But there is plenty of demand. [...] Factor in London, Guelph, the airport and Brampton, and you have a serious business case for HSR.
As you apparently
missed it, this is the intercity passenger rail standard offerred in Germany
before High-Speed Rail was introduced (Note that until this day, only 248 km or 40% of the distance between Mannheim and Hamburg is actually covered by HSR infrastructure, the balance being legacy rail lines):
Similarly, this is the intercity passenger rail standard which was offered in the Northeast Corridor
before the Acela Express was introduced (not even talking about any HSR infrastructure here):
Now have a look at the intercity passenger rail service offered on the Kitchener Corridor currently:
Even when throwing in regional rail services (which are excluded from the timetable extracts provided for Germany and the NEC, but can be assumed to be hourly), we are only talking about this kind of service level and travel speeds:
Is it that difficult for you to accept that there might be a few shades of gray between what we got now and full-scale Japanese Shinkansen service levels, which would still represent a dramatic improvement over the Status Quo...?
All the same, 100 mph on the existing corridor, double tracked, is all anyone needs. Service every second hour all day would be a huge increase in marketability for rail over what we have. We need to get incremental improvement going quickly, so we have something to sell, rather than pushing uphill to HSR with all the sticker shock and skepticism it attracts.
Amen.