Bullet Trains Are Not the Answer to Canada's Transportation Problems

[... originally posted to Rabble.ca]

In Canada, the idea of introducing sleek bullet trains within the nation's busiest transport corridors is periodically proposed as some sort of magic wand solution to a range of transportation problems.
New futuristic trains, proponents claim, will help tackle climate change, decongest highways and act as a springboard for private investment (for instance, see this appeal by the editor of Cantech Letter from just a few weeks ago).

In reality, while high-speed rail sounds nicer than cramped over-priced airplanes, and while it would offer some improvement in travel times over automobiles, it is an unnecessary and expensive infrastructure that would fail to produce its claimed environmental benefits.

Take the Government of Ontario's current plan to introduce what the former transport minister Glen Murray called "very very very high-speed rail" linking London and Toronto with a stop at Pearson Airport. While it currently takes about 2.5 hours to make that trip by car, the proposed bullet train could feasibly cut the door-to-door travel time in half.

But such a luxury would not come cheap: The government has forecasted that it could cost up to $3 billion. Yet, many of the leading scholars of high-speed rail development, such as John Whitelegg, Daniel Albalate, Germà Bel and Ginés de Rus, note how the tendency is for such infrastructure costs to soar beyond their original cost estimates, leaving investors -- whether public, private, or both -- in the lurch.

It is a commonly asserted myth that bullet trains are an environmentally friendly alternative to cars and airplanes, yet again the academic literature suggests the ecological benefits of high-speed rail are marginal at best -- certainly not anything close to the carbon reductions that could be yielded from spending such large sums on renewable energy production, retrofitting buildings, and improving urban transit systems (John Whitelegg has argued this point very convincingly in regards to the proposed HS2 project in the U.K).

Bullet trains are often proposed as a way to confront growing populations and the higher levels of intercity travel to which they will inevitably contribute. Yet most feasibility studies of high-speed rail projects in Canada suggest that these types of investments would actually generate new additional transport demand -- and that's the crux of the problem of unsustainable transport.
In this light a much better plan would be to focus on improving existing public passenger rail services provided by VIA or other interregional transport services. VIA, for instance, already services the London to Toronto route.

A sustainable future transportation system will come from efforts to reduce overall intercity transport demand, not increase it. Regulatory efforts to divert travellers away from cars and airplanes should make use of existing alternatives. Smaller-scale improvements to rail, such as better signalling, eliminating grade crossings and building new segments of dedicated tracks have already worked to improve VIA's travel times in the busy Québec City-Windsor Corridor without requiring a multi-billion dollar investment in new super fast trains.

When it comes to Canada's intercity transportation woes, the need is to improve the infrastructure already in place and lighten the load upon it, not to reinvent the wheel!