Capital costs are easier to run a defict on. As unlike operating costs, you have an asset.
You are right that
once you have an asset, it's use is only dependent on your ability to cover the
operating costs. The tiny problem you are missing is that your ability to build an asset is only dependent on your ability to cover the
capital costs and this is what decides whether HSR gets build in 10 or 100 years...
With the relatively small improvement in travel times with HFR, there wouldn't be much ridership growth, so no additional revenue to cover capital. With a significant increase in ridership with high-speed service, operations could actually run at a profit.
VIA's existing Corridor operations already recover more than their marginal costs (on a per-train-km basis). This is why the operational deficit (i.e., including its fully-allocated overheads) of VIA's overall revenues grew 3 times faster than its costs between 2014 and 2019, when its train-mileage grew by 12.5% (an increase which was driven almost entirely on the Corridor, where train mileage grew by 16.5% in that period):
Had this trend been sustained, VIA's Corridor services would have fully absorbed its fully-allocated costs by 2032:
Compiled and extrapolated from: VIA Rail Annual Reports
2014 and
2019
It is important to note that this growth was mostly driven by an increase in frequency (16.5% in train mileage on the Corridor, as previously mentioned) and not a decrease in travel time (quite on the contrary: the fastest scheduled travel time between Montreal and Toronto increased by 19 minutes (or 7%) from 4:30 in January 2014 to 4:49 in June 2019.
As some people have tried to explain to you, the majority of passenger benefits would come from a decrease in
perceived travel time, not:
actual travel time. I unfortunately can't share the entire
Passenger Demand Forecasting Handbook here, but Table B4.10 of the PDFH6 December 2017 Edition provides the following "Service Interval Penalties" for "Full fare & Season passengers": 15, 26, 39, 51, 63 and 87 for headways of 15, 30, 60, 90, 120 and 180 minutes, respectively. This means that increasing the frequency from currently 6 trains per day (18 operating hours divided by 6 departures equals an average headway of 3 hours) to hourly service would have the same effect on demand as cutting the travel time by 48 minutes (i.e., 87-39) when all things remain equal. Add to that the average delay currently suffered and you have already unlocked the travel time savings of an entire hour without having cut a single minute from the actual travel time.
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Were talking about 2 different things here. Fiscal viability and passenger viability.
Fiscally HSR is expensive, we publicly know its 60-90 billion, but its something we need. and it will get funding.
HFR as noted by VIA themselves and by alto, showed that it wouldnt have enough passengers riding it to create enough modal shift making it fiscally unviable.
Economic viability refers to the capacity and willingness of investors to a) build and b) operate an asset at their own economic risk (i.e., after any government subsidies and guarantees received).
Fiscal viability refers to the capacity and willingness of the government to provide enough subsidies for an investor (public, private or a mix of both) to a) build and b) operate an asset.
Commercial viability refers to the ability of an operator to set fares which generate enough revenues to cover the operating costs he faces (i.e., this excludes any operating subsidies he might receive, but includes any financing costs he has to pay off the construction costs).
Given that we can all agree that the project can't be funded without any form of governmental subsidies or guarantees for its construction, Commercial viability cannot be seen in isolation of fiscal and economic viability...
