Province cites five factors for why Alberta isn’t ready
Last week the province issued its findings on whether Alberta should build a high-speed rail line from Edmonton to Calgary. The answer in short: no way. The Standing Committee on Alberta’s Economic Future began studying the idea in November 2013. Sixty-three oral presentations and 78 written submissions on the pros and cons of the Alberta bullet train led the committee to five conclusions.
Despite the burgeoning population and heavy traffic along the Highway 2 corridor the commission found that ridership on such a rail line simply would not be sufficient to justify the expense of the system pegged at $5.2 billion to build and about $100 million annually to run.
That doesn’t mean the government has ruled it out forever. The final report recommends leaving the door open to private companies that may want to undertake high-speed rail. This includes developing a regulatory framework specifically for passenger rail and possibly helping to purchase land along the route.
This is good news for Liberal MLA Kent Hehr who sat on the committee and filed a minority report in response to its findings. In it Hehr writes “we heard compelling testimony from entrepreneurs in this province who believe high-speed rail can be completed without the need for financial assistance from government…. What should be of concern is the establishing of the robust regulatory conditions to allow for this exciting project to be built.”
Bill Cruickshanks and Jack Crawford have been working together for over a decade to convince the government and potential investors that their company Alberta High-Speed Rail Incorporated can design and build a profitable high-speed rail line through the north-south corridor without government subsidies.
Cruickshanks says his company can do it for about $3.5 billion. He says the initial cost of the line is the main impediment to realizing the dream but he points out many rail lines in North America are over a century old and have long since recovered their initial construction costs and become profitable. He says investors have expressed interest in funding the line privately and he hopes the government begins developing the relevant regulations quickly.
“I think the government of Alberta has been interested in this for a long time but it is not something that ever shows up as being the number 1 priority because there’s always 20 other things that are more important” says Cruickshanks.
Transportation professor Matti Siemiatycki of the University of Toronto also presented to the standing committee. His advice is much different. Siemiatycki says the Calgary-Edmonton corridor is busy but the real traffic congestion issues are inside communities not between them.
“Your better investments for rapid transit is to focus on your cities” he says. “You could alleviate a lot of the congestion by improving urban transportation.” He says a high-speed rail line through the corridor would be politically appealing but regrettable due to the enormous cost likely low ridership and traffic congestion still plaguing the urban cores.
Siemiatycki points to the fact that only two of the world’s two dozen high-speed rail lines turn a profit or operate without heavy public subsidy — the Tokyo-Osaka and Paris-Lyon lines. All the other networks run in regions that are much more heavily and densely populated than the Alberta corridor which only has 2.4 million people.
The first high-speed line in the Western Hemisphere will run from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Construction began in October of last year and is expected to finish in 2029. The current population of the region is 20 million but it’s expected to be over 40 million by the time the 560-kilometre line is operational. However many in California are questioning whether the population size will ever justify the $68 billion price tag.
An Amtrak business plan for a bullet train network connecting major cities in the northeast U.S. rings in at $151 billion. Studies for lines between Houston and Dallas and Chicago and southern Illinois and through the Midwest have all come to the same conclusion — it may never be worth it.
A study of high-speed lines in Asia and Europe by American transportation policy analyst Baruch Feigenbaum found that not only do all but two lines in the world continue to lose money but it is almost always cheaper and faster to buy a plane ticket between the same destinations than a bullet-train ticket.
“The studies still don’t show a benefit [so] why is there such an appetite at least to keep examining it?” says Siemiatycki. “High-speed rail is one of those types of infrastructure that is really seductive.”
This is not likely to be the last time Alberta examines the potential for our own bullet train as the province has conducted feasibility studies into high-speed rail since 1975.
The answer is always the same.
