There were too many points made here in the last 12 hours which deserve a counterpoint that I could possibly respond to all of them, but I'll start with this one:
The scandal here, is that this project was announced in ~2015. Ten years on.........there isn't one corridor delivering its promised potential or even a material fraction thereof.
There is a tale of two cities:
- There is one metropolitan area which has seemingly pulled a "novel" transit project out of a magician's hat in April 2016 and rushed it through so fast that even before a single train has travelled over the majority of the network, it becomes clear that it will escalate the cost and delay the timeframe of essential transportation priorities for no less than two passenger rail networks (commuter and intercity rail) by at least $10 billion and 10 years.
- And there is another metropolitan area which has spent the last 10 years translating ambition into something like a long-term strategy and adjusted it to match the appetite of its own decision makers.
I can't tell you enough how much I would wish that long-term planning decisions here [i.e., in Montreal] were made by a slow and very flawed public transit agency than by an unaccountable and utterly unqualified pseudo-public-but-de-facto private pension funds.
One of the people quoted in that newspaper article is a former colleague and good friend of mine and I've therefore witnessed from the sidelines over the last few years what a dramatic process it has been to transform this laudable ambition to a somewhat realistic and actionable plan through countless excruciatingly painful trade-offs and compromises. This is a crucial step ALTO has so far avoided at all cost and that is why I'm highly skeptical that we will be able to ride a single electric intercity train 15 years from now (i.e., 25 years after VIA revealed its HFR vision and at least 56 years after the first
HSR Study I've been able to locate was published).
I invite everyone dissatisfied with the current frequencies on the Kitchener, Barrie or Stouffville Line to compare them with those 10 years ago. Or to recall how many transfers a simple trip from Union Station to Pearson Airport required prior to this exact month ten years ago. And the reason why the schedules on the Lakeshore lines have not returned to 15-minute headways is that they have yet to receive the massive upgrades which these other three Corridors have already received (just look at all these grade separations between Union and Etobicoke or the Davenport Diamond Grade Separation) and it is simply not feasible to operate 4 trains per hour and direction in addition to the occasional (and often delayed) VIA train while construction is ongoing and modern signaling systems or electrification are absent. Watching years of "enabling works" is frustrating due to the absence of fast results, but they are forming almost literally the foundation of the many improvements which are to come.
***
We are not building from scratch. It is an expansion of the current system. It is not like Toronto never had any rail service and we are starting from new. For this project to take 25 years to get electric trains on some lines is bizarre.
Again, I invite you to find European projects of a comparable ambition to the
initial scope of GO Expansion (especially at the time when the contract to ONxpress was awarded) and to compare the evolution of timelines and budgets with what we are trying here. Construction of the
City Tunnel in Frankfurt (i.e., the
backbone of the Rhein-Main S-Bahn) started in 1969 and it took 21 years before the first S-Bahn train traveled through the entire tunnel to surface at Südbahnhof in 1990, with another branch (to Mühlberg) opening in 1992 (extended towards Offenbach in 1995), while the branch towards Ostbahnhof (the "
Nordmainische S-Bahn" towards Hanau) is expected to open in 2031. That's 62 years after construction started and doesn't include the planning phases.
***
There are a few historical titans who have managed such things: for instance the Five Directions Commuting Campaign grade-separated and quad-tracked the main Tokyo lines in the decade from 1965; but Tokyo is Tokyo and Toronto is Toronto; moreover the JNR was the JNR and Metrolinx is Metrolinx. Otherwise, things in Paris and Munich still took multiple decades, right?
The key detail is not that this is Japan, but that that was in the 1960s: Have a look what year the
Hokkaido Shinkansen or
Chuo Shinkansen started construction (2005 and 2014, respectively) and when they are supposed to be completed (2038 and 2037, i.e. after 33 and 23 years), whereas the
Tokaido Shinkansen was built in only 5 years (1959-1964).
***
to meet a 10- year old promise? That's 30 years.
The 10-year old promise has apparently turned out to be undeliverable, so plans had to be refined and timelines revised to better match reality.
How do you justify not restoring the every 15-minute service they suspend in 2020?
The more services you operate, the more challenging it gets to construct "under the moving wheel". DB InfraGO is closing 2-3 major arteries completely for 4-6 months every year to completely rebuild and upgrade the line. Do you prefer that?
***
The public should be very angry. A petition should be started to abolish ML!
I highly recommend Elon Musk for this job. He has a proven track record of destroying decade-old and established organizations with not the slightest understanding of why they exist, what they are actually doing and why they matter or without having spent the faintest thought on what should possibly replace it...
