New federal bill proposes to give Canada's passenger trains priority | Urbanized
New federal bill proposes to give Canada's passenger trains priority | Urbanized
The federal government is considering a bill to give passenger trains priority over freight trains on Canada's shared railway tracks.
As a Canadian, I'll believe it when I see it. There will be so much bureaucratic red tape between the feds and the municipalities that I'm willing to bet whatever they have planned will be a shadow of its original concept by the time any ground is broken.
Hell, it might go like the light rail projects and the whole deal might get cancelled or they'll go with a whole new engineering firm at the last second, costing exponentially more money for an inferior product.
I want to believe the government doesn't do things poorly on purpose, but when it constantly goes awry in the planning stages and they keep going anyway you do have to wonder about the level of competence being demonstrated by ministers and cabinet members.
There will be so much bureaucratic red tape between the feds and the municipalities
Not sure what municipalities have to do with this? Rail is exclusively in the federal jurisdiction.
You also seem to be referring to HFR, which is unrelated to this topic (though it's mentioned as background on Via Rail).
So where do you think that the tracks will be going, if not through cities and municipal centers? The feds are going to be up against a ton of pushback if they try to ram this through purely because they have jurisdiction. The negotiation alone will take years.
Also I'm referring to the Kitchener-Waterloo and Ottawa light rail transit projects. One is doing better than the other (hint: it's not the country's capital) but neither were very well-planned, well-executed, or well-received.
Inb4 the final text of the bill passed by Parliament:
Passenger trains shall have right of way on trackage used exclusively by passenger trains
Passenger trains? We have more than one? Looking at the schedule you'd think one singular train services all of Via Rail.
You have:
• Toronto's rail system that generally has its own tracks
• Vancouver's commuter train, which already has priority, but because of laws forbidding the movement of dangerous cargo at the same time as passenger trains, CN intentionally kneecaps the line and refuses to let it expand.
• And Via Rail, which has exactly one train in all of BC and it costs over 2k per ticket per seat.Yeah I wanted to train ride from my place to Edmonton. $2K plus a night stay in Jasper. I could fly 3 times for that.
Via Rail has two if you count the Prince Rupert/Prince George train... but to get there from where people exist in British Columbia, you have to go to Alberta and back.
US needs to follow Canada’s lead on this one!
The US already has that law on the books, it's just not enforced.
The amount of industry actively opposing this in Washington is the reason we have plenty of freight trains and rail but very limited passenger transport. In fact, so much of America’s rail system is private that public transportation would have to either be serviced by the freight companies or would have to pay for second-tier access to the rail systems, after negotiating with a plethora of private rail companies.
Here is one of the most significant train lobbyist groups, you can see their priorities in the first main paragraph: increase freight and maintain privatization of rail.
If Richard Nixon had nationalized the infrastructure nationwide instead of just the passenger operations...
If Reagan hadn't re-privatized ConRail...
I'm guessing they don't put forward any arguments related to their climate impact, but out of curiosity do we know how prioritizing passenger trains in the US impacts the way these goods are transported ? Is this a minor inconvenience for the industry that's they're fussing about and nothing would actually change, or would the goods have to significantly shift to truck transportation ?
I live in a country where there's the opposite problem: we have a lot of passenger trains, but they're attempting to revive freight trains because truck transportation is quite CO2 costly. Reduced emissions are definitely only one advantage amongst many for public trains, but I'm wondering how much you save/lose by replacing(?) one freight train passing with passenger train.
What a coincidence, just yesterday we were all complaining about the sad state of Canadian passenger rail over on lemmy.ca, and now there's a bunch of good news.