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Chris Selley: More alarming numbers for Canada's high-speed rail fantasy

Toronto recently opened a light-rail line that cost $684 million per kilometre. At that rate, Toronto-to-Quebec City HSR would cost roughly $600 billion

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An interesting nugget of public-opinion research arrives from McGill’s public-transit lab, with respect to the federal government’s high-speed rail (HSR) plan — perhaps the flashiest project so far announced under the umbrella of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “Major Projects Office.”

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Having interviewed nearly 7,000 people in Toronto, Peterborough, Ont., Ottawa, Montreal, Trois-Rivières, Que., and Quebec City — that’s the very roughed-out plan for the HSR route, as it stands, pending many years to come of political meddling and its eventual, inevitable abandonment — the authors of the report conclude the majority of those residents are, in theory, highly enthusiastic about it.

Chris Selley: More alarming numbers for Canada's high-speed rail fantasy Back to video

Practicalities aside, they should be enthusiastic about it. Peterborough and Trois-Rivières haven’t had passenger-rail service for 35 years. No one likes airports very much. I seem to be the only person I know who would rather take the bus between Toronto and Ottawa, on account of it’s cheaper, more reliable and just as fast, plus the wi-fi works. You can’t work when you’re driving.

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So you would be mad not to want to take a high-speed train along that corridor. No Canadian tourist rides high-speed rail in France, Japan or Spain and disembarks thinking “yuck, I wish we had flown.”

Alas, the biggest practicality you can’t “leave aside” is cost relative to benefits. And the numbers in this McGill survey are truly alarming, with gusts to catastrophic.

The researchers concluded 4,600 people might board a train every day in Toronto, 3,700 in Montreal, 2,000 in Ottawa, 778 in Quebec City, 226 in Peterborough and 224 in Trois-Rivières.

That Quebec City number is especially alarming, it seems to me. You can fit 778 people on two average French TGV trains. France would not build high-speed rail to a city that only needed two trains per day.

It gets worse. The McGill researchers asked their interviewees how much extra they might be willing to pay to ride such a train, compared to what VIA Rail currently charges. The average figure respondents gave was $20 more.

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That is not in any respect a realistic scenario. VIA Rail is by no means cheap as it stands, despite its truly heroic consumption of government subsidy, but high-speed rail is a premium product for premium passengers — and you don’t have to look all the way to Europe or Japan to see that. You can just look at the nearest and most analogous rail corridor to Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City. That would be the high-speed rail that runs Boston-New York-Washington.

I’m writing this early on Wednesday afternoon, pretending I have to get from New York to Washington for a 10:30 a.m. meeting on Monday. I could leave Penn Station at 6:02 a.m. and arrive in D.C. at 9:36 a.m., for a minimum fare of US$112 ($153 CDN); or I could leave at 6:50 a.m. and arrive at 9:55 a.m. on the Acela, the only high-speed train on the North American continent, for a minimum of US$210 ($288 CDN).

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That’s a US$98 ($134 CDN) premium to save 29 minutes. (The Acela is only barely, technically high-speed rail — think 240 kilometres per hour rather than 320 — and only then for about 60 kilometres.) But it works because people who live in New York and Washington, and their employers, value their time in a way that I don’t think Canadians around these parts do, at all.

I can’t back that up empirically, but I live around here and I know these people. I know how they think. We’re cheap. We’re lousy tippers. When we hear someone say “you have to spend money to make money,” we think, “eh, do we though?” It’s part of why we’re famously less productive than the Americans, I think. Torontonians lost their minds when the province tried to charge over $20 for the then new train between downtown and Pearson airport; the province backed down.

Meanwhile, the Heathrow Express charges 26 pounds ($48 CDN) for a one-way ticket to Paddington Station. People use it, because it only takes 15 minutes.

Money’s no object for government employees, of course. It’s no mystery why the Major Projects Office picked the segment of the line between Ottawa and Montreal as the first to be built, despite it being the least in need of high-speed rail: It only takes two hours on the train nowadays, and it’s the most reliable existing segment of the corridor, because VIA owns the lion’s share of the tracks, so it doesn’t have to play second fiddle to CN’s freight.

But the exorbitant price — up front for the infrastructure, and then the fares — is going to kill this thing if nothing else gets to it first. Toronto recently opened a light-rail line that cost $684 million per kilometre. At that rate, Toronto to Quebec City would cost roughly $600 billion — an obvious, unequivocal non-starter. And HSR is wildly more expensive to build than light rail.

You’ll often hear HSR fanatics tell you that European countries are eliminating domestic flights in hopes of shifting intercity transit onto carbon-friendly energy sources like rail. The briefest glance at Google Flights will tell you that’s not true. And there’s a robust intercity bus industry in Europe precisely because trains — even slower ones — are relatively expensive to travel on. Central Canadians simply won’t put up with that. And as cheaper fares become a political imperative — again assuming this thing actually gets built, which it won’t — the financials of the project would become even more disastrous.

Interviewed by La Presse, the McGill study’s authors were at pains to stress they absolutely were not against high-speed rail. Again, I don’t know anyone who is, in theory. In practice, we simply aren’t up to it. Abort mission.

National Post cselley@postmedia.com

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