Alto: A More Connected Canada Starts With High-Speed Rail

By Jonathan English, Toronto-based Fellow, Marron Institute of Urban Management, New York University

Now more than ever, Canada’s future prosperity will rely on a foundation of strong infrastructure. But in too many areas, we have fallen behind and are living off the legacies of decades ago. Our railways are mostly from the 19th and early 20th century, our expressways date from the 1960s and 70s. Even our airports, while upgraded, are fundamentally decades old. Canada has grown a lot since then, so most of them are straining from overcrowding.

We need additional ways to get between our major cities, and the new Alto high-speed rail program points the way forward.

Canada needs this project, but we also need to get it right and not replicate the issues we’ve faced with other projects. We need to overcome regulatory barriers to trade between provinces, but stronger interprovincial trade also requires real physical infrastructure. HSR isn’t just about transportation—it’s also about improving access to housing, improving economic linkages, and encouraging tourism within Canada. This means drawing from global examples to make it as fast, convenient, and affordable as possible.

Canada is the only G7 country without high-speed rail, and even countries like Morocco and Uzbekistan have developed trains that are considerably faster and more modern in their operations than the best we have to offer. In part, this comes from the little-known fact that Canada is a freight rail leader—we move more tonnes of freight by rail than the entire European Union. While this is a great boon to the country, it means that our key rail corridors are full of heavy freight trains with very different operational requirements than frequent, high-speed, electric passenger trains.

The Alto project involves building new passenger-dedicated tracks that will allow trains to run as fast as 300km/h over much of the corridor from Toronto to Quebec City via Ottawa and Montreal. This means much quicker trips of around three hours between Toronto and Montreal, and around 90 minutes from Ottawa to Montreal and from Montreal to Quebec City. Rail tends to be most attractive at journey times at or below three hours. It also means many more trips per day—potentially many trains per hour at the busiest times. With one metropolitan area of over seven million people, another with over five million, and two more with about a million, the Quebec City to Toronto corridor is a sufficiently large market to support the investment needed.

Michael Schabas, a consultant with CPCS who has worked on multiple high-speed rail projects around the world, including previous studies in Canada said:

The Canadian Pacific Railway was an act of faith. Once built, we figured out how to grow wheat on the prairies, discovered nickel in Sudbury, and made a then-unimaginable level of development possible across Western Canada. Alto can spur the development of whole new cities along the route. There’s a reason most countries that build a high-speed rail line go on to build several more.

Better transportation infrastructure has a long history of driving improvements that were never anticipated.

When the Paris-Lyon high-speed line opened, it dramatically shortened trips between the cities, making journeys possible that people never would have imagined. Parisians took the train to go for dinner at Lyon’s famous restaurants, while people from Lyon could go to Paris to catch the opera. The Alto project would make it possible for international tourists to practically visit all four cities on a two-week vacation, making the region a much more compelling tourist destination.

Maximising those benefits, however, means getting certain things right. France’s TGV and Spain’s AVE, among many other high-speed rail services, are very popular with commuters, who boost ridership beyond the core intercity market. This is helped by surprisingly affordable fares, which make it viable for people from, for example, Tours to commute the 230km to Paris in little over an hour. Likewise, passengers travelling at unpopular times enjoy lower fares, like on low-cost airlines. The high volume of passengers means that the trains still manage to cover their operating costs or, in many cases, even turn a profit.

There are many potential locations along the route for stations to serve regional trips and enable access to affordable housing outside the major metropolitan areas. Imagine a world in which Peterborough is only 40 minutes from Toronto’s Union Station and Trois-Rivières only 50 minutes from Montreal’s Gare Centrale. A new high-speed railway will allow thousands of people a day to get off the crowded highways and radically shorten their journey times. By running trains that skip stops like on most global high-speed rail systems, intercity journey times will remain speedy.

The Alto project, if done right, can set a template that can be used for high-speed rail in many other parts of Canada. Extensions of the planned line west to Pearson Airport, Hamilton, Niagara, and southwestern Ontario can bring high-speed rail access to millions more people, along with improving air-rail connections and providing access to a major global tourist attraction. The model could also be replicated in Alberta, where studies for high-speed rail are currently underway, as well as on other corridors. High-speed rail is long overdue in Canada, and it is exactly the kind of foundational infrastructure project we need to make Canada’s economy more integrated and more competitive.