CanadaPolitics

Much of that involves building dedicated rail so that passenger trains don’t get stuck behind freight trains. Indeed, it looks like Via is going to do that — at least on the Windsor–Quebec City corridor, where 96 per cent of Via trips take place.

I think this is the key? I can't help but think Via is forever fighting the battle with one hand tied behind its back. In theory, if it's not going to be a high speed service, it should at least be price-competitive with intercity buses as rail is a more efficient form of transport. But bus companies don't have to lease the roads from companies that can raise the rates the minute they start to show a profit, or prioritize freight on those roads. If they owned their own lines, they could legit start offering reliable, high-speed service.

It's pretty bad. There are countries where taking a train between cities is an experience akin to taking the bus between neighbourhoods. But we've made it more like the experience of flying, with baggage limitations, infrequent trains, expensive tickets, and dumb limitations on what you can bring onboard.

I long for the day I could go Ottawa-Toronto by simply swiping a card, walking onto the platform with my bag slung over my shoulder and my doggo on his leash in the other hand, and stepping onto the next train, and finding myself any seat which is available.

Instead there's convoluted checks where I need to weigh my bag, put my dog in a crate, and buy my ticket a month in advance to get a reasonable price, and getting an assigned seat. Literally nothing about the logistics of train travel necessitates such a high friction experience.

Yeah, as always defining what's good and what's bad is a waste of time. It has a LOT of room for improvement, at the very least it should own the tracks and be able to prioritize its own trains as it sees fit. HSR is a faraway dream at the moment, even in the Windsor-QC corridor where it's so obvious it hurts.

The problem in my opinion is the focus on branding Via around "luxury" travel. As nice as the comfy seats are (even for the cheapest econo fare), it really should be more like GO in terms of being cheap, "boring," and fairly reliable. Euro-trains have very basic bus-like interiors, and that's really where we need to be. Make the trains boring, fast, reliable, and cheap.

The funny thing is, high-speed rail actually has a much lower op-ex than our sluggish system. The biggest expense (other than building the system) is the cost of labour for staffing the cabins. The energy costs are pennies per passenger, the trains need very little maintenance (compared to a jet aircraft), the tracks need even less (again, compared to roads, runways, etc), so the real op-ex cost is just having human beings on it. A train that goes twice as fast pays out half as much human-hours per fare, so it starts to make sense why JR's Sinkansen, SNCF's TGV, or Renfe are basically the only forms of transport that are actually cashflow positive once externalities are considered. ("free" access to roads, free pollution, subsidies for air travel, etc)