Why the Liberals’ high-frequency rail plan is worth a shrug, if that.
LIBERAL RAIL PLAN DESERVES NOTHING BUT A SHRUG
“Could we build the railway today?” That’s a question that’s popped up a lot in Canada in recent years. It’s usually been in the context of oil pipelines, but in the aftermath of COVID-19, with the manifest deficiencies of our federal government and many of our provincial governments laid bare, we can ask it about a lot of other things. The Trudeau government wasn’t wrong when it worried about “deliverology” way back in 2015 (even if it failed to deliver much of the deliverology). Getting stuff done in this country is difficult. We just aren’t good at building and buying new stuff. (The vaccine procurement by Ottawa and the rollout by the provinces being a relatively happy exception to this, granted, but such exceptions are few.)
But now we are getting a chance to prove that we can build a railroad. A literal railroad. So long as it’s kind of meh, and only came about after years of talking about it, and won’t actually exist for many more years to come, if it happens at all, which it easily might not.
This is the recently announced “high-frequency rail” project announced by the Liberals, with Transportation Minister Omar Alghabra actually giving a speech on a train like some modern-day Teddy Roosevelt stumping for a second term. The plan calls for a dedicated passenger-rail corridor between Toronto and Montreal, via Ottawa, and then onto Quebec City. Some of the tracks will be new, other stretches will be upgraded or returned to service after long stretches of little or no use.
Via’s current passenger service operates on tracks owned by the rail freight companies, and passenger trains are a secondary priority on those congested lines. By shifting the passenger traffic onto a new corridor that links our major cities and bypasses the freight traffic, Via’s traditionally lousy passenger service in eastern Canada should be improved. It would be faster, as the trains could speed up on the dedicated tracks, and it would be more predictable, less prone to backups behind freight trains. The freight service will also presumably improve as congestion eases, but this isn’t the purpose of the high-frequency plan, just a fringe benefit. With a better, faster, more reliable service available, Ottawa expects ridership to grow. It probably would — maybe not as high as the government is forecasting, but a major deterrent from using the system now is that it is indeed slow and unreliable. Remove that deterrent and more will buy that ticket to ride.
The Liberals are quite chuffed about the plan. Its announcement before the widely expected election call should surprise no one. What probably should surprise us is that it’s 2021 and we are just now getting around to developing a passenger rail system that might clear the low bar of “adequate.”
Seriously. Consider what’s being proposed: we will be able to run trains full of humans down a track without them getting stuck behind other trains full of grains, between our largest cities, in the most densely populated part of the country. By 2030 or so. This is the scale of our ambition.
All the above may read as a dismissal of the plan, or a condemnation of it. It’s neither. The plan, such as it is, is sound. If we’re going to have a passenger rail service in this country — it’s not a given that we will or should, but if — then think about the lowest possible bar said service should be able to clear. It should link major cities in the most densely populated area, right? It should be reasonably fast, one supposes? And generally reliable, more or less?
Well, based on that level of ambition, the transportation minister has some good news for you. Sometime this fall, we’ll begin a procurement process that will eventually deliver totally fine levels of service in this venture we have decided to embark on.
“Adequate, eventually” should be the project’s slogan.
And again — this isn’t a dismissal or criticism. As bleak as this is, that’s entirely sincere: Canada has set its sights on adequate, and could conceivably attain that goal by 2030, and if it does, that will be welcome news.
But, then again, this may never happen. You need not have made too many laps of the sun to have noticed that Canadian politicians are way better at proposing infrastructure projects than they are at building them. Even if it gets built — even if adequacy is eventually attained — it will almost certainly be late and over budget. (This column is being written in a backyard full of noise from construction on the Eglinton Crosstown, which was intended to start running last year and might, just might, be running by the end of next year.) Indeed, we’ve been talking about high-frequency rail for five years (even longer, if you include earlier plans that were generally similar). So consider: it took us five years to decide to try to do the adequate thing, with a completion date of the end of this decade.
Really makes you proud, doesn’t it? Sometime in the next decade, we’ll find out if we can build a railroad … not much of one, maybe, but anything would help.
A MAJOR DETERRENT FROM USING THE SYSTEM NOW IS THAT IT IS INDEED SLOW.