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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.
This story has been corrected to remove the travel time between Toronto and Vancouver by high speed rail.
Comments
“ With high-speed rail, it would take six hours to get between Toronto and Vancouver, Gradek said” that’s 711 kilometers per hour; that would be exciting in the Roger’s Pass. I think there is an error here.
You are correct. Thanks and just fixed it
Regarding the cost statement of billions to build, we spent approximately $32B for a pipeline that contributes, and will contribute, mightily to the GHG emissions that are warming the country and negatively impacting our health and safety in so many ways. How can this cost not then be embraced?
Very good point. Another fair comparison is with our extremely generous road networks which cover roughly 50% of a city's entire land area when parking lots are included. Why does rail and all forms of transit become the focus of critic's ire on costs when roads are never "paid off" and receive automatic budget approval? The capital cost of the country's entire road network would be several trillions if it was ever tallied up, and that's before ongoing operating cost (maintenance, replacement, etc.) is even considered. Moreover, HSR all over Europe has displaced thousands of short and medium haul fights and resulted in major efficiences in lowering emissions.
Cost is only one consideration. Value is another and is arguably greater.
The conundrum is pretty simple to me: wealthier people would love to have fast and cheap transportation to disperse cities, but the majority of people never or rarely have a need to travel far out of their place of residence. They frequently need to move locally and would also love to have fast and cheap transportation to go to work, visit friends, go to the hockey game etc.
Total up the annual people-distance* of intercity travel and compare that to the people-distance of local travel. Do the same for people-CO2 emissions**, and then compare the cost of building the intercity rail infrastructure or the local transportation (bus, light rail) infrastructure.
I strongly suspect that you will find the greatest benefit and shorter payback associated with the local solution. Let’s vote on that! Canada is not Germany!
* people-distance is the total number of people multiplied by the average distance that each one travels in each trip
** people-CO2 is the total number of people multiplied by the average amount of CO2 that they emit in each trip
When you have major population bases in big cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver you have lots of intercity travel. When big cities are fairly close together you have a critical mass. When you have a substantial critical mass then demand is seen to skyrocket when induced by a very efficient new piece of rail infrastructure. Induced demand and the network effect were not discussed in this piece, which is very odd.
City pairs are an ideal place to begin planning for dedicated HSR corridors with secondary branches coming a bit later. The GTA and Metro Montreal offer a population base of over 12 million people. Add the Golden Horseshoe's Hamilton and extend to Windsor, then crossing the border to connect with directly adjacent US cities of Detroit and Buffalo, and another border extension to Albany (albeit with a longer US section) and you've got a demand market of over 20 million people.
Note that the GTA and Montreal already have mature transit networks, though they indeed could use improvement.
Well waddaya know, that's not far from the London-Paris nexus.
The Eurostar takes 2 hours 15 minutes to travel from inner London (St. Pancras) to inner Paris (Gare du Nord). Both stations are well connected to very extensive regional transit service.
Presumably a Canadian HSR rail service will be placed at downtown stations like Toronto's Union Station, which also has many transit options in the vicinity. A 2.5 hour downtown GTA-Montreal HSR service has the potential to dramatically increase ridership demand because it outcompetes highway and air travel on efficiency, especially with a frequent daily service coupled with an existing local frequent transit network.
Improved ridership helps improve revenue, which helps offset ticket price increases over time. When you have a reliable standard shuttle schedule offering stable service, ridership and revenue will usually be reliably consistent.
Suburban car dependency is an issue, and the best way to counter it is to couple better rail transit with better land use planning and appropriate zoning. But suburbia should never dictate whether to bring HSR to a major city core that is already transit rich. Living in a plastic palace on the periphery will have very little effect either way on the comfort of reading a book and being able to stretch your legs and use a washroom while zipping between Toronto and Montreal.
The big reason the Maritimes have extra senators is because our founding fathers knew that otherwise we founding people would be forgotten as the rest of the country opened up. They were to be our voice in government absent a majority of votes. How prophetic they were. And of course no one else sees the value except us these days; just some irrelevant eastern entitlement that s outlived it day to the rest of you.
And we ve even lost the reason ourselves. Silly Maritimes argue your case for you too; maybe brainwashed from their time out west making a living that was stripped from us here so you could prosper.
Also the national railroad was to keep the country accessible as a country from sea to shining sea. Or whatever the language was.
We re still here, guys and still part of this country even if we re usually left off national maps and strategies( I worked in Ottawa for decades believe me I spent my time correcting drafts of those omissions).
So let me just say that even while we might seem a waste of money to you, small and unimportant, we are the eastern face of Canada and north of the USA here. There may well be a role for us to play in the uncertain future that you will rue losing.
When that superfast rail gets built you might find it in your interests to keep us available to you. We got ocean, ports, cables. first face to Europe etc. Don t worry so much about usage because we dont have the numbers. We have other value added.