It would be a good start towards having rails service in the big urban corridors. Especially Toronto-Montreal and even Calgary-Edmonton. The latter not being as densely populated, but super easy to build.
Travelling long distance by bus is akin to torture so ideally in the medium term I think we should be building a network that combines both. A bus network that could bring us into rail hubs where we could hop on a train for longer trips. Longer term we should be transferring over to high speed rail generally.
There’s no financial benefit to having such a network in Canada given airplanes exist for quick travel. There simply isn’t a need to move a large number of Canadians across the country on a regular basis, and the country is HUGE. Building that much high speed rail would be a waste of resources.
We’d be far better off investing in a connection for Vancouver down the west coast of the US, and Toronto/Montreal down the east coast of the US.
Busiest highway: Highway 401 in Ontario, Canada, has volumes surpassing an average of 500,000 vehicles per day.
That paragraph is straight out of google. Saying that we don’t need high speed rail because we do not have the volume is blatantly untrue.
You mentioned further down the thread that Canada doesn’t have the population for significant passenger rail development, which gets brought up a lot in this discussion. I can’t directly dispute that point, but doesn’t around 90% of the population live within 100km of the US border? We don’t need a network across the entire land mass, just hit at least one major city in each mainland province (sorry territories & maritimes) to start. One line for 90% seems like it would be a good deal unless I am missing something.
Hell, I wish we had a nice train service along the Windsor-Québec corridor.
The Windsor-Québec corridor, aka where almost half of all Canadians live, should become Germany levels of train infrastructure.
