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.
