Ottawa is expected in coming weeks to unveil yet another proposal for a high-speed passenger rail service in the Toronto-Quebec City corridor.
It is unclear why Ottawa will do this. After about 25 studies on this proposed megaproject in past decades, the daunting costs and uncertainties about its economic impact have not changed.
But let’s review the potential benefits of a high-speed rail service with shorter travel times able to compete with flights and car trips.
• High-speed passenger rail (HSR) could help ease the housing crisis. That was an objective of Japanese policymakers in launching the first high-speed rail line, between Tokyo and Osaka, in 1964. Evidence suggests that the resulting shorter travel times encouraged commuters to move to outlying cities with lower cost housing and slowed the pace of housing inflation in Japan’s two largest cities.
• HSR could strike a blow against income inequality. An HSR option would give people who cannot afford a car or plane ticket a semblance of the rapid mobility among cities that more affluent Canadians enjoy. It could also reduce economic disparity between regions.
• HSR might modestly shrink Canada’s carbon footprint if, as seems likely, most of the rail line would be electrified and powered by clean electricity. Canadian reliance on cars and flights helps account for current Canadian per capita CO2 emissions that are about twice that of Germany with its extensive HSR network.
• HSR could reduce airport congestion as short-haul flights are displaced by rail. That should also reduce spending on expanded airports and access roads.
• Faster commutes contribute to what urban planners call “agglomeration,” or concentrations of innovators in business, technology, and the arts.
High-speed rail corridors like Paris-Marseilles, Milan-Naples and Madrid-Barcelona are associated with socio-economic benefits. And the Toronto-Quebec City corridor matches the European corridors in distances and urban populations.
Ottawa has branded its HSR project, with speeds of up to 300 km/h on at least some sections of the approximately 1,000 km-long line, as something of a cure-all.
“Rail is going to improve productivity, it’s going to improve efficiency, it’s going to lower carbon emissions, and it’s going to allow for more housing to be built on these rail lines,” Anita Anand, the federal transport minister, said last month.
But several factors could doom the project.
Stupendous cost
Transport Canada initially estimated that the rail project would cost as much as $80 billion, but experts see the cost rising to about $120 billion.
That’s roughly twice the enormous investment Canadian governments have made in subsidizing an electric vehicle supply chain.
Even ahead of Ottawa’s formal HSR announcement, objections have been raised that the money would be better spent on health care, education, housing and public transit, all of which are underfunded.
Political uncertainty
The proposed HSR project would take up to five years to plan, enough time for a future federal government to cancel or largely defund it.
And if Ottawa and second-tier cities Trois-Rivières, Laval and Peterborough are to be served by the HSR project as currently proposed, politicians representing other cities like Windsor, London, Sherbrooke, and Chicoutimi will lobby to have those communities served as well.
A cautionary tale
The HSR line under construction between San Francisco and Los Angeles, originally budgeted at just over $30 billion, is now expected to cost about $180 billion.
Sixteen years after California voters approved America’s first HSR line, construction on the initial 190 km phase is four years behind schedule.
And with its $140 billion shortfall in funding there’s no telling when the entire 790 km line will be completed.
Costly delays have resulted from court battles over the California HSR’s disruptions to towns and farmland and from successful political lobbying to link more second-tier cities to the system.
Exaggerated GDP impact
In a study released in 2019, researchers Jerry Nickelsburg at UCLA and Saurabh Ahluwalia at the University of New Mexico detected no appreciable increase in GDP in Japanese regions served by the country’s famous bullet trains.
They conclude that HSR is a boon in greater mobility but does not necessarily spur economic growth, one of the selling points of HSR advocates.
Exaggerated effect on income inequality
The fastest rail systems, like that proposed by Ottawa, are so costly to build that they must charge fares that are “too expensive for people with low incomes,” Yonah Freemark, a prominent HSR advocate, acknowledged in testimony to the Canadian Parliament in February. “Equitable fare policies remain a concern” worldwide, said Freemark, a transportation expert at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute.
For the approximately 18 million Canadians living in the Windsor-Quebec City corridor, HSR has long been described as a dream.
And that it is, with every earlier promise of high-speed rail having been abandoned as too fanciful to proceed with.
Alas, that is the likely fate of the latest proposal.
