You just don't have the population now or even in the far future and you don't need to spend millions to figure that out.

Its not that it can't work, it is fairly simple after all, but that it wont work. The entire project is built from the ground up to be unprofitable, unattractive and unrealistic. If you look at cases where HSR does work (Tokyo-Osaka, Paris-Lyon, Taipei-Kaoshiung) the competing modes of transit are usually quite expensive. Just driving from Tokyo to Osaka over the Japanese highway system will cost about 50$ in tolls alone, let alone the grossly higher pump price of gas (~1.7USD/L) is enough to force significant portions of the population onto trains. Never mind that Tokyo is bigger than Canada to start with. Personally, I find this attractive. Large scale urbanization and privatization of road facilities would actually yield large advantages to society and, incidentally, make HSR reasonably attractive.

Proponents of HSR just want to spend someone else money though. Somebody here actually had the gall to refer to Coyne as a Trotskyist for, of all things, arguing people should feel the costs of their economic decisions. Because nothing spells Trotskyist like individual responsibility apparently. In a nutshell, this is why HSR will probably fail. People want HSR as sort of a novelty, something to take once or twice a year. Nobody wants to actually change the economics of transit planning to increase efficiency and, in the process, actually improve the viability of HSR.

What happens to the price of plane tickets when gas doubles and triples again??? How about mentioning the air pollution avoided vs the gas. Very few improvements on plane mileage and no electric one in the works.

If your market size grew 21 fold overnight with no appreciable strain on needed infrastructure, there would be a better justification for HSR due to higher population density and potential for profit. unfortunately, only greenland has us beat for lack of population density. even if you took everything north of edmonton out of a size comparison, we'd still be far short of any european population density.

And if I may play devil`s advocate, things like this can also cause economic deterioration, like theauto industry, bus industry, the short haul airline industry (west jet, jazz, porter, etc), these job losses will be primarily blue collar (maintenance) and service oriented (sales and stewards), driving up social program costs from the government because you just put 5,000 minimum wage folks out on the street, meaning higher taxes, but it`s ok, you made a few extra bucks in montreal. preach on, richard florida.

This is a wee bit like predicting that nobody would ever want a cellular phone because they’d have to carry it around in a briefcase. Times Change, folks.

That would seem to be an absolutely ideal for high-speed rail. Ideal. Yet here’s Coyne raging against those durned locomotives!

Somebody tell Coyne about rail electrification, since apparently he hasn’t seen a subway before.

The evidence of the car subsidy is the very existence of the infrastructure on which people drive. With very few exceptions, none of those roads was built by private industry, and none of them is expected to be "profitable". We expect rail lines to turn a profit, but no one expects the 401 to turn a profit.

And there's a bunch more: http://www.railwaygazette.com/news_view/article/2…

So the Acela Express wasn't designed to be that fast. That doesn't mean they can't build faster trains.

Also, to me a high occupancy day train consists of 10 cars with about 150 passengers each, or 1,500 passengers per train. Even with a 200 passengers I wonder how have you arrived at 29000: 200*365*24*2=3,504,000. With 1500 passengers the same ridership can be reached with jus 7 trains a day, which is roughly the level at which GO Transit profitably operates in the GTA.

Canada presents an entirely different set of challenges. There are not that many destination options, and it's not like a bus, picking up and dropping people at every stop down the road.

Let's say you got that HSR line running between Toronto and Montreal. To get to 5.8 million passengers, you would need some pretty high occupancy trains. If each train could hold 200 people, that would mean, 29,000 trips per year. That means a train leaving every half hour from both directions, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at full occupancy.

Even if you got 5.8 million passengers, just to make the price competitive with air travel, revenue would top out at half a billion. Even if this allowed an incredible profit margin of 50%, it would still take about 80 years to see a return on investment.

This Calgary-Edmonton HSR proposal will likely never cover it's operating costs, and if it can't it shouldn't move forward. The Acela Express (granted, not exactly a bullet-train, but still the fastest service on the continent) that runs between Boston and DC carried 3.3million passengers in 2008 through the northeast corridor with a population of 55 million. Calgary-Edmonton corridor has population 2.2 million. For a HSR system to carry 5.8 million passengers between these 2 cities 12 years from now, the social engineering effort to get Albertans out of their cars and away from airports would have to be Orwellian in nature. Fail.

Tolls on superhighways: a most emphatic YES.

Higher taxes on gasoline: a hesitant yes, depending on what the auditors say about how much is raised already to mitigate costs of road networks, road safety, pollution control, even a little public transit subsidy…

Still more taxpayer money to Bombardier so Wells can zip around between Ottawa, TO and Montréal marveling at the little chocolate thingies they serve in first class? Please…

In terms of congestion, to solve that you really need at least time of use pricing (premium during peak use) if not dynamic pricing based on congestion.

That would indoubtedly cause people to slowly migrate into Cities of course, with todays technology. However, if we could transport people and goods without relying on oil – we could keep our density just exactly the way we have it. But how much subsidy would that technology switchover take?? :P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotrice_%C3%A0_g…

Up to 650 passengers at 360 km/hr without using any fossil fuel.

The benefits of electric HSR's are multiple:
• By far, they have the smallest carbon foot-print of any form of mass transportation.
• No diesel engines, means no on board fuel (no batteries either as the energy comes to the train via an overhead wire) which means the trains are much considerably lighter and therefore even more efficient.
• Much faster than traveling by car (TGV's can theoretically reach speeds of 500 km/hr, but for the time being travel close to 300 km/hr.)
• Downtown to downtown travel, means it's likely faster to take a TGV on trips of less than 500km than a plane, even though the plane is flying faster, since your route is likely downtown to airport to airport to downtown.
• I'm not entirely sure, but I believe trains schedules are much more reliable since weather is much less of a potential issue.

All in all, if the few points I've listed above are valid, I suspect electric HSR would do very well economically.

Now, for the ugly question — is this confusion deliberate so as to bolster the argument, or simply poor fact-checking/writing? Neither answer speaks highly of the writer.

Were I of a more cynical mind, I might think he did so deliberately to bolster his argument.

Can you tell me what Canadian airline would be profitable if they had to build and maintain all of the airports they use instead of paying artificially low rents and having the public dime carry the weight?

How many car dealerships would be out of business if the government didn't build the road infrastructure?

Perhaps you are genuinely willing to have user-pay for every mode of transportation, but if not, why are you holding Rail up to a higher standard than all others?

I also appreciate Mulletaur's point; we are they *only* industrialized nation in the world without high-speed rail. South Africa will have the first phase of its high speed rail network finished for the world cup this spring. Morocco has signed contracts, with plans to connect with planned systems in Tunisia and Algeria. Iran, Vietnam and Pakistan have all tendered contracts to begin building their high speed rail lines.

oh and that South African line? It's being built by a Canadian-French Consortium.

Why are Canadians so backwards about this!

Oh wait, you didn't. A portion of your taxes, along with 30 million other people, went towards paving roads. In fact (as is the case for every public expenditure), people who don't drive and don't approve of driving get to subsidize your filthy auto habit in the name of 'the public interest', So until you start paying your share *plus* everybody who doesn't use cars, and would choose alternatives if available, you should stop complaining about taxes.

If public transit is too expensive, then so is public auto infrastructure.