I don’t have a problem with passenger rail in principle - one thing I think we should have and don’t quite understand why we don’t is a train from Calgary to Canmore/Banff - but I don’t think it’s a huge need at this precise moment.
I think it is.
Why doesn’t winter weather slow down southern Ontario? Why, when even without volume, weather means that traffic is down to 20 km/h on the 401, the 404, the 400, and the DVP? Yet people get to work, to meetings in other cities, to where they need to go? Because an intelligent system of rail links is in place. Trains go through anything that weather throws at them, and they do so reliably.
Do we need to move between cities in our province? Of course we do, and all you need do is to look at the stats of Greyhound, Red Arrow, and Air Canada to find out how much. The idea that we can drive to wherever we need to go falls apart when Highway 2 is closed–yet again–because of weather. I don’t recall southern Ontario ever “being closed because of weather.” If Alberta wants to play with the big boys, then maybe it should act like a big boy and ensure its citizens can get around like the citizens of the big boys.
Is it really that frequent an occurrence? The QE2 gets closed, what, two, maybe three days a year? I don’t think that justifies a multi-billion rail link. I think you could justify it for other reasons, but “occasional delay in getting to Edmonton” doesn’t really hit that mark for me. The Trans-Canada gets closed fairly often, but that’s through the mountains and kind of expected.
Do Canadians travel by train a lot? More than Americans do?
Depends
Depends where you are in Canada. In the Windsor to Quebec city corridor, which Spoons is referring to, train travel is very common, due to population density and the fact that it is a pretty straight corridor, easily serviced by rail. Elsewhere in the country, where population densities are lower, not so much. For instance there’s no passenger rail where I live, Regina, even though it’s the capital of the province.
That’s really hard to say - is there no rail travel here because people aren’t interested in rail travel, or because there isn’t much rail travel to be had? There are very few options for travelling by train here, so people don’t think of it, so it doesn’t make it onto political platforms.
And that’s a shame, because Regina has a beautiful train station. Thankfully, the station has been saved; and while it is now a casino, it retains its architecture and still has a small museum display of railway artifacts.
I think it’s a Catch-22: Albertans, never having been exposed to train travel as we enjoyed in the Windsor-Quebec corridor, are skeptical. Yet when they need to travel in Alberta, they bemoan the lack of ways to do it. Why are the buses always delayed? Why can’t I afford to fly? I guess I’d better drive, but I don’t want to.
And as for Highway 2 delays–yes, I sat for eight hours on a Edmonton-bound bus, that was delayed owing to a massive multi-car accident on Highway 2 during a snowstorm. It was no fun. I couldn’t help but think, “Y’know, if I was in Ontario, I’d be on a train…”
I hate to sound like an ex-Ontarian (which, let’s face it, I am), but there are so many ways that Alberta could learn from Ontario (and Quebec) in terms of improving public transit, from municipal transit services to the ability to move throughout the province. Why Alberta and Albertans wish for alternatives but reject ideas that work in other provinces, is beyond me.
That’s great if you are going from downtown to downtown, but anywhere else in the city is just a pain to get to without a vehicle. Taxis are stupidly expensive and connecting transit is haphazard at best.
But again, I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen - I know full well that it does - but that this is a bad justification for spending billions of dollars. Think about how you’d sell this - “We’re going to build a rail connection for the three days a year that the highway is impassable.” It’s ridiculous. Build a rail line because people are going to use it and it goes somewhere useful, every day.
People use buses and go somewhere useful everyday - from Edmonton to Calgary, Calgary to Edmonton. Why would they not use a train?
Commuter rail is very common. Intercity rail is not particularly common (my guess is that traveling from Toronto to Montreal by rail is no more common than traveling from New York to Washington by rail, for instance), but it’s more common than it is in the prairies, say (where it’s virtually nonexistent).
Well, it’s common enough that there is a need for six trains each weekday, four trains on Saturdays, and five trains on Sundays. (Cite.) That’s 39 trains, each way, a week. If using an intercity rail service is not particularly common, why do they offer so many trains?
I’m unsure if I’d describe transit in Alberta cities as “haphazard,” though it certainly can be that. I’d say it is closer to “poorly planned, and next to useless.” Buses rarely go where you want them to, unless you’re prepared to make a few transfers; and routes meander all over the place, meaning that a trip from A to B that would take ten to twenty minutes by car, takes 30 to 60 minutes by bus.
Oddly, very few routes in Alberta cities follow arterial roads. As I said, they meander through neighbourhoods. They may run on an artery for part of their route, but there are very few routes that consist of nothing but major arterial roads. In Calgary, the 301 bus (Centre Street/Harvest Hills Boulevard) does a great job of getting people from the north end of town into the downtown quickly and reliably on one single road. But it’s an exception. Why isn’t there a Country Hills Boulevard bus that runs from, say, the airport to west of Sarcee Trail? Why isn’t there a 14th Street W bus that runs from Glenmore Trail all the way up to north of Country Hills? A 16th Avenue N bus that runs from Barlow out to Stoney Trail? This is how you move people around a city: the neighbourhood meanderers feed onto the arteries, where arterial routes take you uptown, downtown, crosstown, or wherever; just as quickly as a car can.
I’ve discussed this with one of our city councillors (heck, he’s one of my golf buddies), and according to him, the aim is to make sure that nobody has more than a three-block walk from their home to a bus stop. Hence the meandering. A short walk from home to a bus stop is an admirable goal, but in achieving it, they seem to have forgotten that people don’t just want to be picked up by a bus; they also want to use the bus to go places in a reasonable amount of time.
Albertans are quick to jump into their cars when they need to go someplace, but it’s not because they enjoy burning fossil fuels (well, some do, if some of the customized pickups I see and hear locally are any indication), and driving in conditions that would make a polar bear think twice about heading outside. It’s because the alternatives to driving yourself are uncommon, infrequent, inconvenient, and impractical. Give them some alternatives, and I’m sure they’d use them. But as things stand, we’re back to a Catch-22: Alberta won’t consider offering alternatives because nobody would use them, and nobody will use them because they’re not being offered.
Way to derail the thread.
From my little reading on the matter there are strong proponents at the civic and even private level but the province has said show us the demand. With the recent population growth in Calgary, and the Calgary Edmonton corridor, that demand may be there. Should be about the same travel time say from Calgary to Edmonton as flying when you factor in the drive to and from the airport. A quick google says two hours or less.
Now off to read party platforms. Well, Liberal and NDP to start. I’m afraid of what might happen if I click on the Wildrose link.
I meant compared to flying or driving. A quick search turned up 10 Westjet flights, 23 Air Canada flights and 17 Porter flights direct from Toronto to Montreal on a single weekday, for instance.
They probably would, though I don’t know if we have the volume for a train (literally, I don’t know what the volume of people who’d take a train vs a bus or plane or car would be). My point is simply and solely that road closures are not a good justification to build a commuter train link.
The shotgun will show up in your mailbox within the week. 
Candidates debate tonight - anyone else watching it? It’s not like you’re going to go for a walk tonight, eh? 
ETA: Catfight!
This social conservative scaremongering is just that - scaremongering by the other parties, because they know that Wildrose’s economic conservatism/libertarianism is much harder to attack and has widespread support in Alberta.
The fact is, Danielle Smith is a self-described moderate libertarian, social moderate, and she’s pro-choice. The ‘free vote’ and ‘citizen initiative’ parts of the platform are better seen as a way to placate the social conservatives in that party rather than an attempt to change social policy in Alberta.
The right in Alberta has always been split between the social conservatives in the south and southeast, and the fiscal/economic conservatives in the middle of the province. When the Wildrose Party was first formed, those two factions fought for control of the party. The social conservatives lost. The libertarian/fiscal wing of Alberta conservatism won the day and controls the party. Of course, they had to build a right-wing coalition, and that meant throwing a bone to the social right. Thus the promise to allow free votes and to allow citizens to initiate referendums.
This is smart on the part of Smith, because she knows fully well that, as Gorsnak says, the provinces are quite limited in what they can do in this area already. In addition, a referendum de-listing abortion services would almost certainly fail, and Smith knows that.
The fact is, the Wildrose party has no official position on abortion, is not pushing social conservatism, and Smith has stated that her government has no intention of bringing up abortion at all. If abortion becomes an issue, it will be through a citizen initiative. And that’s a lot easier said than done.
You’re going to see a lot of nasty campaigning and fear-mongering over the next couple of weeks. The Wildrose Party has managed to make temporary allies of all the other political parties, and those parties are going to pull out the stops to demonize Wildrose any way they can. Before you believe it, spend some time actually reading what Danielle Smith has to say and what she has done in the past. She’s no social conservative, and neither are the people closest to her. She’s a Calgary-school economic conservative who graduated with a degree in economics from the same school Stephen Harper graduated from, but she’s more socially liberal than he is - and he’s no social conservative firebrand himself.
A train link between Calgary/Edmonton will not work. Most of you probably don’t know this, but for a time there was a very cheap air shuttle service between Calgary and Edmonton. It was a 737 that flew right out of the Municipal airport and landed at Calgary International. It left every hour on a schedule, just like a train. You didn’t even need to buy a ticket in advance - this was before 911, and you could simply walk into the terminal, pay $69, and walk onto the plane.
The service failed due to lack of interest. They just couldn’t fill the planes, even though it was cheaper than driving and faster than even an HSR train would be. And bear in mind that these planes only needed a few dozen passengers - a train link would need to move hundreds per trip to be profitable.
The problem is that Edmonton and Calgary are geographically huge. Mass transit is difficult. You simply can’t take a train to one of those cities, hop on a subway, and be at your destination in 20 minutes.
This is how the math works out: If you drive to Calgary from Edmonton, it’s about 3 hours. And when you arrive, you’re in your own car and can drive to your destination. Now let’s say we had a train that could go 150 kilometers per hour. It would take two hours to get to Calgary from Edmonton. To make that more time efficient, you would have to find your way to the train station, buy a ticket, get on the train, arrive in Calgary, rent a car or call a cab, and then go to your destination, all in less than an hour. And even if you could do all that in half an hour, it’s very inconvenient and still leaves you at the mercy of cabs or difficult to use mass transit.
And if you rent a car or take a cab, the costs start to really go up. You could easily spend $50-$100 on that. Add in a likely $50-$100 train ticket, and it becomes a pretty expensive proposition.
For all that, even in the best-case scenario a train isn’t going to save you more than a half hour or so out of the total commute, and depending where the train stations are relative to what your driving route would be, it could easily wind up taking longer to take the train than to just drive. And it would cost more money. So who exactly is the market for this?