I gladly confess my ignorance in all things high speed rail, but questions arise. Is there actually a need for it? I mean, it would serve an extremely small client base and even then would still need to compete with air. Why concentrate on a 19th century technology? Are people actually requiring the need to commute Edmonton to Calgary and back when a zoom meeting will suffice? Seems to be an awfully expensive technology to try to replace air travel. We don't even know how autonomous vehicles in the very near future will affect the equation. I know that there are a few HSR fans on this forum but hey, make your case.
I would argue there is still very much a need for high-speed rail between the two cities. Sure, many business meetings can be done on Zoom calls but many will still happen in-person for a variety of reasons. Executives might travel up to operations facilities, entrepreneurs travel down to meet with investors, professors travel back and forth for research networking events and conferences. Edmontonians might need to go down to access business services and consulate offices (ex. my friends who’ve travelled to Japan and Colombia). Many Calgarians come up to access our government services (including the MLAs who need to sit in the Legislature). All of these trips would be better facilitated by HSR that could do the journey in a2-hour round-trip, improving ease of business across both cities while making synergistic cooperation between our cities’ economies easier. We’re talking overnight stays becoming day trips and day trips becoming afternoons here.
Lots of Edmontonians have family and Calgary and vice versa. Many university students from the respective catchment areas of the two cities travel between them to attend classes and visit family in the holidays, and when I took debate in high school, I’ve had to travel to Calgary to attend competitions. Furthermore, I have had the unfortunate experiences of either cancelling those trips, postponing the return trip or running very late during the trip itself due to the inclement winter weather our province is infamous for and the accidents that compound those delays. High speed rail would be a safe and reliable mode of transportation in all of these conditions, much like the LRT is in our city during snow days.
Furthermore, lots of Edmontonians also like to travel down to take a trip to Banff (which will be further facilitated by a regional rail connection) or connect to international flights in Calgary, both of which are more difficult trips by car or plane (when you count last mile travel and wait times at airports) that disproportionally benefit Calgary. While HSR’s impact on our airport might be controversial, it would decouple the dependency of businesses on ample flight connections and make it more favourable to set up shop in Edmonton. At the same time, it would put Edmonton on the map for tourists flying in to check out Banff, by virtue of the HSR easily connecting them to us and being a tourist attraction in its own right.
It’s also important to remember the people living between the two cities that plane travel will never sufficiently connect. Doing HSR right means we would link HSR to smaller communities and provide local and express service (like CA HSR), enabling super commuters and gaining support from rural Alberta. This would also alleviate pressure on housing as more people move to Alberta in the coming decades and the cities run low on land, while simultaneously revitalizing our smaller towns.
In my opinion, a reliable train service that can travel 320 km/h is space-age tech, and Alberta is blessed with geography and mostly intact rail ROWs in the cities that make it cheaper and easier to implement. Passenger travel between the two cities isn’t going anywhere and HSR will be a competitive option. This is the future.
