Often (in particular Southwestern ONT) the population centres that might be connected by regional or commuter rail are too close together for rail to be time competitive vs commuting by car.
I once did a little study to try to connect Ontario's top 10 cities by population and found that 6 out of the 10 cities were within the Greater Golden Horseshoe where the travel distances allow the automobile to compete on travel time.
I don't really know what to make of this. What evidence do you have that cities close together make rail less attractive as opposed to more attractive? GO Transit makes its whole business case on short, driveable trips. Just about every urban region, like the Rhine area for example, has a dense network of regional rail lines combined with cities close together. Speaking of Germany, the vast majority of its ridership is on short trips of
21 km or less.
I don't think of Southern Ontario, outside the GTA, as being particularly dense...
In any case, the spatial arrangement of density matters just as much as the raw scale of density since rail travel can lead to extremely difficult 'last mile' issues. If you get off a train in, I dunno, Barrie, what exactly are you supposed to do? Outside of the GTA (and Ottawa) most Ontario cities aren't very core centric at all.
Much of Europe isn't particularly dense either. A smaller city like Barrie not being core centric doesn't stop it from having good rail service. Barrie and other cities like it are small enough so it's quick and easy to drive to the train station. The statistics bear that out too - when the Barrie GO line reopened ridership was triple what they were expecting, IIRC.
Yup, bingo. And creating a transit system which allows quick and efficient travel between Mississauga, Brampton, Hamilton, Markham, Vaughan, and Durham Region, as opposed to those cities and Union Station, is next to impossible given low route demand, distance and access time issues.
P.S. For most cities in Ontario, it seems like buses would be the most feasible solution... Lots of countries which developed after WW2 rely on buses for regional intercity transport (i.e. Israel). They're really not bad and, outside of Toronto, Ontario's highways are pretty congestion free. The ability to serve specific micro-destinations (e.g. University of Guelph direct) would make up for any time lost against a notional regional high speed rail network and wouldn't take billions of dollars in funding.
I've seen stop and go traffic well outside of the GTA. But this thread is about regional rail, so it isn't really about anything outside the GTA/Golden Horseshoe. Interesting that you mention Israel, that's not really true of that country anymore. They have invested heavily in passenger rail since 1990, and have grown ridership ten-fold since then. What they have built in a couple decades makes our lack of rail investment look even more sad. By the way, Ontario didn't primarily develop after WW2. The settlement patterns were firmly established here by the 1800s. Israel, OTOH, did develop mostly after the war. Toronto is a much older city than, say, Tel Aviv.
It may be true that southern Ontario has the same density as France or Germany, but there are large parts of France and Germany that aren't dense enough to support rail. Southern Ontario is about the same size as England yet it only has one quarter the population.
I'm not sure what point you're making. Ontario outside the GTA may not be hyper-dense but it's still dense enough to support far better rail service than it has. By the way, Ireland has a fraction of the population of Southern Ontario but it has a far better passenger rail system. I don't know why people keep bringing up places like England and Japan in discussions like this, it really is a red herring.
Also Europe has always had that density so rail was able to get established before competitive mode of transportation could get established. Southern Ontario may one day be dense enough to support a competitive regional rail network but retrofitting it in will be expensive and difficult. That may not be a challenge anyone wants to undertake.
And yet every time GO expands, ridership increases. People take whatever mode makes sense, they're not glued to cars the way people think. Rail is weak here because service is slow, infrequent, unreliable, or simply non-existent. If we invested in rail the way that other countries do, rail would be much more successful. Countries like Israel and Australia show that rail can be successful even in new or sparsely populated countries. Our regional rail system sucks because we choose to make it suck, and for no other reason.
