Kingston will ruin Alto High-Speed Rail for the whole Corridor
This podunk town is not important enough to make demands of us.
Oh boy howdy, don’t you folks love political interference in essential infrastructure projects! I sure do love having the design of my essential infrastructure altered for political considerations! Haven’t we all been looking at the plans for Alto High-Speed Rail and asking ourselves “hmm, how can this involve more political interference in the design process?”
If that remark resembles you, then boy do I have exciting news to rock your world! Alto High-Speed Rail is about to get fucked! Steven MacKinnon, Minister of Transportation for the Carney Liberal government—and notorious enemy of unionized labour—has directed Alto to pursue a “southern corridor” option for the Alto HSR alignment between Toronto and Ottawa.
What this means in practice, according to a very helpful graphic provided by the Toronto Star in their above-linked piece, is that Alto will no longer take a straight shot from Toronto to Ottawa. After Peterborough—a small locality only included as a stop because it was on the direct path between Ontario’s capital and Canada’s capital and could easily be bypassed by express trains—Alto will now have to add hundreds of extra kilometres of track to curve downwards towards Kingston, and then back upwards towards Ottawa.
Even if an “express” train bypasses Kingston, another small locality mainly notable for being a university town, this large detour will likely add at least an hour of additional travel time between Toronto and Ottawa. This defeats the entire purpose of “high-speed rail”. Such a capitulation to Kingston will compromise the entire nature of the project, and we now risk more detours and curves being added to satisfy other small municipalities that may legally be considered “cities”, but are in reality small towns with orders of magnitude smaller populations, best served by existing VIA rail intercity service.
Adding all of this additional track will not come at a free cost. It will massively balloon the cost of this infrastructure project by billions of dollars, and at the same time make the infrastructure function at a significantly degraded level, all to satisfy a small town that, if I may be rather blunt, does not deserve to have this. I apologize for the offence that the people of Kingston will surely feel…but it is true. They do not deserve to ruin this for the rest of us.
To be fair, there were some valid criticisms to be had of the route before Minister MacKinnon issued this edict for a Kingston stop. Indeed, is it really necessary to have two stops in Greater Montréal, one in Montréal proper and another just a short distance outside in Laval? But on the other hand, anglophone Canadians are being absurd if they think that Québec City, the capital of Québec, home of the National Assembly, and a significant cultural heritage site, should not have a stop.
As for Trois-Rivières, just like Peterborough, it is right on the straight path, nestled between Montréal and Québec City, and thus can be easily bypassed by express service while also served by local high-speed trains willing to go a couple dozen km/h slower than the absolute peak.
I understand that Kingston will naturally feel left out, but what they fail to consider is that Alto will be assimilating VIA Rail’s Corridor assets, including their trains and track subdivisions. They are not being abandoned, and they will have the ability to access Alto HSR by transferring from conventional intercity rail. They may indeed benefit from being able to use some Alto right-of-ways rather than operating on freight rails, and thus even a train limited to 160 km/h may at least reach that speed more often and not be limited to a crawl to prioritize CN Rail’s freight traffic.
But as for high-speed rail, it is an infrastructure project meant to move large volumes of people quickly between large population centres. It is intended to not only replace a significant quantity of highway traffic, but also to get rid of the massive amount of air travel between Toronto, Ottawa, and Montréal, replacing fossil fuels burned in the air with electrified trains. This is actually why Air Canada is part of the Alto consortium; they want to replace these competitive domestic flights with more profitable flights to international destinations, and have you transfer from air-to-rail on one itinerary.
Under this design paradigm, a smaller town only makes sense to be a local stop if it’s already on the straight path and will not cause a track detour that degrades performance for the vast majority of passengers. The local/express modality of train service does not work if a local stop cannot be easily bypassed by express trains, and you will spend far less time at peak speed if you are slowing down for a passenger stop, or for a curved track segment to avoid derailment.
The capitulation of the Carney Liberals to Kingston will fundamentally compromise the Alto High-Speed Rail project in a way that cannot be mitigated. It will be worse for the vast majority of passengers, to satisfy a small town that as of the date of publication has refused to densify around their existing intercity rail station.
If Kingston increases their population, builds up their local infrastructure, and transitions from a town into a proper city, there could be a case for them to have high-speed rail. But right now, that case does not exist, and if they force this, they are going to ruin Alto for the rest of us.