Why high-speed rail will definitely work in southern Ontario

Congratulations to Premier Kathleen Wynne for grasping the vision of high-speed rail (HSR). As she says, it should have been built 40 years ago; now is the “second-best time.”

Linking Toronto to Kitchener in about 50 minutes and to London in 80 minutes will drive growth and prosperity, just as Hwy. 401 did when it was built 70 years ago. Toronto-Kitchener-London is the right route to start with. It’s Ontario’s busiest corridor, too short to fly, with Hwy. 401 overloaded through much of the day. International experience shows that rail can be very successful, even profitable, on this sort of route. Without HSR, Kitchener and London will always be stuck at the far end of a congested road.

So why hasn’t HSR happened earlier? Probably because previous studies were led by the federal government and only looked at Toronto to Montreal or the whole Quebec City-Windsor corridor. The last big study, in 2010, didn’t even have a stop at Kitchener. Yet there are more Toronto-Kitchener-London trips than Toronto-Montreal.

Wynne gets the credit for “turning over this stone,” which nobody had looked under. In early 2014, she commissioned my company to do an initial study, and we discovered a great opportunity. It will cost about $4 billion to build, about the same as adding lanes to Hwys. 401 and 403. It can be extended west to Windsor, and east to Peterborough, Ottawa and Montreal.

The public response has generally been positive, but there are critics, some claiming to be “experts” (although none seem to have any actual experience building or operating HSR).

Some advocate an “incremental” approach, declaring it would be cheaper to improve existing services rather than build new tracks. Cheaper, yes, but making rail attractive is not just about speed, but also frequency, capacity and reliability.

As long as they must share the tracks with two-kilometre-long freight trains, there can never be more than four or five passenger trains each day on the route to London. Trains will be slow and on-time arrival will be hit-or-miss. Trip times need to be competitive with driving or flying, but also frequent enough to match travel needs. With a car, you can go whenever you want. For rail to compete, it needs to run at least hourly, not just four times each day.

The “incrementalists” also miss the point of high speed. It is partly about journey times, but it also about train and staff productivity. Budget airlines may compete on price, not speed, but their planes go just as fast because there is no point going slowly if you don’t need to.

Curves on the existing line will limit trains to 160 km/h from Toronto to Bramalea, but any new track should be built for 300 km/h. (In 1947, did “incrementalists” argue for widening old Dundas St. rather than building Hwy. 401? With traffic lights rather than interchanges?)

There are also skeptics who say Ontario densities are too low for HSR. They need to check the numbers. The corridor population has doubled over the past 30 years and may double again in the next 50. In England, city-pairs like London-Bristol or Edinburgh-Glasgow support four fast trains each hour, and operate without subsidy. HSR will capture about one-fifth of the Toronto-Kitchener-London traffic, enough for it to operate without subsidy.

Skeptics also complain that HSR will only link city centres, so “whole journey” times will be longer. Well, most European rail terminals aren’t actually in the city centre. And central London and is much more spread out than Toronto, which has the world’s most concentrated central business district.

There are 200,000 jobs connected directly to Union Station by the PATH system. Another 200,000 jobs, and three universities, are a short ride away on the subway. By sheer good luck, stations in Guelph, Kitchener and London are also right in their city centres, actually closer to most homes, jobs and colleges than Hwy. 401.

Rail will be faster than road for trips to and from city centres, not just in rush hour. It will also be faster for many suburb-to-suburb trips. And where it is not actually faster, it will still be more convenient, less stressful and cheaper for many business, leisure and commuter trips.

If we start now, HSR could be running within 10 years. Let’s get on with it.

Michael Schabas is a partner with FCP, rail strategy consultants. Born and raised in Toronto, his experience planning and building railways in the U.K., including high-speed rail, is described in his book The Railway Metropolis. He prepared the 2014 High Speed Rail study for the province.