I really didn't expect so much hostility to this. Some of you seem to be convinced that hardly anybody goes to Kitchener and London. Let's look at some numbers:
Between Greyhound and GO Transit, between 102 and 122 buses and a handful of trains go between Kitchener and Toronto every day, both directions, depending on the day. For London it's 14 trains and 26-36 buses, again depending on the day. Plus whatever other bus routes in the corridor I haven't looked up. Even if we're conservative and assume 30 riders for each bus and 100 for each train, that's well over 3 million existing annual transit riders between the three cities already.
Plus 16 daily flights between London and Pearson (8 each way), a market that tends to be decimated by high speed rail over short distances.
And of course the 401 has an AADT of 100,000 all the way to Kitchener, then 50,000 to London and after that it drops way off. Plus 403 traffic. Add in induced traffic and suddenly 6 million annual riders doesn't seem so farfetched.
So, in your estimation, this line will take a number approaching 100% of the London - Toronto or KW - Toronto trips when built?
Modal share of high speed rail is generally very high, in the 50-70% range from numbers I've seen. Even if this line gets less than that, it would easily be a significant percentage of a busy corridor. It wouldn't need anywhere near 100%.
By the way, if HSR gets a modal share anywhere near other HSR corridors, the government would be able to save money from highway expansions that are no longer needed.
In the last HSR study, the Toronto-Windsor segment was expected to generate 2.3M riders and half the revenue Murray is talking about. There's no way on earth that the addition of KW, over and above the "GTA West" station on the other route, makes up for the differences here.
The last HSR study was incredibly flawed. It almost seemed designed to fail. Despite a higher population and better transit in each city, it somehow managed to predict lower ridership than the study that was done back in the 90s. It had a lot of assumptions and conclusions that would lower potential ridership and increase costs. Just to name a couple that I remember (I haven't looked at it since it came out), it didn't recommend serving Pearson and it assumed that every minor concession road would have an overpass... instead of just giving them dead ends like is routine with
freeways.
So we now can confirm that Glen Murray / Liberals do transit planning by drawing cool looking lines on Google maps.
I think some of you are putting too much emphasis on details like the route on the map or the $40 price. The route is conceptual and will be finalized through the EA process. The price is preliminary and could include lower prices and higher prices. If it's airline style, there would be a whole range of prices like when you book a flight. By the way, $40 isn't far from what Greyhound charges and in some cases less.