Indeed. I've done door-to-door in ~90 minutes. Walk/jog 10 minutes to YTZ, get lucky with the ferry and clear security and board immediately in another 10, door closed immediately and the Porter flight takes ~55 minutes with favourable winds, a few minutes to disembark and get through YOW, then cab downtown Ottawa is another 15. 75 minutes door-to-door time seems impossible to achieve consistently even without the ferry step.
Pearson is usually a bit slower due to the longer taxi times.
AIr Canada in 2006 had a wide-body relocation flight from YOW to YYZ at about 1am which rarely had more than about 10 passengers on it. It took about 50 minutes gate to gate [boarding to leaving] due to the higher airspeed and extremely low volume of traffic at Pearson at 2am. 75 minutes door to door would still be amazing as takes 5 just to walk the length of Pier F.
YTZ is air travel at its best, and sure it happens, but your (enviable) anecdotes prove an important point about frequency versus speed.
Few air travellers would knowingly plan to cut their airport commute that tight if the next flight after their intended flight is four hours away. The nice thing about YTZ commuter style routes is - if you miss one flight the next one is only an hour or two later.
And (unless one wants stress in their day) the uncertainly about delays in each of those trip legs (taxi or Uber in, security, ferry, lineups at bag drop, etc) means that one will likely pad one's travel plan. (I know lots of business travellers who break away from business meetings well before end of business day to catch their flight.... and others who just resign themselves to the lottery of how long it will take to get home in the evening.)
Which validates the HFR premise that frequency, rather than speed, will be the selling point for many.
And--- you may have cherrypicked a very extreme example, and the cases at the other extreme need to be balanced. If anyone peeked at a flight tracker last night during YYZ's thunderstorm delays, consider the plight of air passengers who were stuck in holding patterns over Wiarton and Peterborough, only to land and sit on the tarmac for up to an hour before a gate was available to debark. And then cope with overloaded customs and baggage delays when the crush of incoming flights finally arrived en masse. Or sat at another airport because their flight was held from departure as YYZ couldn't assure a landing time.
I would rate air travel as much more of a crapshoot, and in planning a trip, people give much more of a safety cushion to air travel time than to train, even with the current fiasco with CN. If you have the kind of express flight that you describe, it's a windfall, but not something you can plan.
- Paul
