crs1026
Superstar
I’ve spent less than 20 minutes on Google (search: “fire station near [village name] Ontario”) and found fire stations all along the Havelock subdivision, which is mostly covered by a 10 km radius and always covered by a 20 km radius. For larger emergencies, there are always the hospitals in Perth, Belleville and Peterborough and helicopters to transport critically injured people.
I agree that this is not a showstopper per se. The remote coverage does not deter use of Highway 7, which is a busy road and has a much greater potential accident risk today than a rail line would have. I can think of other situations - Nuclear Plants on Lake Ontario is one example - where proponents had to provide funding to municipalities to upgrade fire and rescue services to meet a desired standard.
Despite this rather desperate attempt, you all present valid concerns of varying severity and relevance, which would have to be overcome if the Havelock subdivision was to be chosen, which again: I can neither confirm nor dismiss as VIA Rail’s intent. However, if you dismiss the Havelock subdivision so easily, I would appreciate a similarly throughout and critical analysis of whatever alternative alignments are available.
Assuming you are still referring just to safety - I won't attempt this on the back of an envelope. One would have to know traffic counts at each crossing and one would look at the average distance and response time of first responders and the likely transport time to hospital for each location. One would sum this across all crossings. For what it's worth, average distances from level crossings to hospitals on the Lakeshore will be lower, which would lower the "risk score" for these. I doubt air ambulance can be an equaliser.
If, as suggested, the Havelock line will not be grade separated, then it will have a significant number of potential accident locations, although traffic levels may be lower than close to the lake. Both the CP Belleville or CN Kingston Sub have many grade separated crossings already, while the Havelock does not. It just seems counter intuitive that we would favour a new routing that would lower the current level of grade separation and raise risk levels.
Bottom line - I would guess the end "quotient" calculation would favour the Lakeshore, but that's pure speculation. Whether the difference is material is impossible to guess. I'm not going to dwell on this issue, recognizing that the EA process does attend to this and the results may be interesting either way.
Some of you have already commented on the report of the auditor general and I have struggle to reconcile the feedback I heard so far with the report I read:
These first two paragraphs set the tone for the entire report, which by the way is already the second to point out severe governance problems (recall that the CTA report also pointed out the lack of enabling legislation and coordination between the various levels of government).
It's encouraging that the A-G portrayed VIA as a fundamentally well run organization. A-G reports often are used to frame what the policy issues will be, rather than shotgunning an organization (unless there is a true scandal being exposed).
A-G audits are not the same as investigative journalism. There is often a back story. The A-G often works from auditees' self-reports, meaning VIA may well have been the one to flag this issue for discussion. It has certainly been pointed to by advocates and observers (and opposition parties, until they were voted in and became the government) over the years. What's disturbing is how obliquely the A-G framed this issue. The A-G could have poked the government a lot more.
To summarize: the federal government had approved to give CN $251 million through VIA Rail’s capital expenditure budget to triple-track 160 km of the Kingston subdivision, in order to receive 14 additional trains, reduce travel time, improve OTP and generate additional revenues and ridership. In the end, the project ran almost 50% over budget, while the scope was reduced to less than half, resulting in a tripling of the per-mile costs and no improvement on any performance criteria (even worse: OTP and ridership decreased even further).
I may have missed some of this at the time, but the first I heard of this project was after the limited (70 km) design was final. That's all that appeared on VIA's web site, at any rate. That was long before any shovels hit the ground. So, how did we get from 160 km at $1.x M per km to 70 km at $4M? Was the initial ask ever documented or put in the public domain? Did things change as the design work came in? I don't recall hearing that the project encountered any unforeseens or technical issues in the field. The construction actually was executed rather well, from my bleacher seat.
If, in asking for the funds, VIA initially represented the $1.x M per km cost as feasible, then they do deserve criticism - for poor forecasting, anyways. A lot of people would have laughed at a number that low. The $4M number sounds closer to reality, not runaway spending. One wonders if VIA had to shave this number to get it through the Ministry or Cabinet or Treasury Board - just as VIA has ended up buying HEP II cars, Ren fleet, and doing other things on the cheap.
It's important to know what happened here, because a lot depends on the validity of the $4B figure now being discussed for HFR. We can't have that number ballooning to $8B. Inquiring sidewalk superintendents want to know.
- Paul
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