Canada's high-speed rail plans reveal transportation conundrum

Taking a train from Montreal to Ottawa recently, McGill professor John Gradek kept an eye on the speed. He noted the train topped out at 160 kilometres per hour. That may be fast for a car, but it’s slow by train standards; high speed trains in Europe and Asia reach speeds of up to 460 kilometres per hour.

In Canada, however, Gradek’s was a fast trip: Canadian passenger trains seldom reach speeds of 160 km/h. The Montreal-Ottawa route managed it somewhere between Casselman, Ont. and Alexandria, Ont. on a section of track that VIA Rail owns and doesn’t share with freight trains, which otherwise take precedence. Passengers traveling by train between Toronto and Ottawa joke about the overly optimistic 4.5-hour trip estimate which is seldom met due to delays from passing freight trains.

“One hundred and sixty kilometres per hour is not high speed,” said Gradek, whose field is supply networks and aviation. “Canadians deserve high-speed rail.”

VIA’s trains are further slowed by tracks that turn and pass through many small towns, which restrict speed. High-speed rail would require straight, off-grid tracks to reach top speeds, with new stations and tracks outside cities, which would mean whole new infrastructure for VIA.

At the end of October, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the federal government is reviewing bids for a high-speed rail network between Toronto and Quebec City that would reach speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour, almost double the speed of VIA’s current trains. 

This project could be the beginning of a transportation shift that would revolutionize travel between Canadian cities and significantly cut transportation emissions — which account for about a quarter of Canada’s total — by offering a greener alternative to cars and planes.

However, with a price tag for Toronto to Quebec City high-speed rail that will likely be in the hundreds of billions of dollars according to experts, there is still debate around whether a high-speed rail is the best use of Canada’s resources for reducing transportation emissions.

Why taking the train could be Canada’s climate fix

The average Canadian takes an inter-city rail trip only once every 10 years; in Germany, the average person takes an inter-city train 25 times per year.

“Rail ridership in Canada is extremely low compared to our peer countries,” said Nate Wallace, clean transportation program manager at Environmental Defence. “One of the key pieces to reducing carbon emissions in the transport sector is to grow rail ridership.” 

The difference in travel choices is reflected in the planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions of each country: Canada produces 2.3 times more transportation emissions per capita than Germany.

“These transportation alternatives make a really huge difference because transportation is about a quarter of Canada’s emissions and the part of it that’s attributed to passenger travel is about half of that, so it’s a really, really, big slice of the pie,” he said.

However, it is not entirely fair to compare Canada to Germany; no two points in Germany are further apart than even Quebec City and London, Ont. 

That’s cold comfort to those trying to travel in Canada by rail. It takes five days to travel between Toronto and Vancouver by train and passengers have to pay extra for a sleeper car instead of a coach seat. 

Instead of taking trains, most Canadians opt to travel by car or plane even for short distances, like getting from Montreal to Toronto or Calgary to Edmonton. However, these modes of transport produce considerably more emissions than trains. For example, getting from Toronto to Montreal by plane produces 186 kilograms of CO2 equivalent or 104 kilograms by car. The current train, even running on diesel, only releases 55 kilograms per passenger.

Gradek said converting Canadians to using rail to get between cities would drastically reduce emissions, especially if Canada built electric high-speed rail. However, Wallace said Canada’s current trains aren’t competitive with cars and planes due to their unreliability, long travel times and lack of public transit at the destination.

Major investments would be needed to make our trains more convenient and reliable to get people to make the switch, he said.

VIA Rail’s existential crisis

In 2023, VIA Rail, the Crown corporation that operates Canada’s passenger rail network, carried 4.1 million passengers all year.

To put that in perspective, the TTC does that in a matter of days and the Montreal metro and OC Transpo in a matter of weeks, said Matti Siemiatycki, a planning professor and director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto.

Gradek says one of the major reasons VIA’s service suffers is because they don’t own the track, making them unreliable and slow. Freight companies Canadian Pacific and Canadian National own the tracks, giving their trains priority and forcing VIA passenger trains to wait as freight trains pass at 35 miles per hour.

“It totally screws all your travel plans and if you miss your train, you’re not going to see another one for multiple hours,” Wallace said.

Because of these issues, Siemiatycki said the company is having a bit of an existential crisis. 

Since building a high-speed rail network is so expensive, many suggest setting up existing passenger trains on new tracks on what is known as a high-frequency rail line. However, Siemiatycki said this option wouldn’t be enough of an improvement to compete with air and car travel. All tracks ultimately lead back to high-speed rail, he said.

“Strategically, this is a real conundrum,” he said.

High-frequency rail would reduce the travel time from Montreal to Toronto from five hours to four, but with high-speed rail, this trip would be 2.5 hours, Wallace said. With high-speed rail, it would take about half as long as driving, and about the same time as flying, which is “really crucial” to getting those trips to switch, he said. When a day trip from Toronto to Montreal becomes possible — say, to catch a hockey game and make it home in time for bed — that’s a game-changer for the critical mass needed to support such an endeavour.

Getting around Canada without a car

However, with costs that would take generations to pay off, Siemiatycki says improving public transit within cities might give Canadians more bang for their buck to reduce transportation emissions than high-speed rail.

He thinks investing in improved transit would be a better use of public resources to reduce transportation emissions, allowing people to forgo the use of cars while travelling within their city.

For example, the Evergreen extension to Vancouver’s fully electric SkyTrain, which opened in 2016, cost around $1.4 billion and carries 32,000 people daily from suburban areas to the downtown core. Such projects are significantly less expensive than high-speed rail and would help people be less reliant on cars.

“Our cities, compared to our peers, are woeful in terms of underinvestment in public transit over the last decades. In many parts of our cities, it’s very challenging to get around without a car,” he said.

According to 2021 Census data, about two thirds of Canadians live in suburbs, which are associated with higher emissions from transportation as a result of travelling greater distances and relying on a car, Siemiatyicki said. 

Public transit in the city you land in is also important to convince people to choose rail over driving. Passengers should be able to hop on an urban transit system or rail connection that’s convenient and reliable to get to their final destination, which for many travelling to another city, is in the suburbs.

High-speed rail works well in Europe because it's designed to get people from one city-centre to another, Siemiatycki said. In Canada, it may not be as convenient for people if they need to get to the suburbs and there isn’t sufficient public transit.  

“There’s a lot of ifs there that need to be worked out in this system before we can decide that this is an environmental winner,” he said.