Skip to main content

TGV in Canada....its baaaaaack!

The wet dream of some bureaucrat the idea of building a high-speed train between Quebec City and Windsor.  A distance of 1,100 km with thousands of viaducts.  The Mexicans are, right now building a tourist train in the Yucatan and not a high-speed train and the total bill is just around US$ 20 billion, and that's going to be a diesel train.

It's a stupid project in Mexico, and it is even more idiotic here in Canada.  Problem #1 population density is just not there.  There are currently 20 flights a day with an average flight time of 75 minutes at a cost of C$ 250 return (so $125 each way).

Looking at the pure transport economic perspective:  Right now you can leave Montreal downtown at 6 am, and catch the 7:00 AM flight to Toronto, and be in the business district around 8:30 am.  So a 150-minute door to door.  The train has to equal that measure to be worthwhile.  The distance is 560 KM and a TGV  average speed of 320km/h so it could notionally do the trip in 200 minutes.  So the travel time is 50 minutes longer on the train than on the aircraft (add 20 minutes of traffic and you are closely matched).  However, for this to work the train would need a minimum of 12 departures per day.  Currently, there are ten per day, so again an additional two per day and the two mods of transport are comparable.  In terms of costs to passengers, the plane can be as low as $80 each way and the train NOW can be as low as $40.  

So right now, you can take a VIA Rail train from Montreal to Toronto (on average 5 hours) but as high-speed train would cut the travel time to 100 minutes the train would win.  The big difference is in cost to society.  The plane ticket pays for all services provided, from airport to traffic control to luggage handling, the cost includes everything, whereas there is virtually no way for the train to pay its way.  The French government indicated that the cost to build the TGV is 20 million Euro per Kilometer, A $65 billion price tag at 5% interest rate with a loan to value of 80% interest expenses alone would be 800 million per annum, or about $250 per passenger... or $1000 per round trip (10 trips a day 365 days a year, both direction) so 2.9 million passengers per annum.  

BTW as of today (08/02/22) there were a total of half a million passengers transported on Air Canada and Porter airlines (95% of all Montreal to Toronto flights) including connecting flights to Pierson airport.  Bottom line, for a TGV to be reasonable with a load factor of 80% then traffic between the two cities would have to rise eightfold.  Even then, the infrastructure cost per passenger of the TGV would be substantially more than C$250 each way.

Even in terms of pollution, all the electricity would have to be generated by green energy, which is not the case in Ontario where 95% of the rail link will be located -- so not that green either

This has all been debated in the Canadian press and the funniest bit is that again this is seen as a plot to give business to Quebec enterprises, specifically SNC Lavalin and Bombardier.  Only problem, Bombardier is no longer in the rail business and SNC has no special knowledge of rail transport.  knowledge 







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

what people get wrong about tariffs

 The issue is simple. What percentage of the economy is dependent on tariff goods? The truth, is that the US economy is far more closed than people understand. People genuinely believe that all manufacturing has ceased to exist in the United States all given to China on the altar of woke policy the truth can be further from That statement. Only about 15% of US GDP is related to foreign trade. Of that amount, slightly more than half is from Canada in Mexico. And half of that is energy. What that means, is that about 7% of US GDP is tariff dependent. The proof in the pudding, is how little money tariff generates. People think that 30 or 50 billion is a lot it’s not in an economy that has $3 trillion. The impact on the US economy will be less visible but not absent. Inflation hasn’t occurred yet first because tests have hardly started to bite, but more importantly it’s such a small percent of the economy. Now certain things are critical. The rare earth metals from China were critical....
Post a Comment
Read more

The end of Tesla?

 it takes a special kind of idiot, to think that he can antagonize his entire customer base, and think that it will not impact his business. When Elon Musk went to work for Donald Trump, and created the doge department, he antagonized every liberal, and these people represent 90% of his client base.That’s not a brilliant move. Now Elon Musk is worth hundreds of billions of dollar, so he shouldn’t care a great deal, however, he needs to care because of several other issues. The cyber truck has been a disaster, most have had to be recalled because of defective glue, it’s not a truck, it’s not a car, it’s noisy, relatively uncomfortable, but great as a development platform. What Tesla has learned in making car manufacturing more seamless is truly amazing. The problem was that Elon Musk was so pissed with the Democrats, and with Joe Biden, in particular because of some slight, which were just plain stupid too. By the way, that he decided to support with hundreds of millions of dollar, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Demographics

 I am preparing a kind of family tree for our children so that they know where they came from.  In my family I am the only survivor, although my brother and sister died recently they were both in their seventies (a story I told already).    It was a fun process, but it provided more than that.  First, I married relatively young I was 26 when I married and nearly 30 when our first child was born.   I was looking at my ancestors.  On my mother's side, she had 6 siblings, Four died before the age of 30, two in war, and two from illnesses.  Only she and a single sister survived.   The two boys had a child each but they died in WWII, and the other sister died as an infant.   what is interesting is that every one of my mother's siblings had children in their early 20s.   I know that my mom was hardly 20 when my brother was born.    What is remarkable is that among our friends, we are the only ones to have fou...
Post a Comment
Read more