long weekend and I bought the return ticket at the same time as the destination ticket. I guess it wasn't normal over the long weekend, but still. I couldn't even take a Greyhound bus home, as they no longer exist. The world is winding down.
I like trains.
This is what a serious high speed rail proposal looks like. The number of trains running should dictate the schedule, instead of having the infrastructure be the bottleneck.
If I were PM 10-20 yrs from now, I'd recruit the best performing managers, leaders, engineers, architects and designers from the Cadence consortium into a crown corp to continue high speed rail work, perhaps for Edmonton to Calgary, Toronto to Windsor, Regina to Saskatoon, then just pick a bunch of other 200 to 300km major city pairs to connect in a standard style.
That's sounds like a great idea but it isn't who yours and your MPs' corporate-linked donors would ask you to hire. 🤭
It's nice to dream about investments and trains that don't exist yet but unfortunately nothing is going to get better for actual VIA services.
I live without a car, have to use trains, and current services are either lacking or overpriced. People without cars using trains and coaches are watching all other intercity options slowly whittle down while everyone else is excited by a shiny brand new investment project that won't move people before at the very least half a decade.
It would be an exciting project if there was a greater transit plan coming with it, like the revival or investment in regional lines. But sine it's "just" one line, in PPP, while everything else seems to be ignored, it's difficult to be enthusiastic about this.
Oh fuck off. Not even local GO trains run that frequently and are not reliable. What is the point of these mega projects when there is no decent public transit on either end?
This will piss away tens of millions in feasibility studies, get progressively less affordable and will just have governments kicking the ball down the road. I've been hearing about this in some form or another my entire life and I'm old AF.
Not even local GO trains run that frequently
For whatever reason, GO operators have trouble envisioning a system that is useful for anything besides commuting. This is a entirely separate project.
when there is no decent public transit on either end?
What are you talking about? Ottawa's station is directly adjacent to Tremblay, Montréal's Laval will be Lucien-L'Allier or Gare Centrale and De La Concorde, all right on the Métro, Toronto's goes to Union or a future East Harbour station, Toronto's transit sucks for the city's size but there is genuine ongoing work, projects large and small to improve it.
This will piss away tens of millions in feasibility studies
The feasibility studies are already done, multiple times over, the current step is the Environmental Assessment and design which is a precursor to actually building the thing instead of thinking about it.
get progressively less affordable
That's always the price of waiting/delaying, it's always more expensive than announced, at minimum due to inflation but also loan interest, so suggesting to not even try will make a project more expensive if we start again from the pie in the sky stage (we're currently past that). And I think we need to swallow the pill of the full construction cost early, be it through public bonds or financing. We see from the example of California HSR that flying by the seat of their pants on funding has been a huge source of delay and budget ballooning.
governments kicking the ball down the road
I do worry about 2029 where even if construction does start, the next government underfunds or intentionally slow-walks construction, in order to manufacture justification to cancel the project.