ByeByeBaby
Active Member
It's a great graphic. It could also do a great job of illustrating why Alberta HSR is not a particularly strong project:
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Calgary Regional Rail Transit
- Thread starter Oddball
- Start date
darwink
Senior Member
Alberta is neat, since Alberta is a straight line, so the cities generate way more traffic between them than if they were in a grid. From 2021:
It might still be, though - it's not that different on a passengers per km basis than the Maçon-Marseille stretch. I'm sure there's a lot less in the way, as well. (Although our material and labour costs are still huge).
Not that I think it's feasible for both geographical and political reasons, but I wonder what a route from Edmonton-Calgary-Vancouver, with stops in Kamloops and Abbotsford, would look like presented this way. Not dissimilar to the Spanish route, perhaps.
Silence&Motion
Senior Member
On the other hand, the diagram doesn't show how challenging the terrain is along some of those other corridors. The Edmonton-Calgary corridor is practically a straight line along flat ground. No mountains in the way. No Canadian Shield. No large bodies of water to deal with.
The only issue is the numerous grade crossings. Something that needs to be addressed but is relatively easy to resolve.
trtcttc
Active Member
And the province already owns most of the ROW. From what I read on why Brightline was successful vs California was mainly that Brightline ran on existing ROW and highway medians, and California had to do lots of land acquisitions. They also had issues with funding uncertainty, not unlike the Green Line. I really hope something comes of the Province's plan next year, it's one of those things where the land, engineering, labour, etc gets more expensive with each passing year.
ByeByeBaby
Active Member
I've heard this from time to time (not just from you), where Calgary-Edmonton have some crazy outlier of demand. And I've been wondering if this is one of those stories that people tell because they've heard it from other people, repeated from civic booster to politician, but there's not any actual underlying facts. So I decided to dig into it a little. The federal government does a survey of intercity travellers, called the TSRC. I happen to have some old data kicking around (2011,13 and 14). I looked at all of the trips in Canada that were between CMAs (bidirectionally, so I'm adding say Winnipeg to Thunder Bay and Thunder Bay to Winnipeg together for a single point).
It seems pretty logical that the travel from a city will scale relative to the population in that city; we'd expect a city of 1 million to produce half as many trips as a city of 2 million people, all else being considered.
And the attractiveness of a city as a destination might also be relative to the population in that city; again, as a naive assumption, let's assume it's related to the population, where if somewhere has two cities at equal distance and city A is half the size of city B, we'd expect city A to get half as many trips as city B.
With those, we can calculate the trips per capita in the origin per person in the destination (or to have a better scale, per million people in the destination). So a value of 1 here would suggest that if the destination had 2.5 million people, then we'd expect 2.5 trips per capita from the origin.
Basically here, I'm reinventing the classic gravity model from first principles; to top it off, let's plot the square root of the distance (i.e. 1/distance^2). Here it is:
There does seem to be a broad relationship, although it has a handful of big outliers. Most of the points are very close to 0, but the trend broadly continues as you get close to the x axis; here's the same thing with a log y scale
The four big outliers in the top chart are:
A - Moncton - Saint John
B - Oshawa - Peterborough
C - Regina - Saskatoon
D - Québec - Trois-Rivières
Zooming in on the bulk of the pairs, with Calgary and Edmonton highlighted in red (and trips where both ends are in the 12 largest CMAs are in purple), here we are:
The main conclusion I draw is: We're a little on the high side for our relative size and separation, but not a wild Saskatoon - Regina style outlier.
And since I'm working with the data anyway, here's the top pairs of major cities:
Calgary - Edmonton is a fairly big travel market, but it represents about 1/6 the Toronto-Quebec corridor travel market. The Toronto-Quebec corridor is about 2.5x the length of ours, so the cost-benefit is high-level 2x ours.
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CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
I wonder about future job mobility. If you can live in red deer and take a 45 minute commute on 300km/h HSR to Calgary or Edmonton, what does that mean for where people would choose to live? How does that affect affordability? It is an extension of the regional rail to outlying communities question.
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Red Star
New Member
I don't know much about the feasibility of this...but is it possible to utilize the existing Calgary to Edmonton freight line for a passenger rail service? Obviously you'd have to twin the track where needed and grade separate the track where needed. But can a high speed passenger train share a rail with freight?
There could be two services.
Service 1 - High Speed Calgary to Edmonton (stops below)
Calgary Downtown
Calgary Airport
Red Deer
Edmonton Airport
Edmonton Downtown
Service 2 - Calgary to Edmonton (stops below)
Calgary Downtown
Calgary Airport
Airdrie
Crossfield
Car Stairs
Didsbury
Olds
Bowden
Innisfail
Bowden
Red Deer
Blackfalds
Lacombe
Ponoka
Wetaskiwin
Millet
Edmonton Airport
Edmonton Downtown
Maybe Service 2 could only operate three times per week and increase with more demand,
darwink
Senior Member
There is some divergence data wise, with the TSRC having 1.8, 1.9 million trips between Calgary and Edmonton.
Instead of a survey, the province installed license plate cameras to attempt to capture all auto trips for selected times (this was harder to do with the technology of the time), and then worked with schedules and surveys for bus companies and air travel. This was done to reduce fears that while AADT was high, trips that traveled between CMAs was low, and to compare available seats versus occupied seats.
Here is the model that the provincial data collection yielded for 2006:
Here is 2005 AADT, more just for interest sake.
It is quite something that no study used by Alberta transportation had demand anywhere close to as low as TSRC:
Instead of a survey, the province installed license plate cameras to attempt to capture all auto trips for selected times (this was harder to do with the technology of the time), and then worked with schedules and surveys for bus companies and air travel. This was done to reduce fears that while AADT was high, trips that traveled between CMAs was low, and to compare available seats versus occupied seats.
Here is the model that the provincial data collection yielded for 2006:
Here is 2005 AADT, more just for interest sake.
It is quite something that no study used by Alberta transportation had demand anywhere close to as low as TSRC:
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trtcttc
Active Member
The Acela in the US share some freight rail, so it slows down in certain sections. The Quebec-Windsor Hight Frequency Rail is also using shared freight rails, which also won't be HSR speeds. I don't think we can run HSR or even HFR on EDM-CGY because it will be owned by freight companies which will inevitably lead to delays as they prioritize freight traffic. The NEC with Acela is owned by Amtrak and they let freight use the rails as additional revenue but they prioritize Acela service.
For stations I imagine they'll build out service 1, leaving room for infill stations to allow for service 2 in the future. The benefit of being in a straight line is that these future stations won't be far from the city. Some HSRs around the world, the stations for smaller cities are really far from the city centre, since HSR typically have a hard time with turns.
darwink
Senior Member
The province studied this in the 80s, and the cost for redeveloping the track for enough capacity was forecast as so high, that a Greenfield service with even higher speed (and higher revenue) evolved into the preferred option.
ByeByeBaby
Active Member
I suspect this effect would be very small; you could live in Carstairs today, get affordable housing and take a 45 minute commute to downtown Calgary. Yet almost no one does this; almost no one even lives in Crossfield for a 30 minute commute. And sure, sitting on a train is easier than driving. But you could also live in Airdrie, Okotoks, Cochrane or Chestermere and have a roughly 45 minute transit commute to downtown Calgary - with nearly door-to-door service. There are 180,000 people living in these places, and only 11 buses need to be run every morning to handle the demand; I don't think all of the buses are full, either. Maybe 0.3% of the people in these places choose to do this commute.
This happens in places like New York and San Francisco where home prices are crazy, home building is slow and virtually all of the developable land has been taken. I love Calgary, but we do not compare to New York or San Francisco in this way.
The other place where this happens is when there are two nearby but different metro areas; couples will have one person working in Baltimore and one in Washington and live in between, or one in academia in New Haven and one in finance in New York. I suspect this would also be relatively infrequent.
AllanS
New Member
I think this was the reason the old dayliner shut down back in the 80s. Remember watching it go through town but basically empty most of the time.
Remember hearing at the time it was due to constantly being in accidents along the route - but don't know if that is actually true.
Quick google and someone has a blog with their account of their trip on the service. Later on in the post mention the shutdown in 1985 with part of the reason being the 200 level crossings and 11 accidents in the previous 2 years.
VIA's Calgary-Edmonton RDCs, Part 1
Often referred to as the 'Death Train', CP's perilous Calgary-Edmonton passenger service was a quick dash at speeds reaching 90 mph. For...
tracksidetreasure.blogspot.com
ByeByeBaby
Active Member
There's a lot of reasons for differences. The biggest one is that I was using a measure of household trips, not person trips. About 40% of the trips were by one person, about 30% by two people and about 30% by 3+ person parties, bringing it much closer to the numbers you have here. The TSRC is also a tourism focused survey, so it does not include regular work commuting and other routine trips like shopping, medical appointments, moving, religious observances, funerals and so on - this would affect Red Deer travel much more I suspect. I was interested in comparing between places within the survey, where these exceptions are all consistent; it's definitely different when comparing to external data.
A license plate survey on the other hand includes extra trips; someone driving from Calgary to Fort Mac or from Edmonton to Phoenix would be included in the count, even though they are not travelling from Calgary to Edmonton. (For that matter, someone from Okotoks or Strathmore to Edmonton - who would plausibly be in Calgary-Edmonton HSR market - are excluded from my TSRC numbers because of the CMA definition.) It could also include (depending on how it is done) trucks, buses, RVs, etc - about 20% of highway 2 traffic volume away from the cities.
I'm also not sure whether the air number in your table includes total passengers flying Calgary to Edmonton or actual Calgary to Edmonton air passengers; there's a lot of YEG flyers making connections here. In the late 00s YEG had ~5 million domestic passengers enplaned/deplaned; it seems a little surprising that over 10% were only flying to Calgary. Expanding the TSRC to person trips, I got 4.1M by car - 80% of the license plate count and 400K by bus; 1/3 higher but certainly a very similar order of magnitude. But the air passenger trips were 130K, only about 20% as much.
Given how reliable the high-level 10 year old estimates for constructing a greenfield rail line in Calgary have proven to be, I'm not sure I would want to rely entirely on 40 year old construction cost estimates as the basis for a decision today.