It’s time for a national bus service | rabble.ca
It’s time for a national bus service | rabble.ca
It’s time the provincial and federal governments stepped in to provide a national bus service, like Greyhound.
It's time for a lot of things, infrastructure-wise.
Here's an idea: let's bring back 1960s-level marginal tax rate. That'd fund a bus service, a lot of affordable housing and quite a lot of healthcare. Add in much higher capital gains and estate taxes and we'd be there.
It would be a good start towards having rails service in the big urban corridors. Especially Toronto-Montreal and even Calgary-Edmonton. The latter not being as densely populated, but super easy to build.
Hell, I wish we had a nice train service along the Windsor-Québec corridor.
The Windsor-Québec corridor, aka where almost half of all Canadians live, should become Germany levels of train infrastructure.
Travelling long distance by bus is akin to torture so ideally in the medium term I think we should be building a network that combines both. A bus network that could bring us into rail hubs where we could hop on a train for longer trips. Longer term we should be transferring over to high speed rail generally.
There's no financial benefit to having such a network in Canada given airplanes exist for quick travel. There simply isn't a need to move a large number of Canadians across the country on a regular basis, and the country is HUGE. Building that much high speed rail would be a waste of resources.
We'd be far better off investing in a connection for Vancouver down the west coast of the US, and Toronto/Montreal down the east coast of the US.
If they're fully electric (and power stations are built for them accordingly), sure, but I'd rather have that be a temporary thing as (and take a back seat after) passenger rail services are expanded.
Make Air Canada a crown corporation.
Let's focus on transit where the people are instead. In the GTA, if you're more than a couple minutes from a GO Station, getting somewhere takes an order of magnitude more time than driving. In Montreal, a 20 minute drive can take more than an hour on bus / metro, and force you to cover 2x-3x the distance.
For smaller communities, focus on carpooling instead... If I had a dollar for every car with one person in it on the highway, I'd have enough money to fund... a... uh... national bus service.