Canada’s High Frequency Rail Should be High Speed too
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- Опубліковано 25 жов 2023
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Recently, Canada's High Frequency Rail project entered its RFP stage, but many still have reservations about the project, especially its naming. Can high-speed rail really not be frequent? Do we have to settle for slower trains to get high frequency?
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Ever wondered why your city's transit just doesn't seem quite up to snuff? RMTransit is here to answer that, and help you open your eyes to all of the different public transportation systems around the world!
Reece (the RM in RMTransit) is an urbanist and public transport critic residing in Toronto, Canada, with the goal of helping the world become more connected through metros, trams, buses, high-speed trains, and all other transport modes.
In Germany even on routes where trains can "only" run at 200-250kph like Berlin to Hamburg for example., there are still like 12 trains per hour per direction
through different connections there is a HSR connection between Berlin and Frankfurt up to every 10 minutes as well, even tho you have to change trains for some of them, they arent actually slower
A US equivalent would be from Chicago to St. Louis, which runs at about 100kph five times a DAY.
@@willythemailboy2 *oof*
@@willythemailboy2100kph equivalent to 200-250kph😂😅
???????
@@bedri1 I'm highlighting how terrible rail service is in the US. So I'm using a rail link between two cities in the US of reasonably comparable size and distance to Berlin and Hamburg, then saying how our service differs in terms of both speed and frequency.
There are no 250kph rail lines in the US. I think there is one line in Florida that approaches 200kph but that's it.
Prime example: the Norwegian high-speed train to Oslo airport runs on a 10 mintmute schedule.
Many cities are happy if their most important bus lines are running on a 10 minute schedule, but they're able to provide that on a high speed line
Heh, I'd love 10 min bus on my town. Here a 100k town can easily have 30min/1h frequencies on urban bus, it's pathetic
Or just all of the Shinkansen or the Paris-Lyon TGV line or the Cologne-Frankfurt line in the future (I think we're just above 10 minutes here right now). You could probably find similar frequencies around the globe
@@jan-lukas Cologne Frankfurt is 4 trains per hour, but the the closest trains are 11 minutes appart.
@@jmiquelmb thing is, all the trains connecting these cities within an hour might be ICE high-speed trains, but from different lines, heading to different destinations.
In Oslo all the trains are from the very same line
@@jan-lukasThe Shanghai-Hangzhou HSR has even better frequency.
You are absolutely right. The politicians are are just prepping to 'under' deliver on the HFR/HSR in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City corridor. For many of our citizens, HSR/HFR is just a concept we have not be exposed to and thus we cannot picture it. If we lived in Europe/Japan, then we will understand the difference and what each achieves. You are doing a great job on this. I remembered travelling all over Germany with DB, rail pass in December 1999. I was travelling from Munich back to Frankfurt before my flight out of the frankfurt the next day. I found that I had to make a quick trip to Kassel for a quick emergency meeting. As soon as I arrived in Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, I was able to leave some of my extra things in a locker at the station and was given a timetable for the ICE trains between Frankfurt and Kassel which were about 200km apart. I was able to leave and arrive back in under 6 hours as my meeting only took 1 hour. This was available in 1999. The flexibility of travelling by train and the various options gave me the piece of mind to return back to Frankfurt for that evening. Here in Canada, if we can even reduce travel time between Montreal to Toronto to 3.5 hours, you will see a big jump in passenger numbers, resulting in increase in frequencies. I am surprised the HSR/HSF agency is not listening to the DB consultants. I would have thought they would have given better advice.
Being familiar with VIA service, checking the timetable for the Shinkansen was... beyond a shock and eye opening. Travelling 450 km, I figured there'd be maybe a train every couple of hours. Nope. Something like 20 trains _every hour_. For a distance approaching that of between Toronto and Montreal! Fell in love with the system immediately. :)
no trains actually currentk run at 450km anywhere. max in japan is 300 or 320 kmh
@@Flowformed Travelling 450km in distance... not travelling at 450 km/h. :) I traveled from Tokyo to Kyoto in that first trip.
@@KannikCat i am stupid
Indonesian HSR currently having hourly frequency on the weekend and 2 hourly on the weekdays because it's still on trial commercial operations, and luckily is always busy, now they are plan to make it every 30 minutes. Hopefully indonesia hsr in the future can also match the Japanese Shinkansen frequency that is every 3 minutes.
Java should be able to reach that if they really invest the money. It's literally the only island in the world more populated than the central island in Japan (Honshu), and it's even smaller.
@@jmiquelmbdon't know how much the train costs and how much money most people there have, but still it's enormous ridership potential, even when you ignore that Japan's population is concentrated in the non-hilly areas
Incremental improvements are really good to see - the most important thing is getting the right infrastructure in place first!
@@jan-lukasAs of now the utility of the HSR is limited since it connects two cities that are only ~150 km apart, but once it gets extended all the way to Surabaya (the second largest metro area) it'll undoubtedly be the primary choice for intra-island travel in Java.
Jakarta-Surabaya was among the top 10 busiest air travel corridors in the world before the pandemic.
@@jan-lukas so the Train cost around 10 USD per person, and with current frequency 1 train hourly per direction (around 12 to 13 train per direction per day) it's carrying 15K passenger per day (the train capacity of 600 passenger 8 car long per train) quite impressive and most of them are usually traveling with plane before the high speed train operational and now they are switching to high speed train. Hopefully the number of passengers continue going up and most people I talked to say hopefully the government are able to rerouting the high speed train to city central station giving the amount of people using the HSR
I believe they're branding it as "HFR" because the original plans where akin to Brightline, a system that isn't HSR, so they wanted to change the branding to make it sound cooler then a slightly faster/more frequent train
Indeed. The HFR feels more a marketing strategy to explain people that this is a more affordable plan to get a better rail system. The high speed cost had been set to be at least 60b$, which would probably not pass the public opinion so VIA came with a plan which is more budget conscious. At the end, it seems it was a bad idea : promising high speed, with a big asterisk, it’s probably easier to sell.
In Victoria, Australia, we have spent billions on our commuter distance regional rail network. We have tripled service on the busiest line, making it more or less like a suburban service, and drastically improved it on all but one corridor (Seymour), whilst raising the maximum speed of the trains from 115kmh to 160kmh. Not high speed by any means, but proof that speed and frequency are not mutually exclusive.
Before the investment, ridership was 7 million per annum. Just prior to the pandemic, ridership was 35 million, with the busiest line (Melbourne to Geelong) carrying almost half of the total. The other lines have all performed solidly, despite major problems with reliability on the Latrobe Valley line.
If only NSW and the other states can achieve the same
They call it HFR because they didn't want to go HSR, but still needed some branding to differentiate the proposal from existing service.
Trains on Japan are such a joy. I wasn't surprised by speed because the Shinkansen (high speed train) go exactly at the same speed as the high speed trains in my country (Spain). What made them miles apart is frequency. While frequencies have gotten worse here after COVID (they lowered the number of trains during the pandemic but never bothered to increase them again afterwards), taking a train from Kyoto to Tokyo was such a frictionless experience. There's one every 2-5 minutes at peak hour, it looks impossible. I was rushing to take one that was leaving soon, and then I remembered that there were several after this one, so I just went to pick some train lunch and didn't even bother to look at the timetables. You can also drink alcohol and it's not frowned upon. I know the logistics are different in a 400 km line between three cities that cover more than 70 million people, but there's no excuse for any dense rich area to not have good train service. North Eastern America has similar demographics than central Japan, as an example. And I bet Netherland-Western Germany must be close too
We can create the same logistics in North America, even outside of the major corridors. We just have to be willing to move people onto the lines. Japan may be able to sustain those frequencies through intercity travelers due to sheer population, we can only achieve the same level of demand in the US if the rail is convenient for daily use. This means the station has to be as convenient as a metro station (walking distance to your destination).
I would argue that "high frequency" means you can just turn up at the station without looking at the timetable, because you know that there will be a train in a few minutes. For a long distance service that takes several hours, that might be every 15-20 minutes, for a local service that takes maybe 5-10 minutes, it would obviously need to be a lot more frequent than that.
10 minutes is the maximum for local services to just turn up, while for me it's probably 30 minutes for long-distance, though on those you usually reserve a seat so you don't have to stand so you know your time anyways
Hourly and half hourly however is a pretty common intercity train frequency. It’s an understandable goal for areas where city pair train frequency is currently abysmal (say 4 trains a day or something like that)
@@jan-lukas The longest interval on the London Overground is 15 minutes which is very much on the outer limit of the "just turn up" principle. In fact most Londoners probably consider having to wait that long as a violation of their human rights 😀 I'm not sure what the maximum is on the Underground but typically it's no more than 3 to 4 minutes, often less.
@@caw25sha The Chesham Branch of the Metropolitan Line is every 30 mins, but that is more like an Overground service.
I don’t feel like turn up and go needs to be the goal for long distance trains. In practice most countries ticketing prevents that anyways by requiring reservations (France, Spain, Italy) or at least making flexible tickets considerably more expensive (Germany). Japan is somewhere in the middle, they have some dedicated non-reserved cars, but you have to reserve a seat if you’re traveling with baggage.
I’d say our German system is one of the few where turning up and getting on is actually practical, but even with the highest tiered ticket, which gives you multiple days to complete your journey, you have to pick a planned connection. It doesn’t matter if you actually use it, but that’s the train where you’ll have your seat reservation and on all others you have no guarantee for a seat. Many trips are taken with the cheaper tickets though, where you are bound to your chosen connection. I’d say the vast majority of trips are taken with at least a few days of planning ahead. If you want to get cheap tickets it’s usually going to be a few weeks ahead.
I’d say a long distance service is frequent if you can make a trip at any reasonable time without needing to plan your day around it. So I’d say half-hourly or better can be reasonably called high frequency. Hourly is fine and 2-hourly is workable. Anything less requires specific planning and will make the train unattractive, if you can’t plan well in advance.
There's usually two factors: higher speed means higher usage, but higher costs for those speeds mean lower usage. So you get a curve with an optimum speed somewhere, where maximum ridership (and thereby frequency) will be achieved.
Technical reasons on the other hand are just not a limit, the limit to any train track is the stations. Theoretically, with the needed technical systems (possibly ETCS L4 or so in the far future), you could digitally couple two trains that aren't actually coupled, thereby making the distance between trains 0. The problem is just to fit all those trains into a station in the city
ETCS 4 is fully autonomous. ETCS 2 which allows for higher speed and train movements or possible ETCS 3 which is semi autonomous.
Uh not sure this is correct?@@chrismckellar9350
The higher speeds don't necessarily mean higher costs, it allows things like better equipment use
@@RMTransit - I agree. Higher speed up to 200kph is less expensive to upgrade and maintain as you are using existing rail corridor infrastructure compared to 300kph or more.
This is wrong. High speed trains do have higher construction costs but what matters for ticket pricing is operations costs. High speed rail has lower operations costs than conventional rail. This is because reducing travel time reduces labour costs and because rolling stock depreciates based on time in operation more so than distance travelled.
Would love to see a series looking at "What would high-speed rail between these cities look like?". Look at stuff like potential routes, potential tech, how it could be achieved for lower costs etc. I've read a lot of amateur engineers doing cost-benefit on HSR in Australia and finding that the government reports massively overestimate the costs (e.g. putting a 50km tunnel under Sydney when you can do it in less than 10km of tunnel).
Frequency in HSR can be achieved if we have separation between the High Speed Trains and the conventional trains. In case of Italy, where the majority of Milan - Rome HSL is separated from the local traffic, there time intervals between the trains are only 5' in the peak time, and aproximatelly 10' the rest of the day. In peak time there are some moments where the "Direct" FR and the "stopping" FR depart on the same time from Rome of Milan. But between the outskirts of Rome and the outskirts of Milan, there is no possibility that the HST will meet a Regional train in front of it.
The irony of a video about fast and frequent rail but with a german train on the thumbnail
DB ICE has been pretty good - the problems that have crept in and made DB puntuality a joke must be largely money 'saving' organisational changes (DB or whoever maintains the railway itself).
Compared internationally DB is not that bad. And to be fast and frequent isn’t the issue of DB. It’s more like the punctuality that is an issue.
Germans love to complain on a high level while the overall service, speed and frequency isn't too bad at all
Check out almost all countries on all continents and then see how wrong your comment is.
You: “wow out of 20 you are 20th!”
The rest of us: “Okay cool. But there are 198 countries so that’s actually 20 out of 198.”
PERSPECTIVE. Learn it.
@@EnjoyFirefighting Right I am regular DB customer. It has some punctuality issues, but if you do proper planning ahead then it won’t be an issue. If you are a business traveler it can be annoying, but otherwise it is not that dramatic to come some minutes too late especially if you take this into account.
I love the corridor attention, it's well overdue, but I hope VIA creates new lines soon outside of the corridor as well. We in the Maritmes used to have great passenger rail, and we still have comparatively dense downtowns (that we're currently reinvesting in) right on the rails/rail ROWs.. in fact, we have a 400km high-quality rail corridor with 750k people connecting most of our major cities that would need minimal investment to get some passenger trains rolling on.
But instead, we get l'Océan, which only serves the less-populated west coast of NB, at a staggeringly slow pace, with 3/week frequency, and train cars older than Bridge on the River Kwai.
I want my region to improve, damnit!
As a french who spent several days taking different trains in Canada, the main problems on the corridor for long distance trip are:
- Very low frequency : Only 6 round trips between Toronto and Montreal isn't enough at all. The best line in terms of frequency seems to be the Toronto - Ottawa line with (only) 9 round trips per day.
- Trains being late : None of my trips with Via Rail came with a delay of less than 15 minutes (and a 90 minute delay on the Montreal - Quebec line as a record)
- Trains are to slow to be really competitive with bus, plane and carpooling.
- Trains seems to be a bit expensive for the service it provides but my french point of view on it can be the cause
So during the time I spent on your trains here, I was thinking on the solutions... I know that the topic of a dedicated HSL here is a bit controversial and wont came without NIMBYs opposition. Also we need to solve this problems quickly, not loosing 20 years to get something to be done. So before talking about HSL that could be a real nightmare (ask UK citizens about HS2), Canada should probably start by the imporving on existing lines that could benefit to freight trains, regional and national trains. For instance:
- Making the line totaly double track between Windsor and Quebec and replace level crossing by bridges where it's possible.
- Improving signalling systems
- Uprading track infrastructure to allow speeds up to 125 mph with the perspective to cut travel times (by 15, 20% ?)
- Electrification ? Someday because Via rail already choose diesel type locomotive to replace existing trains.
- Improving frequency on Montreal - Toronto - Ottawa line based on a 60 minute cadence for each destination.
You must remember most of rail corridors in Canada are own by rail freight operators or maintained for rail freight operations
@@chrismckellar9350 True. But this specific point make no sense to me. Track should be state owned and open to compagnies such as Via Rail or freight operators.
@@mickael9665 Yep. I happens in Europe, UK, Japan, Australia, etc. I support state owned 'open track access' national rail infrastructure and should be treat as national steel highway network/s.
Trains between Paris and Lyon run at least every 30 minutes all day long, and they reach high speeds.
Trains between Tokyo and Osaka are something like every 5 minutes.
@@katrinabryce That's true but the combined population of Tokyo and Osaka is much higher than the combined population of Paris and Lyon. At least TGV trains between Paris and Lyon reach higher speeds than the Tohoku Shinkansen.
@@katrinabrycetrains on the line between Paris and Lyon run every 3 minutes, but its a trunk line and many trains do not stop at Lyon. The reason TGV is double decked is actually because they couldnt run more than a train every 3 minutes without safety concerns
@@ambroiseimbertfor me the TGV is still better than the shinkansen in viability because I never felt that you could take a distance like Paris Marseille viably in japan
@@katrinabrycethis is by the way also why you can go the 800km between Paris and Marseille non stop in 3 hours, unheard of in japan
Simplest possible model relating frequency and speed. Treat each train as a point.
N= number of trains passing any given point per second (frequency)
v = average velocity of trains in meters per second
d = average distance between trains in meters
v=N*d So three variables, one equation, implies you can arbitrarily pick two.
So you can make both frequency N and speed v large.
I appreciate you making these videos Reece. I remember not too long ago when you had 25K subscribers and now you've passed 10 times that amount! I hope with people like you educating the people about what we could easily have they will start demanding it from our politicians and one day we too will join the rest of the developed world (and parts of the developing world) with high speed rail!
In Italy we often use the term 'alta capacità', 'high capacity'. Which in some way is related to the 'high frequency' concept.
This describes a national rail corridor which has at least two couples of rails. One for long distance HS trains and one for local trains and long distance slower trains, such as freight ones (there used to be even a HS freight service, run by a company called Mercitalia, but it didn't work. As its French counterpart TGV LaPoste years ago, which had the same fate).
Two couples of rails which run on the same corridor allows to exponentially increase the frequencies, virtually at metro standard, if you got trains who runs at the same speed each rail. Though the capacity of the system booms.
This was even a secondary goal of building HSR. To free existing infrastructure from long distance IC (which got the priority in Italy) and allow a more frequent local service.
Anyway even 'alta capacità' came out like a political term.
In some corridor, instead of building HS rail (to run at 300 km/h or more) to couple the existing infrastructure, to cut cost they decided to build rail with a lower max. speed (which generally is 180/200 km/h though). Hence high capacity concept became commonly used
If HRF gets built. Does it maybe at least rebuild some of the faith in train travel as a more viable option. If its regular enough and frequent enough that people can rely on it maybe does that allow us to push for more longer distance or intercity rail that likely wouldnt have any real support now
The new LRT in Edmonton is finally about to open after 3 years of delay.
Huzzah for Edmonton! No, seriously. Better late than never?
Yeah he might go to it next week he said on Twitter
Ey 3 years 3 months same difference haha! Exciting!
And with 10 mins frequency. So less frequent than the bus it's replacing lol.
@@jasons6021 and also part of "Light-Rail Mania" like the O-Train was, it's gonna be just as bad.
Canada has never been known to aim high, so don't get your hopes up.
Meh, Canada has its ups and downs
"High Speed and High Frequency are mutually exclusive and can't exist together" -Canadian Government
*Japan has entered the chat*
France would like a word too...
that's not what the government is saying. they are saying the cost is too high for HSR but HFR is attentable and can be done relatively quickly.
Caveat: frequency can also be limited by the capacity for timed overtaking when running express and local trains on the same line (this is a major limiting factor on the Tokaido Shinkansen, and will likely be a critical one for the Chuo Shinkansen, especially since turnout performance seems to be quite poor on the SCMaglev system)
Great presentation as always Reece. Are you thinking of doing a video on the UK High Speed train fiasco? I bet that would get a lot of views.
Wrote an article on Substack! reecemartin.substack.com/p/the-cancellation-of-hs2-north-should
it seems, that politicians in Canada are in fear, that the high speed train can be too sucessful after all😆
It's great to see more Canadian inter-city rail content and to be able to look forward to some more videos on this topic in the near future. Thanks a lot! If I could just quibble a bit though. I don't think VIA Rail has ever really said that rail can be frequent or that it can be fast. I think their messaging has been pretty consistent. We currently have low frequent and low speed rail. By building on dedicated tracks separate from freight lines, we can upgrade to low or medium speed rail that will also be able to be frequent. However, because the costs are so much greater and this is all so new in a Canadian context, we are hesitant to pay the additional costs to make it frequent & high speed. I'm sure you are going to cover that in your next video on costs, but I think its important to highlight that noone is saying that high speed raid is necessarily infrequent.
The sticker cost of building high speed high frequent rail might be $100 billion and high frequent medium speed only $20 billion (to grab some numbers out of mid-air). I think we can agree that the latter cost will be more palatable to all political parties and voters in general, whereas the former might be a tougher sell - however much we want it.
I disagree, I think knowing that the cost for such a primitive technology makes taxpayers unwilling to fund such a project. If they had a guarantee that they would be funding Toronto to Ottawa in 2 or 3 hours by train, they wouldn't complain about a $100 Billion price tag as much, certainly not as much $20 Billion for kinda sorta faster and a little more reliable that it currently is, if they actually deliver.
Canadians want nice things, we want new subways in our cities and high speed rail, but we've been lead to believe we can't have that, and it's only reinforced by us being half-promised more technologies that are already outdated and not needed.
In reference to VIA HFR pols have certainly said its one or another and VIA has marketed it as if this is true
@@TheHothead101 I hope you are right, and the way te RFP seems to be structured, thee should be a clear choice since companies are asked to provide an HFR proposal and a high speed HFR proposal. I expect hugely higher cost projections for the second option, and it will be interesting to see the response.
However, I wouldn't say that the HFR option is terrible as proposed. The UK have HFR basically with speeds below 200kph, and those systems are widely used.
@@RMTransit I would love to see that language in the political announcements. I just can't imagine what non-frequent high speed rail would even look like ... 7 trips a day but each at 350kph?!
A mixture of high-ish speeds (say 90-125 mph) with high-ish frequencies (maybe 30-60 mins) can be a decent outcome depending on how many passengers can be expected. A key measure is to simply ensure development (commercial and residential) near stations is adequate enough to guarantee a ridership base.
For intercity travel between cities as large as in Canada you can have 300km/h and 15min frequencies for sure
@@jan-lukas - Having track speeds up to 200kph can use upgrade rail corridors. When talking about 300kph you need highly engineered dedicate rail corridor/s which is expensive than upgrading existing rail corridors to 160kph or 200kph.
@@jan-lukas Toronto is a big city. Montreal biggish. Ottawa and Quebec City...smallish cities. Current service between the cities is just 1 train every 1-3 hours. So moving from that to 200 km/h service every 30-60 mins would be a huge improvement and could likely be achieved for a fraction of the cost of complete re-engineering for true high-speed 300 km/h service. Again, development around stations cannot be emphasized enough to ensure ridership base.
I believe there are four basic items that people might want consider when choosing a travel mode - Expense, Time, Locations, and Alternatives. It seems obvious that there should be a lot more forms of rail travel in North America, but it is difficult for people to see the whole travel picture. As Reese points out, it is a matter of striking a balance.
Expense
-infrastructure
-equipment
-maintenance
-personnel
Time
-distance
-frequency
-speed
Locations
-geography
-population density
Alternatives(Additional Travel Mode Considerations)
-intangible experience
-environmental impacts
-social impacts
-safety
-cleanliness
-convenience
-luggage
Shanghai has Express Train that traversed 1300 km-ish in around 4 1/2 hours to Beijing every hour starting from 7 am to 7 pm. That didn't even account for the "local" trains and interlining express trains to other major cities. In AM peak hour it's probably 1 train in five minutes, just like subways. I felt like Chinese signal system can permit a frequency of 1 train per three minutes I guess?
you can increase the frequency as long as lines are used from homotactic trains. Which means not having suburban, regional and high speed trains on the same tracks.
I mean you can increase the frequency on shared tracks too, you're just have less room
The other thing about high frequency means you need more trains obviously. If these are High Speed trains they will be very expensive, so those costs would have to be factored in.
The thing that's actually more expensive are the train tickets themselves, I wrote a comment on how more speed gets you more riders, but at the same time more expensive tickets get you less riders so you'll have to find an optimum somewhere
We have to be thinking about the next century. Population in this corridor will continue to increase. If we don't build good rail infrastructure, we will have to build more and more highways.
When I went to Japan, travelers don't need to shape their itinerary around the Shinkansen, because if you miss one, there's another one in 15 minutes or less.
Thanks!
Thank you!
The old Wiki for Canadian passenger service said VIA met the criteria for high speed even though the maximum speed was 120?? mph. That's because there are so few stops that the average speed is quite high if compared to racing between a lot of stations.
Although a Rally is a type of race, a regular rally is not about going as fast as you can between checkpoints. You're deducted points for arriving too late or too early. A special section may be timed and therefore fastest gets more points.
The great thing about high speed rail is that there are so many different definitions that you can choose from. In particular, anything can be high speed rail as long as you're using a North American definition.
Never ever this year did I travel with an ICE which was on time. The smallest delay was ~25 min, the biggest being at about 3 hours, so the thumbnail is not that inspired 🙃
They're fast and frequent, but because of just how frequent they are in combination with other trains they're often delayed...
High Speed Rail that gets delayed > No High Speed Rail
Look forward to hearing what you have to say in the next video. From everything I've heard it's not so much that "high speed rail is expensive" as much as it is "rail is expensive". If you're going to the (pretty substantial) effort of building a whole new railway anyway, making it high speed only increases the costs by ~10%, and yet increases the benefits by a LOT more!
Do you plan to do a video about vienna/austria anytime soon?
we have 5 (soon 6) metro lines, mulktiple s-Bahn lines, one regional train corridor with double decker trains, high speed rail in all 4 cardinal directions, busses, trams and tram trains the only thing missing are frequent ferries and a gondola system (which apparently is being planned right now)
if you need video footage i can film that if you need some
nice 👍
Smart!
If only it was so simple
I know it sucks but Canada really needs this! It's better than the current setup. The NEC in the USA is what Canada is trying to emulate.
Think the naming is more simple than you think. We can't afford/don't want to spend to build high speed, but its a term that has become known, thus high frequency rail. To the layman sounds almost the same.
"we can't afford" is stupid when you can analyze rail projects economically and get positive outcomes - given that you don't only count ticket prices but also increased productivity by the people using the line
What I really want is a HSR system that goes from Victoria BC to Winnipeg Manitoba (let's call this the "west leg") Solve all the geotechnical problems about going through mountains and under bodies of water in a straight line, and by the time it gets to to the end (East leg, from Toronto Ontario, to Labrador to St. Johns Newfoundland,) another HSR being built from the other end can meet it there. Fantasy, I know.
Like it seems to me part of the housing shortage could be alleviated it it was just bloody possible to actually go anywhere without a car. You can't get to Victoria, You can't get to Yellowknife, You can't get to Whitehorse, You can't get to St.Johns, You can't even get to Charlottetown, by rail. You look at a map of CN/CP rail and see there is all this other track everywhere, but not a single passenger train. No Bus service either (remember, Greyhound started pulling out in 2018 and left entirely by 2021.) Like it's absolutely silly that there is no means of leaving most cities in Canada except by car or plane, even though there is clearly rail trackage.
NewfoundLand and Labrador, as well as Yukon, NWT, Nunavut, and also Vancouver Island have zero active rail service. Air travel is not going to be viable at all in a few decades given they are doing the same thing the rail companies have done, cutting routes, withdrawing from less/un-profitable routes.
The trackage exists because there's bulk product there to be shipped, not cuz there's people. Whitehorse and yellow knife have a combined population of 48 000 people and are 1000km apart and no cities of note are within a 1000 km of either. Vancouver Island is different but St John's is only 200k, Charlottetown is 100k... Creating regular reliable and affordable bus service sure, but a quality train service would be a giant waste of money.
That would cost over $100 billion which government would ever propose such a projects that would take decades to built.
I believe that the numbers for high-speed rail are that, in terms of the relative time required, HSR is strictly better than planes for distances of less than 500km, and planes are strictly better than HSR for distances of more than 900km. Canada is several thousand kilometres across, and there are a lot of largely empty stretches of 900km or more on a trans-Canada trip (barring the odd village).
This isn't to say that there can't be practical trans-Canada rail travel, of course, but the money and investment is definitely going to need to go into connecting urban centres that are less than 500km across first.
I guess our Shinkansen network is a bit on the.. extreme end.
Also note that most Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen have 16 cars!
@RMTransit What do you think about maglevs? The idea of one running through my country tempted me and now I can't unsee it!
Looking good Reese. You at planet fitness now
It is just about the distance between the stations if you can operate a high speed train line. In my country the InterCity trains have a top speed of 140-160kmph and the commuter trains (we call them Sprinters for a reason) of 100-130kmph. It is fast enough for our small country, because the InterCity stations are close to each other, about 20-30minutes apart, and the commuter trains stop at every station which are about 5-10minutes apart. I think you could compare our national high frequency rail system more with a metro system, with regular metros and express metros, than a long distance train system like in Germany or France.
I think the biggest problem with long distance connections is that often there is another connection missing a regional one, why would one take the train just to be stranded in a public transport hostile city with no really good way of going around the city.
Oh, it can be done, but you need *DEDICATED* lines to pull it off. I mean, look at the Japanese Shinkansen, French TGV and Spanish AVE services--they can do it because you use either completely grade separated tracks not used by any other service or the high-speed train only uses a relatively short number of conventional lines to reach dedicated high-speed tracks.
I can tell you that AVE frequencies are pathetic though. But that's because our governments suck
The Spanish network is very much capable of the same frequencies as the French or Japanese networks (up to every 3 minutes, each way).
But there isn't enough demand to have more trains and thus more frequency.
The arrival of OuiGo España, then Avlo and finally Iryo on the market helped bring the prices down and drive demand up, but still far from the capacity the lines.
Another issue is that with the 2 different gauges between HSL and legacy networks, there are much less high-speed destinations than in France for example, so there are less trains to different destinations and thus less demand.
When there's a train passing every 3 minutes at peak time each way on the LGV Sud-Est between Paris and Lyon, it's because there's one train from Paris to Lyon, one from Paris to Marseille (non-stop), one for Grenoble, one for Montpellier, one for Geneva, one for Lausanne, etc. Plus trains from Lille (LGV Nord) or Reims (LGV Est) that arrive from Paris Eastern high-speed bypass and join the LGV Sud-Est on their way to Lyon or Marseille, etc.
They all use the same high-speed line trunk, following each other by 3 or 4 minutes, before exiting the line to their destination.
@@KyrilPG It also helps the French TGV that their high-speed trainsets only run on very short runs of conventional track near major stations (usually limited to 160 km/h top speed) before reaching dedicated high-speed tracks that allow the TGV train sets to run at 300 to 320 km/h, with frequent service on these high-speed train lines.
@@Sacto1654 Not that short... The Paris exit tracks are up to 30 or 35km long. But they can run up to 220kph on some parts before / after the HSL.
The LGV Est for example, only starts near the Paris Eastern high-speed bypass.
Look for "Vaires - Torcy" Transilien station in the Eastern suburbs of Paris on the satellite view, you'll see the beginning of the Eastern LGV branching off to the North about 400 meters East of the station.
It's quite far from Paris center but the regular tracks in the area are upgraded and allow 220, then gradually decrease the closer you get to Paris center.
On the Southern lines, LGV's truly begin only after Orly airport's latitude. And on the North, LGV Nord only starts near CDG airport.
220 is the max allowed speed for TGV's on regular upgraded lines. But that's not high-speed by French standards.
The Paris exit can be quite long, Paris Reims, which is about 150 or 160 kilometers takes 42 minutes, which gives about 220 or 225km/h of average speed despite running at 320km/h on the line, due to the long Paris exit. That's twice faster than the regular train though and shorter than the travel time to access many suburban areas of Paris. But the exit still takes its toll.
Thankfully, on city pairs like Paris Bordeaux (2/5 at 300, 3/5 at 320 for the LGV parts) takes 2h04 for roughly 600km. With faster access to the LGV, the service could run under the 2 hour threshold.
Rule 1 of Canada: There is more money in studying rail options over and over, and producing vapour-rail plans over and over, than there is solving the problem. Rule 2: Such rail requires a dynamic federal government focused on long-term, public (and not stakeholder) interest and Canadians don’t vote for such politicians. There will never be be high speed T.O-Ottawa-Montréal line.
Sounds like Australia too!
Well one aspect of frequency can be competition: in Italy since the arrival of ntv the frequency basically doubled on the HSL.
I mean, there are multiple ways of bring frequency in: you can do like Japan with a single operator for the network or like Spain and Italy with multiple ones.
Whilst rail freight operates own and operates the rail corridors, signalling and train nothing much will happen.
Well yeah, that why VIA want HFR rail to increase capacity on it's current service. VIA knows there is no political will for a 10's billion dollar project lasting 20 years to get built. but HFR rail can be done quickly and affordably and increase capacity greatly in it's profitable services.
@@TheTroyc1982 - 97 percent of the national rail infrastructure in Canada is owned and maintained by other railway companies, mostly by Canadian National Railway which is for profit corporate that is list on the Canadian and NY Stock exchanges. VIA doesn't own any rail infrastructure unless it builds the necessary track. It the Canadian federal government ownd the Canada's national network, it would be a different story.
Important to note that high speeds also make high frequencies cheaper. If a train can do the journey in three hours rather than six then it can run twice as many services per day, so you need only half as many train sets, train crews and so on and still get the same frequency (simplified).
Of course saving money that way requires spending money up front, and if the Canadian government isn't willing to do that, mid speed at high frequency is still better than mid speed at low frequency. But if the shovels get brought out anyway, it would be a huge missed opportunity to not go high speed from the start.
(Unrelated but this video reminded me: I hate the current Thalys livery. They had a great design in the early 2000s that made you believe that these were cool premium trains. They weren't, but the design was great. Ever since then they just kept adding random stuff to it. A red stripe here, a silver stripe there, a panel with a different shade of red, now Eurostar logos… come on, if you want to do something different, just repaint the damn things!)
The first step is to acquire the right-of-way for an eventual high-speed network. In Canada, I see potential for the following lines:
1) Detroit to Quebec City, going through Windsor, London, Kitchener, Pearson Airport, Downtown Toronto, Oshawa, Kingston, Ottawa, Trudeau Airport, Downtown Montreal, Trois-Rivières then finally Quebec City. At Detroit, the Canadian system would connect to an eventual US network.
2) Toronto to Buffalo, going through Hamilton, St-Catharines and Niagara Falls. At Buffalo, the Canadian system would connect to an eventual US network, with hopefully a line from Buffalo to Albany that would become part of a Toronto to NYC line (and possibly continue on to Boston).
3) As part of an eventual US system, Montreal to NYC, going through Albany. The Albany to NYC portion would also connect Toronto to NYC, and a line from Albany to Boston would connect both Toronto and Montreal to Boston.
4) Calgary to Edmonton, with a stop at Red Deer.
5) As part of an eventual US system, Vancouver to Portland, going through Seattle.
Initially we would have not-so-frequent slow trains, but over the years gradually improve the network and service, separating grades, increasing curve radii and banking, and hopefully both frequency and speed would increase over time.
But the first step is planning the network and acquiring the right-of-ways.
They do have plans, it’s using the CP railway to Peterborough then connecting it to an abandoned railway/turned trail going to smith falls then connect to Via Rail tracks near Ottawa to connect to Ottawa or keep going east to Montreal. And I’m guessing they’ll be using nearby CN or Quebec Gatineau railway to Quebec City
Increasing train frequencies is may be a bit more complex. In addition to maintaining breaking distances, which may require advanced signaling if headways are getting lower (as you pointed out correctly), you might need more power substations, more rolling stock, more maintenance yards, more staff, more resources such as normally idle platforms and sidings to deal with gridlock situations after outages or accidents, etc.
But yeah, adding all that is much easier than changing the minimum curve radius for higher speed once the line has been planned and built.
Fast AND Frequent Rail is Possible! - me, every time reading any article about HFR 🙄
yes everyone know this the issue is the cost and time. Just look at any public project in Canada, the public goes insane if a project is a year or more late. HFR can be built affordably and quickly without the risk of several years delay.
will you go to Edmonton fo rthe Valley line opening on Nov 4?
With France being less dense than other European and Asian countries with many large cities, there is little traffic to justify very high frequency.
However with a few trunk lines serving many national and international cities from Paris, they are already saturated, for example the LGV Sud-Est that currently sees up to 13 300 km/h trains per hour with 1970s/1980s TVM cab signalling. The current update to ETCS will increase capacity to 16 trains per hour.
I noticed in the map shown early in the video it looks like HFR could have two routs between Toronto and Montreal. One through Ottawa and the second directly between Toronto and Montreal. Does the tracks exist for a direct connection between Toronto and Montreal, not going through Ottawa?
Yes, but they aren't VIA's!
The heavily used CP freight corridor
I can now say I've been to those cities. :-) No railway transport though - we were on a coach for our holiday group going between the cities.
Some of those platforms in the B-roll footage seem ridiculously low. Needing multiple steps to get onto a train seems very outdated.
I wouldn't call a railway operating at 20 minute intervals or higher, high frequency, though it's better than most of the trains going through my hometown (UK, population of 50 thousand, most routes running every 30 or 60 minutes)
When you compare different countries and their approaches to (long-distance) high speed rail, you have to consider the topography and population density distribution, e.g.:
Japan: basically one line that runs along the coast with several really large cities along that corridor, no need or even the possibility for a second corridor due to the mountain range
France: hub-and-spoke configuration with their capital. Most important (only?) goal is to connect all the regions in the country to Paris within less than 4 hours so nobody will want to embark on a domestic flight.
Germany: 10 metro regions of rather similar size and similar importance distributed all over the country plus a federal (decentralized) government structure require a mesh network.
For example, single corridor vs. mesh with interlining services - maybe trains having to wait for connecting trains so delays build up - may have a big impact on frequencies and (perceived) quality of service.
On a first glance, the map of the proposed corridor in eastern Canada looks similar to the situation in Japan, except for the population density, isn't it? Are there high-frequency metros/busses/commuter trains in all these cities, so I would not have to consider time tables on my door to door journey?
Agree about the Canadian corridors, but the NE Corridor surely needs a lot better than 30 minutes and should try to push for a more TGV like system
I was briefly on an advisory committee for a high-speed line that was oddly being proposed to only run a few times a day, and yet they wanted to double-track a relatively short greenfield corridor. Now, ideally this would have linked into a much longer route which would have had more frequency and added value necessary for double-tracking, but I was really frustrated by the process that must have led to that proposal -- a deep disconnect between the headline idea of high-speed rail and the reality of how to make it a practical alternative for people.
Of course, my state DOT had the equivalent of like 2.5 people working on it in direct employment, meaning they had to heavily rely on consultants, and probably didn't have the institutional capacity to think critically about the proposal. But if I was sitting there scratching my head as an amateur historian and rail enthusiast, it really says something about the state of rail planning in North America.
Anyway, I guess that's just to say that at the relatively low end where you're only talking frequencies of less than a dozen or less than two dozen round-trips per day, you're generally going to add more value by just running more trains rather than making them go a whole lot faster. Sure, get them up to 90 mph or 110 mph if you can, and do whatever's practical to cut out slow zones, but zooming at 150 to 220 mph is not going to be very sustainable until you are moving a lot of people on a lot of trains.
Of course super high frequency is standard outside Japan. The busiest LGV's in France, like in Japan, see a train up to every 3 minutes each way, which is currently the highest standard on high-speed lines, thanks to in-cab signaling and precise operations.
Usually TGV's leave every 4 minutes from Gare de Lyon in Paris during peak hours, or 6-7 minutes when another TGV arriving from Paris Eastern high-speed bypass or the Massy SouthWest connection link is expected to insert itself in between.
LGV's in France working as "collectors", where multiple HS branches and regular network connection ranps join, most trains following each other by 3 or 4 minutes have different destinations.
So there isn't Paris Lyon services every 3 or 4 minutes, but there are such frequent trains passing to different destinations, that entered the LGV at different points and will vacate it also at different points.
I'm not sure about Germany, but there's also pretty high frequency on the ICE network.
Spain's network should be able to have the same 3 minute frequency as in France, but they haven't enough ridership yet and the different track gauges reduce the number of destinations, so they don't fully use their lines' capacity.
There are studies in France to implement a high-speed variant of NExTEO on busy LGV's (presumably LGV Sud-Est first and foremost) and switch to automated (but manned) operations with the goal of further decreasing the time separation between trains and thus increasing the number of trains per hour that the lines could handle.
It would be a centralized remote autopilot based on CBTC that would control every single train on the line simultaneously in real-time.
Like on a high frequency automated metro line or like how RER E will be operated once the new trains have arrived and the Western extension is open with NExTEO activated.
As for Canada's "High Frequency Rail", I think it's pretty much a sca. A way to sound almost revolutionary and very pompous while trying to convince the public that it is more reasonable and affordable. When in reality it is nothing more basic rail with a few upgrades.
Maybe is it to justify the expense ? Even though it doesn't bring anything new, it just barely raise it to average rail level. So they call it HFR because it sounds a bit like HSR to justify unjustifiable costs (given anything is overly expensive compared to continental Europe).
Plus, I doubt high frequency would ever be needed on such route without high-speed rail, as it is way too slow to really take over the market share from roads and airlines.
High frequencies here in Germany heavily depend on where you are due to the structure of Germany. While in France everything goes towards Paris radially, Germany has an actual "net"work with many lines between all cities, so frequencies are super mixed. Cologne-Frankfurt is 6 high-speed trains per hour I think, but there's also trains leaving Cologne towards Aachen, Bonn, Düsseldorf or Wuppertal (and their respective destinations beyond those cities)
@@jan-lukas Yeah but that's the problem, there are so many stops that there are no fast long distance services. Leaving the domestic air market without much competition.
Hamburg München takes hours and hours when it should be done in 3 hours, like Paris Marseille.
Or Kôln Berlin, that should be done in 2 hours like Paris Bordeaux.
The radial network is because France's population spread ratio is more than 10 to 1 between Paris and the largest cities. That's where most of the demand is.
But there's plenty of non-Paris services. Like on the high-speed bypass linking the North and South while avoiding Paris or on the LGV Rhin-Rhone which is a transversal line.
Anyway, that's not really the point I was making, which is "infrastructure frequency" driven by the multitude of non-stop destinations and the presence of Paris and Lyon's high-speed bypass.
There's something like 30 or 32 *services* each way per day on the Paris Lyon city pair, but there's up to 18-20 trains per hour each way on the Paris Lyon *LGV* as the line carries traffic to many other destinations from several other origins.
What I was wondering is the *infrastructure* frequency on the busiest German HSL's, not the *service* frequency of any given city pair. It's probably less than on LGV or Shinkansen lines due to the many stations acting as bottlenecks and most trains stopping frequently.
I pray it so
The biggest strength of german rail network are mostly suburb train network because germany used to have in my eyes a really cheap commuter ticket products like the länder ticket where you can pay for 20 euros to go anywhere for a whole day in a state or 40 euros for whole germany and now we have the deutschland ticket that cost 49 euros where you can travel whole germany for a monthly fee subscription
But hey can you imagine going from MTL central station to union station in 2 hours and 30 minutes? Every 30 minutes or so? The huge blow it would have on air Canada! I think the government is like, let's invest into slow "high frequency" trains that are not worth taking them so people will still fly from YUL to YYZ.... :(
Biggest problem for Montreal is where to put a stop. Gare Centrale would have it go through really slow tracks to traverse to the station due to Mont Royal Tunnel is used by REM now and new tunnel is expensive, Lucien L’Allier needs an overhaul on how it’s organized when it’s practically slapped on the side of Bell Centre. It got to the point it would just skip it and possibly use an EXO station that has a metro station connected for it to be used as a stop.
Did the second video ever come out?
It’s all about where you’re willing to invest funds. As you stated, high speed largely means investing in track and signaling infrastructure. High frequency on the other hand means having a lot of rolling stock in operation.
I figured "high frequency" was term officials used to sell this project, rather than say inter-provincial GO Transit-like service.
maybe hfr should extend to yyz(toronto pearson airport), gulping up half/all of up express trains
and also poaching passengers from air canada and porter
btw can you talk about germany's rail&fly system?
The key to both is to move people onto the lines (walking distance, or at most biking distance), and treat the railway as an oversized metro. If you can't move people onto the lines, then you can't have fast and frequent rail, at least not in a way that is healthy.
HFR was a genius branding move for the initial plan in 2016. A lowest cost possible project to unlock the potential of montreal toronto using as little new track as possible. How do you get government funding for a project that isn't a shiny HSR ? Steal the sine of HSR with an acronym that evocates it.
Yes, you can have fast (up to 160kph or possibility 200kph) frequent passenger trains on upgraded track using existing rail corridors with out spending big money on dedicated highly engineered rail corridors. The problem with Canada and USA, rail freight operators owned the rail infrastructure, signalling and train control systems which creates difficulty in developing decent fast frequent intra-province/state and inter- province/state passenger rail services. The Canadian and the USA federal governments need to take control of the respective national rail infrastructure operating on them on an 'open access' national steel highway networks for freight and passenger train services who operators pay track access and train control fees.
Another way that High Speed Rail can increase frequency is that having a mixture of train speeds on a single line severely limits the capacity of that line- if you shift all the high speed passenger services to their own line, you can run more service by having "fast" and "slow" lines. So speed and frequency are really really not in conflict.
While I would welcome a HSR system between Montreal & Toronto I do not foresee it being built. Flying up & down that corridor is a huge pain. If I could catch a train to between those points that would match their times I would be on it. It would not even have to match the air time. If it was near the total time for getting to the airport, stripping down for "security" & then dealing with the mess at the destination I would have no issue with a train.
I think the cause of the confusion might be countries like the UK, where we have mixed traffic mainlines, where express InterCity trains are run in between stopping services. The signallers on those lines can neither optimise those railway lines for InterCity trains nor commuter trains. The signal blocks can not be optimised for either type of train. Big gaps get left behind stopping service, so the InterCity trains can run fast all the way, without catching up the train in front.
HS2 was supposed to solve those problems, via service separation (which would have handed over three existing mainlines to slower trains, allowing those railways to up their frequency, while HS2 also had good frequency. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of misleading propaganda about HS2. The advocates of high speed rail, over here, have been emphasising the capacity benefiits on old and new tracks.
But the very arguments for high speed rail, involve telling people that the UK's InterCity trains are causing a frequency problem. And those arguments will be available to people in other countries, who are trying to understand what sort of factors might be relevant to projects in their own countries.
I think the average Canadian voter is not going to be aware if an existing or new line through their city is going to be dedicated to one specific type of train, or if they are going to be getting a mixed traffic railway. They are unlikely to be aware if there are flat junctions, flyovers or level crossings that might have an impact on service levels. So, I think it's going to be hard for regular people to separate real-challenges a Canadian railway faces, from real-challenges that only are a problem in other countries, because of historical problems that have not been addressed.
The Shinkansen has higher frequency than the Chicago L half the time. Speed and frequency aren't mutually exclusive.
They want to sound new and exciting like HSR would. High freq Rail sounds very similar
I don't think anyone is saying high-speed rail can't be frequent. The whole premise of this video isn't correct. They're saying high frequency rail can be competitive at a fraction of the cost. Paige Saunders' video goes over the options between the two different approaches of Siemens and Alstom really well. The issue is cost and schedule. HFR can be built faster and at a lower cost because it doesn't need to go through as much land acquisition and grade crossing removals (think brightline).
Personally I think a 5.5-6 hour train ride isn't competitive and they should build Alstom's proposal but again, the argument is cost vs value not that HSR can't be frequent.
-you severely underestimate this country's ability to not accomplish things-
We've done lots of good stuff, we can do a good thing. We just need to want it, throwing around studies for decades doesn't sound like wanting it
Meanwhile in the US, California HSR looks like it will take 100 years to complete, in Florida Brightline isn't HSR but SHSR (somewhat higher speed rail with top speeds Amtrak can match or beat with diesel locos and has in Illinois), and in Texas their HSR hasn't even overturned a spadeful of dirt yet. And in the Northeast Acela HSR... isn't. 😭
California HSR is still building and seem on track for the Central Valley system, Caltrain electrification opening soon, the problem would just be LA region and a bunch of plans and environmental review. I don’t know why you think it’s slowing doen
Trains come in and out of Shin-Kobe station (2 track station) on the Sanyō shinkansen every 2-3 minutes during peak periods, so yeah it's not only possible but it's being done ✅
The Tohoku Shinkansen runs 16 car trains (1300 passengers) 10 times per hour normally, 13 per hour at peak. One thing to think about is how the number of stations and train acceleration play into this. Very few stops, and the Shinkansen accelerates very fast due to the 64 wheel drive!
the cheap options really do stop quite often
this line should go to Windsor and Niagara it only makes sense that it goes to the border in Western Ontario
Hopefully the high frequency rail extends way beyond Quebec City- Toronto corridors. Different provincial ministries of transportation (including Quebec and Ontario) need to start building their own dedicated bi directional passenger railway tracks free from tightest curves and at grade crossings.
Can you please make a video about the Athens Metro?
i live in the neterlands there is high speed not so big problem but we still have 140 kmph and still have freuquent services
Great regional rail is also important, but you shouldn't forget that in many cases (HS2) regional rail can be improved by building HSR by taking intercity trains off of the tracks
But what you can't have is high speed and high stop density. You can have high frequency and either high speed or high stop density.
If you double tracked the Wolverine line from Detroit to Chicago and at least left room for quadtrack at stations and restored service to the dozens of rail museums, model railroad clubs and libraries that now occupy old rail stops, you'd provide service to a lot of people, a lot people who previously might not of wanted high speed rail who now when they have the option of taking a slow train to transfer to a fast train might now really want high speed rail.
Japan is interesting because they also have slow Shinkansens which stop a lot more frequently - called the Kodama Shinkansen which have to wait at stations for the Express Shinkansens to overtake.
Personally I am currently quite annoyed at how the British gvt has butchered HS2 as it has reduced terminal capacity at Euston and running less trains wont save that much money.
There should be an international standard for what actually constitutes "high frequency rail" so there can't be any vagueness or misunderstanding. Like, every 10 minutes or less should be high frequency, once every hour or more is low frequency, and everthing in between medium frequency.
Then if the Canadian government states it's going to build a "high frequency" train line that only runs once an hour you can call them out on it.
I mentioned this in another comment, but people really do want nice stuff. Canadians aren't gonna be happy paying billions of dollars for a slow train, but they'll be happy paying double that price for a proper, modern high speed train service. Canadians (and Americans as well) constantly look at other countries putting up things like high speed rail and feel annoyed that we can't have nice things like that, but we absolutely can. I was pissed after the Liberal candidate shuffle introduced a new minister of transportation who is unwilling to discuss high speed rail, and knowing that the opposition would rather give private airline services subsidies to operate the trips which would be cheaper and better if they were done on high speed rail, like Toronto to Ottawa, Ottawa to Montreal, and even Edmonton to Calgary.
The Canadian government gets based repeatedly for running deficits by the oppositions who are likely to win a majority in the next elections so Canadian very much care about government spending.
"Can they be both?"
*looks at Shinkansen coming every 5 minutes*
Yes?
The biggest hindrance for high frequency is capacity and capacity limited by number of tracks and most important similarity of speeds.
Having a high speed train (>200kph) and a commuter or freight train (>100kph) on the same track limits its capacity a lot.
The maths of this "high-frequencey =/= high-speed" argument is quite silly once you think about it for even a few seconds. Consider a simple worked example:
Let two rail companies, called A and B, each operate a single train on a 100km trip. Company A operates their train at an average travel speed of 80km/h. Company B operates their train at 160km/h average. These speeds might seem a bit low, but these are **average speeds for the whole journey**, not peak speeds. That means we can easily divide the distance by the average speed to find:
Company A makes the trip one-way in a leisurely 75 minutes, and, adding 5 minutes for turnaround, is back at the other station and turned around (add another 5 minutes) after 160 minutes, or 2 hours and 40 minutes. This means that if they begin operating at 07h00 and don't run past 23h00, they will make exactly 6 round trips in a day-- that's 6 departures in each direction.
Company B makes the trip in 37.5 minutes. Round up for simplicity, multiply by 2, and add 10 minutes (5 minutes for turnaround at each end; a fixed time cost irrespective of travel speed), you get a round-trip time of 86 minutes. Assuming the same 16-hour operating interval as above, Company B makes 11 round trips per day.
Company B has almost doubled the number of daily departures in this toy problem, without any additional train sets (or the crew-hours and maintenance costs) associated with them. Each company has exactly one train, but company B makes almost double trips, so can sell tickets to almost double the passengers. Furthermore, the faster trip is more appealing to passengers, so more riders will choose to ride on Company B than Company A, both because there are more daily departures (it's ore convenient) and the higher speed means a lower time-cost to the passenger.
This is not a hard thing to work out with a pencil and a piece of paper. This is not a difficult physics problem. It's very simple math: higher speeds mean higher frequency, up until some point of diminishing returns where the fixed time costs (those 5 minutes at each end to turn around; also, the dwell time at any intermediate stops) start to become a substantial fraction of the total trip time.
The claim that speed and frequency are incompatible is not only a false claim, it's an actively backwards one. Faster trains mean higher frequencies. They mean better "operating ratios" for the equipment and staff involved (more paying customers carried in a given day). Slower speed trains are more expensive to run and generate less revenue. Slower trains make fewer round trips and occupy the tracks for longer, denying them from other vehicles for longer intervals, including freight trains. Of course, there are diminishing returns eventually. Shorter trips don't demand such high speeds, which is why metros don't need to move at bullet-train speeds. As long as the train is substantially faster than a car trip, making the service incrementally faster won't attract as many new riders as would be attracted by taking a service which is slower than cars, and making it faster than cars. There's no need to be too extreme with this stuff: The original bullet train only reached peak speeds of 200km/h, and it was a revolutionary service. We don't need to blast our rails and vehicles into oblivion trying to hit 350km/h. But going fast is an important part of a financially solvent transit service. I don't personally believe that public transit needs to make money, but all of the passenger transit agencies that do make a profit, operate high-speed trains; and those high-speed lines are consistently, from spain to france to germany to japan, the highest margin routes. It's simply good business sense to put your infrastructure to maximum use, and that means running fast trains, frequently.
One still should consider the population along the lines to see if the passenger level could support a more frequent service.
Would you agree High frequency is a good first step before making high speed. Obviously we want high speed but until it is built, high frequency is a good option
Where is the next episode
I wonder how many people per day would travel vom Toronto to Montreal for example on a single day. 5,000? 10,000? And most of those people might want to do the trip either in the morning or in the evening, while in the rest of the day it will be very hard to fill a train every 30 minutes.
In Germany that problem was met by making the popular times more expensive and the unpopular times cheaper. I quite hate that, because I want an affordable train ticket at a convenient time. It is the same thing as with energy. When you need the most energy, it usually also costs the most.
Adjusting the train tickets' prices according to the usage rate of said train is a very good thing in my opinion, as nobody wants to sit (or often even stand) in fully overcrowded Intercity trains that travel for several hours
@@jan-lukas So make it too expensive for people with a tighter budget? I would prefer getting more trains running at rush hour, even if that means building a third rail track. Remember, we want to make people switch from cars to public transport. So public transport has to be as convenient as possible and an affordable price is a big part of the convenience.
There's yield management pricing on the ICE ?
Or is it simply high demand / rush hour and low demand / off-peak prices without being true yield management pricing ?
Cause on the TGV it is fully yield management pricing, like on airlines. You can sometimes have huge differences, like 1 to 5 or maybe more in price for tickets on the same route.
I've regularly seen tickets at 30 or 45€ off-peak on quiet days, while the same ticket the day before during peak hours is 200 or more.
If a particular train has trouble selling tickets, it will have lower prices. But on like Fridays at the beginning of holidays, ticket prices are stratospheric.
The annoying thing is that you can look 3 different times and have 3 different prices as they are constantly adjusted according to actual demand and "expected demand".
Thankfully, there are subscriptions for high-speed commuters. About a decade ago it was estimated there was something like at least 200K to 250K TGV commuters. They pay a reduced fare on some of the high demand schedules. (They don't all travel every day)
I'm pretty sure a true HSR line between Toronto and Montreal offering travel times of 2 hours or less would be packed.
Paris Lyon has 25 double decker TGV's (1000-1200 seats) each way per day plus 5, 6 or 7 trains from other companies. I'll let you do the math, it's a lot if seats.
Paris is huge (up to 15 millions for the whole metropolitan area, 10 millions in fairly close reach, 12.5 in the IDF region), so there are multiple stations, in center and suburbs.
But Lyon isn't, about 1.3 million for the whole metropolitan area and 675K jobs. Yet it has 2 center stations and one suburban station under the airport.
Toronto, up to 9.7 millions in the whole extended metropolitan area and Montreal, 4.4 millions in the metropolitan area, which is more balanced.
Add to that Ottawa, 1.5 million in the metropolitan area and many government officials and employees plus the government adjacent jobs (lobbyists, administration, justice, etc.), which gives a much higher ratio of premium passengers compared to the 2 most popular destinations.
That's enough to have a pretty solid schedule.
Especially because with true HSR you'd easily be beating air travel and driving on the different city pairs.
Plus, having such shorter travel times creates demand and drives ridership up, granted that the tickets are affordable. The effects of OuiGo's (OuiGo España) arrival on the Spanish market were clearly visible : prices went down, demand went up, largely surpassing demand levels before competition. Lower prices created demand that wasn't visible before.
So, a HSR line linking the main largest cities in the country and area with affordable tickets would certainly have pretty good ridership.
And the conventional tracks would be freed from intercity passenger traffic, leaving plenty of room for more freight and more regional trains.
@@KyrilPG Not sure how the Deutsche Bahn exactly calculates its prices. I just know that there is a "normal price", which is depends on the type of train and the distance. Some connections like Cologne-Frankfurt are even more expensive. That "normal price" us quite high and defines the maximum fare at any time. You really do not want to pay that high price. From that high price you get discounts for booking long in advance or booking off-peak trains. Having to book long in advance is also a major inconvenience. As a tourist who wants to do a day trip I can't know the weather long in advance and changing a ticket even to the next day is very costly. That's not how you get people away from the car. Twenty years ago or so tickets were much more consumer friendly. They were not bound to a specific train. You had four days to complete the journey at any time within a 28 time window starting from the day printed on the ticket. You were not "punished" if your plans had changed and you took a later train or even postponed the journey by a week. So you were almost as flexible as a car owner. That no longer is the case unless you own a "Bahncard 100" for unlimited journeys within a whole year. That Bahncard costs thousands though. I really love taking a train, but a spontaneous train journey still is a luxury.
@@skyscraperfan Really? I thought there was free seating in a portion of each ICE? Wouldn't that mean you could take the one that is convenient for you?
If that's not the case, then what's the point of free seating? (By free seating I mean no reserved seat).
And why are people traveling without seat or standing on the inter-carriage platforms if they have a fixed ticket?
(Sorry that's a lot of questions)