PLANES, TRAINS AND THE NEW REALITY OF OIL
So I’m sitting in my car, in the parking lot of a small strip mall on Donegani Ave. in Pointe-Claire, waiting for a call from the airport that a family member has passed through all the stations of the cross that airports now contain. I can now go and pick her up.
I would like to be able to wait closer to the airport, perhaps at a facility built for the purpose of picking up passengers, as if those who built the airport had the foresight to know that, ultimately, this would be an important interface between the airport and the outside world.
But, as we all know, there is only a small road where you are only allowed to pick up people after they are already outside waiting, even in the extreme cold, otherwise security will force you to move along.
So instead of paying for more space and a better way to pick up passengers, the airport instead pays people to prevent others from doing what they have to do. And so instead of waiting outside the airport, I am in a parking lot on Donegani Ave.
Anyway, I’m looking south. I half notice a train passing by. It’s one of those 100-car freight trains. I suddenly realize that it is composed of black oil cars. I start counting and quit after 100.
And now that I have noticed it once, I begin to realize how many trains pass along the tracks next to Highway 20 with 100 oil cars.
This is the way oil is being shipped these days. According to Maclean’s magazine, oil shipments by train jumped 83 per cent last year.
It makes sense. The environmental lobby doesn’t want anyone to build a pipeline, which would seem to be a safer and more efficient way to get the oil to market. But, with the same logic as the airport planners, they want to make it as difficult as possible for people to do what they need to do.
And the oil companies are learning that rail has certain advantages over pipelines. Rail cars can be rerouted to wherever the best prices are. They are not stuck with one route.
So now we are faced with the new reality that thousands of oil cars a day will be rumbling through our communities.
Thanks a lot, guys.