We would also be further fracturing the passenger experience. (Request stops HERE but not THERE unless THIS. Pay on entry HERE but pay in the station THERE unless boarding above ground...)

I can sympathize with the fact that it does take years to get a project up and running. But let's not forget: the government spent the better part of a decade dicking around with High Frequency Rail before they "committed" to this. If they'd arrived at a definite conclusion a few years earlier...

One big difference here: if you step off the train at Queen, you can potentially be inside the Eaton Centre in about 30 seconds. If you step off the train at Golden Mile, you can walk directly at your shop of choice and, ten minutes later, still find yourself walking across its parking lot...

On the other hand, it is almost certainly cheaper for the agency to have two drivers move two three-car trains than it is for them to have three drivers move three two-car trains. And as seat capacity is the same, you can present this as a neutral change, when it's actually a service cut.

It also demands a fundamentally different kind of engineering. When you're designing high-speed rail, you're trying to triangulate between various requirements (minimizing curves, minimizing changes in elevation, avoiding obstacles, etc.) which tend to steer you away from any population centres...

Commuter services are properly understood as a provincial and municipal responsibility. If the provinces want to come up with their own money, I'm sure ALTO will let them buy into the project.

And thus Hoverlink continues its unbroken streak of being about 18 months away.

The next train estimates are often completely incorrect: plenty of people have reported double-digit estimates seconds before a train pulled into the station. With that being said, during the late evening on weekdays, the service standard is 8-10 minutes, and 9-13 minutes during evenings on...

Yes, there would be much the same pushback. Kingston and Cornwall would still be demanding a station, rural landowners would still be hopping mad about expropriation, and the same political forces would be trying to wield this as an urban-vs-rural wedge issue.

Gotta say, the 1984 Olympics are not the top-of-mind thing for me when I contemplate Sarajevo.

. You know how clever parents will sometimes keep a child out from underfoot by, say, handing them a spoon and asking them to stir a measuring cup of plain milk? Not a million miles removed from Canadian political parties inviting their members to draft policy resolutions. These resolutions are...

If we're being kind, we have to acknowledge that people often experience emotional attachments to land that go way beyond its monetary value. In eastern Ontario, you'll find many cases where a plot of land has been in someone's family for six generations or even longer. But even when they've...

It's the BC ostriches all over again. Gonna have American podcasters flying north to record special episodes live on the scene.

If we're getting serious about the "Union Station West" proposal that had everyone all mildly interested pre-pandemic, perhaps Alto service makes sense. "Bare" Alto, without that kind of integration, I have a hard time believing?

The point is that what we've done in the past did not really amount to treatment: it amounted to expensive warehousing, more concerned with making these people easier to administer than actually improving them or their prospects. The stories out of the Ontario asylum system would make your hair...