Any proposal to substantially improve passenger rail in this country will create billions of dollars of new wealth for the property owners around station locations. The question is whether or not we want to try to tap that to actually make something happen. The political will doesn't seem to be...

I feel like you're being deliberately obtuse. Real estate development plus public transportation is a tried and true economic model that we have somehow forgotten in Canada. Economically they are massively complementary.

The fact that the land is cheap or expensive is irrelevant. The scale is what's important. Coordination and negotiation costs are likely to be prohibitive in existing urban areas. Depending on the jurisdiction developers pay huge amounts towards infrastructure. Obviously historically this wasn't...

The point though, is obtaining private money for public works. If it's suburban Ottawa, I'm doubtful that they could put together a large enough land assembly for it to be worthwhile. Real estate lawyers are very expensive (I have some in my family). Via has reasonably good customer service and...

Then you have to deal with local politics and NIMBYs. I doubt that those towns would appreciate Mattamy putting up a few thousand homes nearby. Transportation amenities have a very large positive externality (basically the option value of being able to take the train/plane/bus or ship with it)...

Wow this is quite conservative. Seems to basically prohibit any kind of new large scale development outside of existing municipalities, regardless of the existing use of the land. "The establishment of new permanent townsites shall not be permitted."

There's a greenbelt around Ottawa, but not being from Ontario, do they have an equivalent of BC's Agricultural land reserve?

Would the geography on Via's trackage between Ottawa and Montreal admit a greenfield station? With the modest goal that others have articulated of running 1-2 tph and doing some grade separations on that segment, the costs might be low enough that you could actually get real estate developers to...

A thought that occurred to me recently was that a decent amount of the moaning from people that thinking the lakeshore route with a spur to Ottawa is a better alignment don't understand that great circle paths are shorter on a sphere. Obviously there's also all the kvetching about not servicing...

average top speed doesn't matter is what they're saying; average speed for the entire journey is what matters. Plus reliability, or equivalently the consistency with which trips reach that average speed.

I am referring to the cost projection from the professor they consult with. The insider sources I am quite skeptical of.

Use the search function and you can search by user for posts within this thread. Urbansky and smallspy are usually the most technically knowledgeable people, generally. This post in particular sums it up.

There was an article in Lapresse about the project's potential costs where experts provided cost projections basically just using CAHSR costs multiplied by the distance covered here, which makes them extremely high (120 Billion+) and extremely suspect (geography and political economy seems a lot...

Look up previous comments by smallspy on this thread.

Certainly, it's just often trotted out as an obstacle by RRs (e.g. NS). It's motivated reasoning for sure, but I assume that CN and CP would reach for everything try to extract as much as possible in return for building infrastructure on their RoW, even if the infrastructure on its own provides...

Whether Tunnel or not, I'm assuming that electrification without batteries or dual mode locomotives would prohibit sharing any trackage with CP or CN because of dual stack containers (at least that's been the refrain of class 1s over the past decade).

My suspicion is that they think they'll need an entirely new tunnel and approach into Montreal, which helps make the leap to HSR + electrification more reasonable.

*kneels on throat* "See, she can't even get up anymore. I think it's time for the vet." (to be clear, kneeling on throat is an analogy for budget cuts by the feds)

It's becoming a bad word for good reason: look at the disaster the Cyclone helicopters have been.

A probably meaningless announcement out of Alberta, but count me as surprised, nonetheless: https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/alberta-announces-master-plan-aimed-at-increasing-passenger-rail-service/ It does sound like they would try to cut out VIA from anything that did come from this, though.