thoughts on Alto?https://www.altotrain.ca/enpersonally I think it is a shitty project, deeply political and cynical. the timeframe and expense estimates are massive and no real work has been done yet, as is typical for North American HSR.I am all in favor of HSR on the Quebec-Windsor corridor, it makes sense, however as someone who doesn't live in one of the major cities it NEEDS to be supplemented with a good regional service. Unfortunately there is zero political will for that in Canada right now since most of the entire country's population lives in one of the big corridor cities, and the areas outside of it are very conservative and don't give a shit about rail.I think it would make much more sense to focus on improving Via first, giving it its own trackage and improving the quality of the existing corridor services. But Via seems to be coasting by on what they have until Alto comes to kill off their core business - and then what will happen to Via's non-corridor services, or indeed the parts of the corridor that Alto doesn't cover?And there is a massive political operation surrounding Alto to where all criticism of it is heavily suppressed and strawmanned. Although it's not hard to strawman given that most of its opposition is retarded nimby farmers throwing a fit even though we have no idea where the tracks will actually go through yet.But yeah, it's so political that they have routed it through specific cities just because they are tossup ridings and the LPC wants to win votes in those areas. What a mess.
>>2080971Just fucking build it.The regional services you are talking about will happen organically. Once you have something to drive demand for transportation, the rest of the network will get built. The cities will add more buses servicing the station. The neighbouring suburbs or exurbs will start looking at intercity connections. The larger nodes like Toronto and Montreal with existing commuter services into the neighbouring municipalities will add more trips and off-commuter trains to facilitate transfers.No one is going to nationalize CP/CN land (unfortunately), so while building along the existing right-of-way is theoretically appealing it's a devil in the details. A lot of this railway land was given out before Canada's "modern" (like late 1800's IIRC) legal framework for land ownership, so it includes legal rights that other landholders just don't have. Like, railway land includes air rights and mineral rights! It's insane we never harmonized this shit. But it makes it much more expensive to take away that land from the railways. So what do you do? Do you lease the right-of-way to build tracks that... are basically direct competitors to the railway that owns the land?As expensive as it is to draw a new right-of-way, it's the best way forward and makes things like high-speed rail possible (which wouldn't be possible on the existing right-of-ways).I'll agree that Alto probably should have been packaged politically as the most ambitious format possible. Like, promise "phase 2" as an extension all the way to Windsor, promise "phase 3" as high-speed rail to New York City (never mind that they don't have HSR to connect to), promise "phase 4" as a new Atlantic Canada route. Doesn't matter if it's impossible, or unfunded. Just hold out the promise that it's going to happen (in 30-50 years) and give people a vision for what it looks like.
