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  • One line then the next

    One Line, Then the Next

    What Spain’s high-speed rail experience does, and does not, tell us about ALTO.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Comparative Brief · Published October 2026 · Prompted by Fareed Zakaria GPS, CNN, October 18, 2026
    The Commentary

    On October 18, 2026, Fareed Zakaria closed his CNN programme with a segment presenting Spain’s high-speed rail network as evidence that a democracy can still build large infrastructure. He credits Spain’s result to six conditions: building one line first, public finance, low construction cost, routing through less populated land, cross-party support and, since 2021, competition between train operators. He also notes two caveats: low use of parts of the network, and the cost of keeping it safe. CNN transcript

    Spain is the example most often offered for what a Toronto–Québec City line could become. This brief sets each of those conditions beside what has been published about ALTO.

    Key Finding

    On the sources set out here, ALTO shares few of the conditions the commentary identifies. Spain opened a single 471 km line in 1992 and did not open its second until 2003. ALTO’s published plan is a 1,000 km network, with property acquisition on its first segment, Ottawa–Montréal, reported to begin in late 2026 or early 2027.

    Spain’s average construction cost has been reported at €17.7 million per kilometre. ALTO’s $60–90 billion working assumption, divided by 1,000 km and converted at the October 1, 2026 rate, comes to about €38–56 million per kilometre, an Initiative calculation set out below with its limits. Spain financed its network publicly, with a substantial share from the European Union; ALTO is structured as a public-private partnership with no comparable outside funder.

    The Spanish case also carries findings that bear directly on ALTO: Spain’s fiscal authority and the European Court of Auditors have both found that much of the network carries few passengers relative to its cost, and the January 2026 derailment at Adamuz, on the original 1992 line, has made track maintenance a national question. Research also finds the network’s gains concentrated in the largest cities and at stations, with none of the studies reviewed finding that it reversed rural decline between them. These are findings about a network that was built cheaply. The comparison implies that a network costing two to three times as much per kilometre would face the same questions with a narrower margin.

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    Comparative brief with cost tables, the Spanish build sequence, and 32 numbered sources
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    The Numbers

    Three figures that frame the comparison

    11 years
    between Spain’s first high-speed line (1992) and its second (2003)
    ADIF / Renfe opening dates
    2.1–3.2×
    ALTO’s working-assumption cost per km against Spain’s reported average
    Initiative calculation
    46
    deaths reported at Adamuz, January 18, 2026, on Spain’s first line
    Final investigation report pending

    The commentary is a summary rather than a study, and its figures are round ones. Each is checked here against the underlying sources. Where the sources give a different number, the source figure is used: later reporting puts the Adamuz toll at 46, against the segment’s “more than 40,” and ADIF, Spain’s infrastructure manager, gives the network length as 3,973 km as of March 2026, consistent with the segment’s “nearly 2,500 miles.” ADIF Inspain

    Sequence

    One line at a time

    The Madrid–Seville line was inaugurated on April 14, 1992, timed to Seville’s Expo 92, with stops at Ciudad Real, Puertollano and Córdoba. The next new line, the first section of Madrid–Barcelona, did not open until 2003. The network then grew line by line over two decades. ADIF / Renfe via Wikipedia

    1992
    Madrid–Córdoba–Seville (471 km). The first line, opened for Expo 92.
    2003
    Madrid–Zaragoza–Lleida. First section of Madrid–Barcelona.
    2007–08
    Córdoba–Málaga; Madrid–Valladolid; Madrid–Barcelona completed (621 km).
    2010–13
    Madrid–Valencia, Albacete, Alicante; Barcelona–Figueres, linking to the French network.
    2015–22
    León, Zamora, Granada, Galicia, Burgos, Murcia, Badajoz. Madrid–Galicia took about 20 years of works; Plasencia–Badajoz was built for 200 km/h.

    Spain’s record is incremental, but it is not uniformly fast. Construction of the Basque high-speed line began in 2006 with completion forecast for 2016; completion is now forecast for 2027. Part of the network also consists of lines built or upgraded for 200–250 km/h rather than 300 km/h.

    ALTO’s sequence runs the other way. The federal government chose a high-speed option and selected Cadence in February 2025, and co-development began in March 2025. The plan is for a 1,000 km network. On the first segment, Ottawa–Montréal, ALTO’s chief executive has estimated about 1,700 property acquisitions, about 500 of them farms, with construction in 2029. Ridership has been forecast to 2084. Transport Canada Five Hundred Farms

    What this implies. Spain’s decision to build its second line was taken with years of operating evidence from the first. ALTO’s structure commits to a network before any segment has carried a passenger. On this sequence, the evidence the commentary credits with building support in Spain would not exist for ALTO until after the network’s scope, delivery model and land acquisition are settled.

    Cost

    Cost per kilometre, in the same units

    Four published sources give Spanish construction costs. They use different methods and periods, but each places Spain well below other European builders: an ADIF study gives €6–19 million per km by line; Spain’s fiscal authority, AIReF, €14.7 million (€15.3 million including stations); the engineering firm Ineco €17.7 million, against €45.5 million in other high-speed countries; and the European Court of Auditors €25 million as the average of ten audited lines across six member states. ADIF via Next City AIReF Ineco ECA

    ALTO’s published range is $60–90 billion in 2024 dollars, which its chief executive told a Senate committee is a class 5 internal working assumption rather than a cost estimate. Divided by 1,000 km and converted at 0.62526 euro per Canadian dollar (October 1, 2026), it compares as follows. Senate NFFN

    Initiative calculationLowHigh
    ALTO per route-km (C$)$60M$90M
    In euros at 0.62526€37.5M€56.3M
    Ratio to Spain, Ineco (€17.7M)2.1×3.2×
    Ratio to Spain incl. stations, AIReF (€15.3M)2.5×3.7×
    Ratio to ECA audited average (€25M)1.5×2.3×
    Ratio to other countries, Ineco (€45.5M)0.8×1.2×

    On this arithmetic, ALTO’s range is two to three times Spain’s average and close to the average Ineco reports for other high-speed countries. Spain is the low outlier; ALTO’s range is not an outlier against the international figures. The question the Spanish example raises is whether the conditions that let Spain build at half the international average are present in ALTO’s corridor.

    Limits. The Spanish figures cover construction from 1992 onward and are not stated in a single current price year; in 2024 prices they would be higher and the ratios lower. The published ALTO sources reviewed do not say what the $60–90 billion range includes, and the Spanish sources do not define their scope in the same terms. ALTO’s figure is a class 5 working assumption. The ratios indicate an order of magnitude, not a measured gap.

    Condition by Condition

    What made Spain work, and whether it transfers

    SpainALTO, as published
    Who pays. AIReF reported more than €55.89 billion spent on high-speed lines over 35 years, €14.09 billion (25.2%) of it from EU funds. As reported, Spain received 47.3% of the EU’s high-speed rail co-financing between 2000 and 2017.A public-private partnership that Transport Canada describes as among the largest the Government of Canada has sponsored. ALTO is funded by appropriations during development ($597 million in 2025–26). Canada has no outside funder in the EU’s position, and the terms of construction financing are not set out in the published sources reviewed.
    Transfers to ALTO:No
    Who builds. ADIF, the state infrastructure manager, has built line after line since the early 1990s, carrying its experience from one to the next.A first line, with no domestic high-speed construction programme behind it. The private partner develops and designs the project with ALTO during co-development. Cadence comprises CDPQ Infra, AtkinsRéalis, SYSTRA, Keolis, SNCF Voyageurs and Air Canada.
    Transfers to ALTO:No
    Where the line runs. Routing through less populated land lowered cost. Spain’s first line stopped at Ciudad Real and Puertollano, and the commentary describes the network as connecting urban and rural Spain.In Eastern Ontario, less populated land means farmland: about 500 farms on the first segment, under a statute that removes the standard attempt-to-purchase step and the public hearing on objections. Seven stations on 1,000 km, four of them in Québec; none between Peterborough and Ottawa.
    Transfers to ALTO:No
    Consensus. The commentary describes high-speed rail as a rare subject of cross-party agreement. The European Court of Auditors found, however, that decisions to build were often political and that cost-benefit analysis was not generally used.Consensus has not formed. OFA and UPA, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and Beef Farmers of Ontario have each called for the project to be halted or suspended pending assessment. In February 2026, senators asked whether a cost-benefit analysis had been done.
    Transfers to ALTO:Not yet
    Fares and competition. Ouigo entered in 2021 and Iryo in 2022. Spain’s competition authority reports Madrid–Barcelona tickets about €25 cheaper after liberalisation, fares on the main routes about 40% below 2019 in real terms, and 44.5 million passengers in 2025.One consortium develops and operates. The sources reviewed do not describe other operators competing on the new line. Air Canada, which operates air services between the corridor’s cities, is a consortium member.
    Transfers to ALTO:Not in published structure
    Demand. AIReF found Spain’s network the least used of the large networks, with socio-economic returns between zero and minimal in all four corridors it evaluated. Per-kilometre use was about a quarter of France’s.A forecast of 24 million trips a year by 2055 would exceed the Court’s nine-million benchmark for a successful line, and the corridor has about 18 million residents. Spain’s demand record is observed; ALTO’s is a forecast made before a cost estimate exists.
    Comparison:ALTO’s strongest point, unproven
    Upkeep

    Adamuz and the cost of keeping a line safe

    On January 18, 2026, an Iryo train derailed near Adamuz, Córdoba, on the Madrid–Seville line, and collided with an oncoming Renfe train; 46 deaths have been reported. The railway accident investigation commission, CIAF, stated in an interim note that its working hypothesis was a rail fracture at a weld that occurred before the Iryo train passed. Spain’s transport minister said the section had been renovated in May 2025. The train drivers’ union had written to ADIF in August 2025 about wear on that section, and the CIAF has reported inconsistencies in the documentation on the welds. As of the most recent reporting found, the final report has not been published. This brief makes no finding on the cause. CIAF Reuters

    The line involved was Spain’s first, 34 years old at the time. Maintenance is a lifecycle cost that grows as a network ages, and it is the cost least visible when a project is announced. The Initiative’s earlier operating-cost work estimates ALTO’s recurring lifecycle cost at about $1.8 billion a year at ALTO’s 3.5% discount rate. Cost of Running the Train

    Who Gains

    Who gains, and who does not

    Rural depopulation in Spain predates the high-speed network by most of a century. The share of Spaniards living in municipalities under 2,000 inhabitants fell from 27.5% in 1900 to 5.7% in 2021, though such places still make up 72.2% of all municipalities. Of 5,678 small municipalities studied, 56.9% lost population in both post-crisis periods examined, about 404,000 people combined, and the authors judge that around 3,300 face a bleak outlook. Gil-Alonso et al. 2023

    On 2018 INE data, 53% of Spain’s area holds about 5% of its population at under 12.5 inhabitants per km². elDiario.es The evidence reviewed does not show that high-speed rail caused this decline. The question it can answer is narrower: whether the network changed the pattern, and for whom.

    Gains concentrate at the ends

    On Madrid–Seville, population growth and land development concentrated “mostly towards the two largest cities.” Ciudad Real, within commuting range of Madrid, gained; Puertollano, one stop further, seldom did. Shen et al. 2015 Shen et al. 2016

    Stations matter

    Provinces with stops on Madrid–Barcelona saw on average about 2.4% higher output and 3.3% more firms. Across Spain, service has been associated with population growth overall, but not in every case: a required condition for development, not a guarantee of it. Carbo et al. 2019 Miralles i Garcia 2019

    The places in between

    The coverage gap is greatest for smaller, peripheral municipalities and those between lines, and strengthening links among the largest places could further isolate the smallest. Activity concentrates in the most developed nodes, and areas without a station can see service degradation. None of the studies reviewed finds that high-speed rail reversed rural decline between stations. Naranjo Gómez et al. 2020 Albalate & Bel 2026

    Local evidence from those places is mostly advocacy and press reporting. A users’ association reports Linares-Baeza station fell from 56 passenger trains a day before 1992 to 14. Soria, reported to be the only province the high-speed line crosses without a stop, has had no operating rail service since April 2025. In May 2025, farm unions in Sanabria, Zamora, protested a proposal to remove high-speed stops to shorten journeys to Vigo, citing depopulation and access to medical care. Each intermediate stop slows the trains for everyone travelling end to end, so the stops that provide access are the first to come under pressure. Moncloa El Debate Agronews

    What this implies for ALTO. ALTO’s published plan has seven stations on 1,000 km, none between Peterborough and Ottawa. On the Spanish evidence, gains would concentrate in the end cities and at those stations, while the rural communities between them carry the land acquisition without a station of their own. Transport Canada’s 2025 briefing records funding for the planning and eventual transfer of VIA Rail’s Québec City–Windsor corridor services to the private partner; the published sources reviewed do not say what service would continue at VIA’s intermediate stations. On the Spanish record, that is the question that decides whether the places between the stations gain or lose. Transport Canada

    Implications for ALTO

    What the Spanish case supports, and what it does not

    What it supports

    Democracies can build A democracy can build an extensive high-speed network at a cost per kilometre well below the international average. On the sources here, the commentary’s central point holds.
    Stages produce evidence Building in stages lets each later decision use evidence from the lines already running.
    Competition lowers fares Independent operators competing on publicly owned track can lower fares and raise use.

    What it does not support

    That ALTO would cost what Spain cost The conditions behind Spain’s costs are largely absent from ALTO’s corridor and delivery model.
    That high-speed lines fill wherever built Spain’s own fiscal authority and the EU’s auditors found otherwise on much of the network.
    That construction is the whole story The Adamuz investigation concerns the upkeep of Spain’s oldest line.
    That benefits spread evenly Research finds gains concentrated in the largest cities and at stations; none finds it reversed rural decline between them.

    On the arithmetic and sources set out here, the Spanish case is better read as a description of a method than as evidence for a particular project. ALTO’s published plan differs from that method in sequence, cost, finance, routing, station spacing and market structure. The comparison implies that whether Canada can build depends less on whether high-speed rail is built than on how it is built.

    Status of the Figures

    Published figures on this page are quoted from the named sources and can be checked there. All other figures, including every per-kilometre figure and ratio for ALTO, are Initiative calculations from those inputs: ALTO’s published range, a 1,000 km route length and the October 1, 2026 exchange rate. Reconstructions are estimates rather than measurements. Where ALTO has not published something, such as a breakdown of its cost range or the terms of construction financing, the text says so rather than inferring it. No claim is made about why any particular figure was or was not published.

    Download Full Brief
    One Line, Then the Next (PDF, 12 pages)
    Full comparison with the Spanish build sequence, four cost sources, the per-kilometre calculation and its limits, and 32 numbered sources
    Download PDF
    Sources

    Primary documents and reporting

    1.
    CNN, Fareed Zakaria GPS, transcript, aired October 18, 2026. transcripts.cnn.com
    2.
    ADIF, “Red de alta velocidad” (network length 3,973 km, March 2026). adifaltavelocidad.es
    3.
    Wikipedia, “High-speed rail in Spain” (opening dates, speeds, construction delays; drawing on ADIF and Renfe), accessed October 19, 2026. wikipedia.org
    4.
    Associated Press, report on the Adamuz collision, January 19, 2026, citing EU figures of more than 3,100 km of Spanish line above 250 km/h. gpb.org
    5.
    Next City, “New Starts: Spain’s Dirt-Cheap High-Speed Rail,” reporting an ADIF study of cost per kilometre by line. nextcity.org
    6.
    Ineco, Efficiency of the Spanish Sector in High-Speed Rail Development, as reported by Global Railway Review and Forbes España. globalrailwayreview.com
    7.
    AIReF, spending review of transport infrastructure (2020), as reported by International Railway Journal. railjournal.com
    8.
    European Court of Auditors, Special Report 19/2018, A European high-speed rail network: not a reality but an ineffective patchwork. op.europa.eu
    9.
    Reporting of ECA Special Report 19/2018 figures for Spain: Ara, June 27, 2018; Catalan News, June 26, 2018. ara.cat · catalannews.com
    10.
    CNMC data as reported by Railway Pro (2026) and International Railway Journal (2023); Frontier Economics on liberalisation; Hosteltur on the transport minister’s comments. railwaypro.com · frontier-economics.com · hosteltur.com
    11.
    CIAF, note on the investigation of the Adamuz accident, January 2026; Railway Gazette International, January 27, 2026. transportes.gob.es · railwaygazette.com
    12.
    Adamuz reporting: The Citizen (Reuters), January 19, 2026; Ara, on weld documentation (March 2026); Inspain (September 2026). thecitizen.co.tz · ara.cat · inspain.news
    13.
    Transport Canada, Committee of the Whole briefing binder, “VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc. (Alto),” June 2025. tc.canada.ca
    14.
    Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, evidence, February 24, 2026. sencanada.ca
    15.
    Library of Parliament, HillStudy, VIA Rail: Its Past, Its Present and the High-Speed Rail Project, executive summary, May 4, 2026. hillnotes.ca
    16.
    OpenCouncil, “Alto High-Speed Rail” project summary, January 2026. opencouncil.ca
    17.
    Millstone News, “Alto: Coming soon to a neighbourhood near you?”, July 21, 2026. millstonenews.com
    18.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, Five Hundred Farms (May 2026), and the sources cited there. citizenresearch.ca
    19.
    Exchange-rates.org, CAD/EUR rate for October 1, 2026 (1 CAD = 0.62526 EUR). exchange-rates.org
    20.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, earlier briefs: North American vs. European Regulation of High-Speed Rail; Three Claims, One Fare; Cost of Running the Train (all August 2026). citizenresearch.ca
    21.
    Gil-Alonso, Bayona-i-Carrasco & Pujadas-Rúbies, “Is Spanish depopulation irreversible?”, Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 21(1), 2023. austriaca.at
    22.
    elDiario.es, “Radiografía de la España vacía,” March 29, 2019 (INE data for 2018). eldiario.es
    23.
    Shen, Zhao, de Abreu e Silva & Martínez, Madrid–Seville HSR and population growth, TRB 2016. mit.edu
    24.
    Shen, de Abreu e Silva, Zhao & Martínez, 15 years’ impacts of Madrid–Seville HSR, TRB 2015. mit.edu
    25.
    Carbo, Graham, Anupriya, Casas & Melo, causal economic impacts of the Madrid–Barcelona HSR corridor, 2019. figshare.com
    26.
    Miralles i Garcia, “High-speed rail services in Spain and their relationship to population growth,” WIT Transactions on the Built Environment 182, 2019. witpress.com
    27.
    Naranjo Gómez et al., “Assessment of high-speed rail service coverage in municipalities of peninsular Spain,” Infrastructures 5(2), 2020. mdpi.com
    28.
    Albalate & Bel, When Speed Outruns Demand, ADBI Policy Brief 2026-6, March 2026. adb.org
    29.
    Moncloa.com, “El AVE y la España vaciada de trenes convencionales,” July 2019 (union and users’ association figures). moncloa.com
    30.
    El Debate, on Soria’s rail isolation lasting until 2027, July 20, 2026. eldebate.com
    31.
    Agronews Castilla y León, Sanabria protest against removal of high-speed stops, May 21, 2025. agronewscastillayleon.com
    32.
    Transport Canada, Minister’s briefing binder, “High-Speed Rail,” June 2025. tc.canada.ca
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Comparative Brief  ·  October 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.
    This page makes no statement about the motives or conduct of any person or organisation.

  • The REM ridership dispute

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Comparative Brief

    The REM Ridership Dispute

    What two La Presse reports, published a day apart, show about forecasts, baselines and payment models, and what that means for ALTO

    September 2026

    Two La Presse reports (September 28 and 29, 2026) give opposite readings of ridership on Montréal’s REM, the light-rail network built and owned by CDPQ Infra, a subsidiary of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. For ALTO, the useful lesson is less which reading is right than what the dispute shows about forecasts, baselines, and the per-passenger-kilometre payment model used for the REM.

    +9%Ridership the business-plan study projected from the Anse-à-l’Orme and airport branches together
    +63%Weekday ridership rise, May to September 2026, with only the Anse-à-l’Orme branch open (Initiative calculation)

    1. What the two articles report

    CPCS report (La Presse, Sept 28)CDPQ Infra figures (La Presse, Sept 29)
    SourceCommissioned by developer Scalia PropertiesReleased by CDPQ Infra to La Presse
    RidershipAbout 75,000 daily trips (last figure La Caisse had made public, early 2026)130,000 average per weekday since Aug 24; peak of 149,000 on Sept 22
    Expected at that stageAbout 114,000 a day: 2017 projections adjusted for delay, two open branches and COVIDNot stated; ridership described as about 40% above what was anticipated
    Result34% below target; at least 11% below under the most optimistic recovery assumptionsDescribed as well beyond expectations
    NetworkTwo branches, before Anse-à-l’Orme opened64 km, 23 stations; airport branch due 2027

    The first article also reports that ARTM pays La Caisse $0.72 per passenger-kilometre under the 2018 agreement. CPCS puts the shortfall at 148 million passenger-km a year, which La Presse reports as over $100 million the public pays under a performance guarantee.

    2. What the dispute shows

    The parties disagree on the baseline as much as the ridership. CPCS’s expected figure is about 114,000 a day. CDPQ Infra’s “40% above” implies an expected figure near 93,000 (Initiative calculation: 130,000 ÷ 1.4). Neither article sets out the published baseline for the current stage.

    The two figures measure different things. CPCS uses daily trips at the end of 2025. CDPQ Infra uses a weekday average over about five weeks in September, which Professor Jean-Philippe Meloche (Université de Montréal) notes is historically a busy month. The payment is per passenger-km, and neither article gives passenger-km for the current period.

    The business-plan forecast did not anticipate the network’s behaviour. The study behind the business plan projected that the Anse-à-l’Orme and airport branches together would add 9% to ridership. Weekday ridership went from 80,000 in May (as stated by La Caisse’s CEO) to 130,000 now, about 63% higher (Initiative calculation), before the airport branch has opened. How much is seasonal is not known; CDPQ Infra says a fuller update will follow this fall.

    3. What this means for ALTO

    1. Forecasts can miss by large margins in either direction. On the figures reported, the REM was well below its projection at end-2025, and a single branch has since outperformed its forecast several times over. ALTO’s 24 million annual trips by 2055 (Canada’s Moment, August 2026) is one central figure; the REM case shows why published ranges and sensitivity tests matter at this stage.
    2. A per-passenger-km payment scales public cost with use. If ridership falls short, La Presse reports the public still pays under the performance guarantee; if ridership rises, payments rise with it. ALTO’s payment mechanism has not been published. If it followed the REM model, public cost would depend on ridership in both directions, which a “no subsidies” description would not capture.
    3. A ridership number needs its basis. Weekday or annual average, trips or passenger-km, which season, which stage of the network. ALTO’s 24 million is an annual figure; any comparison with it, or with REM-style reporting, needs the same basis.
    4. Land value capture has a real-world ceiling nearby. The REM levy is $12.26 per square foot, capped at $600 million over 50 years, and the developer reports it is slowing construction near stations. The McGill HSR analysis (July 2026) assumes $12 billion in land value capture, 20 times the REM cap (Initiative calculation). ALTO projects 63,000 housing units while noting it does not control land use.
    Status of the figuresPublished figures are quoted from the named sources and can be checked there. Figures marked as Initiative calculations are derived from those inputs. The REM is an urban light-metro network, not intercity rail; its trip-generation figures are not applied to ALTO here. Where a figure has not been published, the text says so. No claim is made about why any figure was or was not published.

    Sources

    • 1Vincent Larin, “Le REM serait loin de l’achalandage promis,” La Presse, September 28, 2026.
    • 2Vincent Larin, “L’achalandage du REM bondit,” La Presse, September 29, 2026.
    • 3ALTO, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, August 2026.
    • 4Zhang, Negm and El-Geneidy, High-Speed Rail in Canada: Insights from a corridorwide survey and a financial analysis, Transportation Research at McGill, July 2026.
    • 5The CPCS report itself has not been published; its figures are as reported by La Presse.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Comparative Brief · September 2026 This page makes no statement about the motives or conduct of any person or organisation.

  • How many riders?

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Plain Language Brief

    How many people will actually ride the train?

    Every cost figure for this project sits on top of one forecast. Two independent ways of estimating it both land well below the twenty-four million passengers a year being promised — and both say the two competing designs would carry roughly the same number of people.

    Chapter 6 of the HPR Research Report · September 2026

    4–5M

    What corridors like this one actually carry, on the evidence of comparable railways worldwide

    24M

    Alto’s published target — above every independent forecast of this corridor

    5.7%

    How far apart the two competing designs are on total riders carried by 2080

    The case for a railway of this size rests, in the end, on a forecast. The number of riders sets the benefit, drives the ticket revenue, and sits underneath every cost-per-passenger figure anyone quotes. Choose the ridership and you have largely chosen the economics.

    So we answered the question twice, on purpose, using two methods that were free to disagree.

    The first asks what comparable railways actually carry, and where this corridor sits among them. The second builds a number up from the ground: how many people live along the line, how often they travel between its cities, and what share of those journeys a train would win. The first gives a floor grounded in what people really do. The second gives a ceiling based on how travel choices work. Where they differ is itself worth knowing.

    1. What railways like this one actually carry

    The measure is simple: intercity rail trips in a year, divided by the population the railway serves. Trips per person per year. It lets you compare countries of very different size.

    Across twelve operating systems, two tiers appear. Networks that serve a whole country — France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Spain, Italy, Sweden — sit between 1.0 and 3.4 trips per person. Single corridors — one dominant city pair, or a cross-border link — sit near 0.3, whatever technology they use. Eurostar is 0.35. Brightline in Florida is 0.31. The Boston–Washington Northeast Corridor is 0.30.

    Toronto to Québec City is long, but it is a corridor: a single chain of cities. Today VIA carries 0.23 trips per person along it.

    Why Taiwan carries ten times what the Northeast Corridor does

    Not speed, and not the price of a ticket. The thing that predicts intercity rail use better than anything else we tested is how committed the surrounding society is to the private car — how many cars per thousand people, how cheap the fuel, how few the tolls, and how poor the transit at the far end. We combine those four into a single score.

    Measured that way, this corridor scores 71. That puts it beside VIA today (71), Brightline (73) and the Northeast Corridor (64) — and a long way from Sweden or Taiwan. The fitted relationship predicts about 0.29 trips per person, which is roughly four to five million trips a year. Barely above the 0.23 that conventional service already achieves.

    The empty quadrant

    Sort every system in the set by car dependence and look at the high end, where this corridor sits. Above a certain point, every railway in the world is lightly used: the Northeast Corridor at 0.30, VIA at 0.23, Brightline at 0.31.

    There is not one car-committed country anywhere running a heavily used intercity railway. Either they did not build fast rail, or they built it and it underperformed. The top-right of the chart — car-dependent and heavily used at the same time — is empty. A twenty-four-million forecast puts a marker in that empty space.

    One honest qualification

    The relationship is anchored by its extremes. In the middle of the range the scatter is wide: Spain and Italy sit well below the line at much the same car-dependence score as Taiwan and Sweden sit above it. The measure predicts the ends well and the middle poorly.

    That matters less here than it might, because this corridor is not in the ambiguous middle. It is at the car-dependent end, where the pattern is tight and uniformly unfavourable.

    2. Speed is not the lever. The fare is.

    The case for building fast leans on three things: the train is quick, it can be made cheap to ride, and it runs through a populous corridor. Tested against real railways, none of the three works the way it is assumed to.

    Speed explains almost nothing. At around 300 km/h, ridership across the set ranges from 0.35 to 3.4 — a tenfold spread at the same speed. At 200 km/h, Sweden carries 2.9 and Brightline carries 0.31. Once car dependence is accounted for, speed adds nothing measurable. The world’s fast railways are mostly its least car-dependent ones, which is a different fact.

    Density does not rescue it either. The Northeast Corridor has roughly three times this corridor’s population per kilometre of route. That threefold advantage buys it about 0.07 more trips per person — the difference between 0.23 and 0.30. Not the two- or three-fold gain a high-speed business case needs.

    The fare does move it. The same physical railway carries about 36 per cent of corridor travel under heavy subsidy and about 19 per cent under minimal subsidy — close to a doubling, decided by policy rather than engineering. That is the real lever, and it is a recurring cost rather than a capital one.

    What matters to a traveller is not the speed of the train. It is the time from where they are to where they are going.

    Measured centre to centre, a 177–240 km/h railway already beats flying between Toronto and Ottawa — about 2h55 against roughly 3h30 once you count getting to the airport, security and the trip in at the other end. Toronto to Montréal comes out at about 3h32 against 3h45 by air. The extra speed of a 300 km/h line buys perhaps twenty-five minutes on that journey, at several times the capital cost per kilometre.

    3. The two designs carry about the same number of people

    This is the part that surprises people. The faster, more expensive railway does carry more — but not by much, and not for the reason usually assumed.

    At maturity, for every 100 riders the greenfield high-speed line carries, the brownfield route carries about 84. Part of that gap is speed. Part of it is simply that the high-speed line also runs on to Québec City, which the brownfield route does not.

    Over the whole horizon the gap is much smaller. Counting every passenger carried between opening and 2080, the two are 5.7 per cent apart — about 321 million against 341 million. Both open in 2040, so neither gets a head start. The brownfield route opens as a single stage and is running at full strength by about 2050, while the high-speed line phases in over three stages to 2050 and only passes the brownfield route on the running total in 2069.

    Single-stage delivery is worth almost as much, over fifty years, as the higher speed is.

    And the remaining gap can be closed with the fare. Price the brownfield route 11 to 18 per cent below the high-speed line and the two carry the same number of people. Price it twenty per cent below and it carries more at every point across the fifty years — a discount that sits inside its subsidy budget precisely because its costs are so much lower. Matching that discount would oblige the high-speed line to give up revenue it can far less afford.

    4. How our numbers compare with everyone else’s

    Our central figures are about 9.2 million a year for the high-speed corridor and 8.2 million for the brownfield route, around 2055. Those sit just below the published forecasts — and well below the twenty-four-million target.

    Annual corridor ridership around 2055 — published forecasts and ours
    ForecastRiders a year
    Alto published target24M
    Munk School GEPL (Toronto–Montréal, scaled up)16.6–18.3M
    C.D. Howe Institute (2050)12–21M
    Joint Project Office 2021 (high-frequency, not high-speed)15.5M
    McGill TRAM (2026) — survey evidence10.9M
    McGill TRAM (2026) — with induced demand added18.4M
    Our central case, high-speed corridor9.2M
    Our central case, brownfield route8.2M

    Most of the distance between our figures and the earlier ones is not method but population. The older forecasts were built before the 2024–25 immigration cap, which removed about 6.3 million people from the corridor’s projected 2055 population. Run our own method on the population path those forecasts assumed and it gives 12.1 and 10.8 million — inside their band.

    Two of these are not independent of the project

    McGill TRAM states that its results “rely on ALTO’s announced information, survey data, and stated assumptions.” The C.D. Howe Institute describes its own work as an economic analysis “largely building on VIA-HFR passenger forecasts, rather than a full bottom-up transport modelling exercise.”

    Neither is a separate test of the demand case. Both take the promoter’s forecast and carry it through a benefits model. That does not make them wrong — it makes them fewer independent estimates than a list of four suggests.

    There is also something worth noticing in the fourth. The Joint Project Office — the federal body that has since become Alto — put corridor ridership at 11.0 million by 2034 and 16.8 million by 2059 in its 2021 business case. That works out at roughly 15.5 million around 2055. The twenty-four-million target now advanced for the same corridor is about half as much again, and the increase arrived with the change from high-frequency to high-speed rather than with any new measurement.

    Read all the methods together, the honest range for 2055 is somewhere between four or five million and twelve or thirteen million. The published forecasts cluster in the upper half of that. Alto’s target sits above all of it.

    5. How we tried not to fool ourselves

    The discipline this report asks of Alto is that a forecast be tested against what comparable completed projects actually achieved, rather than defended from inside its own assumptions. A standard applied only to the other side is not a standard.

    Three things we did that cut against our own argument

    We ran our method on their population figures. Using the pre-2024 population path the earlier forecasts assumed, our own method lands inside their published band. So on a common basis we are not more pessimistic than they are — the difference is a Statistics Canada input, not a modelling choice.

    We report where the brownfield route loses. It carries fewer riders. At maturity it is sixteen per cent behind, and over the whole horizon 5.7 per cent behind. That is in our summary, not a footnote.

    We carry a low case that damages both. On the lower of our two trip-generation rates, neither railway reaches the traffic economists consider necessary to justify high-speed construction at all. That does not help the alternative this report argues for. We publish it because the method produced it.

    The estimate is bounded rather than precise, and the bounds are wide. The comparison set is twelve systems and predicts its extremes better than its middle. How often people travel between these cities is the least settled input, and ridership scales directly with it. Only one leg of the car market is measured at a roadside count; the others are sized from travel demand. And Alto’s own demand model is unpublished, so we can measure the size of the disagreement but not say which assumption causes it. That is why our first recommendation is that the model be released for independent audit.

    A claim that no evidence could overturn is not a finding.

    So here is what would overturn ours. The empty quadrant rests on an absence: one car-committed society carrying intercity rail ridership well above one trip per person would remove our strongest argument at a stroke. None appears in the record we examined. Statistics Canada’s National Travel Survey showing corridor travel materially higher than we assume would raise every figure here in proportion — though not the ratio between the two railways, which is why we report that ratio separately. A simulated journey time showing a larger speed advantage than the twenty-five minutes we estimate would narrow the gap.

    How to read the numbers on this page

    Figures attributed to a named source — Alto, McGill TRAM, the C.D. Howe Institute, the Munk School, the Joint Project Office, VIA Rail, Statistics Canada or a named operator — are quoted from the full chapter’s source list and can be checked there.

    Everything else is output from our own models: the car-dependence scoring and the relationship fitted to it, the modal-share curves, the population trajectories, the ridership envelope and the cumulative totals. These are estimates built on stated assumptions, not measurements. The assumptions and the fitted equations are set out in the full chapter so that any of them can be replaced and the arithmetic re-run.

    Where Alto has not published a figure, we say so rather than inferring one, and we make no claim about why any figure has not been published.

    Read the full chapter

    Chapter 6 — Ridership and Demand (PDF)

    The reference class and the Car Dependency Index with its fit statistics, the corridor population trajectories, the journey-time build-up, the modal-share curves and their fitted equations, the fifty-year ridership and cumulative-passenger figures, the comparison against published forecasts, and the complete source list.

    Sources and notes

    1Reference class: annual ridership and served population for twelve operating systems, 2024 reporting year, from operator and national statistical reporting — Taiwan High Speed Rail, SJ, Central Japan Railway, Korail and SR, SNCF Voyageurs, Deutsche Bahn, Trenitalia and Italo, Renfe, Eurostar and HS1, Brightline, Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada. China is shown for reference and excluded from the fit.
    2Car dependence: motorization data from the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers and World Bank development indicators; fuel prices from the International Energy Agency; road-pricing coverage from national transport ministries.
    3Population: Statistics Canada, Population Projections for Canada, Provinces and Territories, January 2026 vintage, catalogue 17-20-0003, tables 17-10-0057-01 and 17-10-0058-01, low-growth, medium-growth baseline and high-growth scenarios; and the 2024–25 federal Immigration Levels Plan.
    4Published forecasts: Zhang, B., Negm, H. and El-Geneidy, A., High-speed rail in Canada: insights from a corridorwide survey, Transportation Research at McGill, March 2026 — tram.mcgill.ca. Jones, D. and Fariha, T., All Aboard: The Benefits of Faster, More Frequent Passenger Trains between Ontario and Québec and The Costs of Delay, Commentary 676, C.D. Howe Institute, February 2025 — cdhowe.org. Global Economic Policy Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, High-Speed Rail: Toronto–Montreal — Economic Analysis, 2021. Joint Project Office, High Frequency Rail Project: Business Case Update, V.002, December 2021, released under access to information.
    5Method: B. Flyvbjerg, “Survival of the Unfittest”, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2009, and HM Treasury, The Green Book, on reference-class forecasting and optimism bias; G. de Rus and G. Nombela, “Is Investment in High Speed Rail Socially Profitable?”, Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, 41(1), 2007, on the minimum traffic needed to justify high-speed investment.
    6Travel markets: Ministry of Transportation of Ontario, Provincial Highways Traffic Volumes; VIA Rail Canada, 2024 Annual Report; Statistics Canada air passenger traffic; and the Initiative’s companion briefs Intercity Car Trips Between Toronto, Ottawa and Montréal and Undressing the Addressable Market, July 2026.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative Independent, non-partisan citizen research on the proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. This page is a plain-language summary of Chapter 6 of the HPR Research Report. The full chapter sets out the models, the tables and the complete source list. Nothing on this page is a statement about the motives or conduct of any person or organisation. It is an estimate of how many people a railway in this corridor would carry, and of what follows from that.

  • Where you put a railway

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Plain Language Brief

    Where you put a railway decides almost everything else

    Build beside a highway that already exists, or cut a new line through open country. That single choice sets the carbon, the habitat damage, the disruption during construction and the opposition — and it sets the cost too.

    Chapter 5 of the HPR Research Report · September 2026

    −15 Mt

    Carbon removed over fifty years by the brownfield route, on our model

    +15 Mt

    Carbon added over the same period by the greenfield route

    29 v 65

    Community friction scores, brownfield against greenfield

    The environmental case for a railway is usually made with one number: the carbon saved by taking people out of cars and planes. That number matters, and we deal with it first. But the bigger environmental fact about a railway is decided before a single train runs — by where the line is put.

    A route that follows an existing transport corridor inherits ground that has already been cleared, drained, fenced and cut through. A route driven across open country creates a new line of disturbance where there was none. The same choice governs the human side: whether a project takes its land from beside a highway people already live next to, or from farms and communities that never expected a railway.

    This page covers the four consequences that follow from that one decision. On each of them the two routes differ not by a margin but in kind.

    1. Carbon: the two routes have opposite signs

    Over fifty years the brownfield route is a net removal of carbon. The greenfield route, measured the same way, is a net emitter. Not smaller — opposite.

    Three things drive that. Construction carbon is the one-off emission of building the line. Building at grade beside an existing highway needs no tunnelling through the Canadian Shield, no deep cuts, and no treatment of the unstable marine clay south of Ottawa. Our estimate is 4.9 Mt for the brownfield line against 14.9 Mt for the greenfield one — roughly three times more.

    Running the trains turns out to be almost a rounding error either way. On Ontario’s grid, electric traction emits about 6 grams of carbon per passenger-kilometre.

    Freight is what decides it. A passenger line built beside the existing freight railway frees capacity on that railway. Every long-haul truck that moves off Highway 401 onto rail saves about a quarter of a tonne of carbon on a typical haul. At 3,000 trucks a day — about eight freight trains — that is roughly 13.5 Mt over fifty years. The greenfield route has no freight function, so it cannot claim any of it.

    Fifty-year carbon balance — our estimate, central case
    What countsBrownfield (electric)Greenfield
    Building it+4.9 Mt+14.9 Mt
    Running the trains+1.3 Mt+5.4 Mt
    Roads closed by fencing—+1.7 Mt
    Trucks moved to rail−13.5 Mtnone
    Passengers out of cars−7.9 Mt−7 Mt
    Net over 50 years−15.2 Mt+15 Mt

    Both columns are Initiative estimates, not published figures. A dash means the project structurally has no such term. The two routes differ in length — roughly 485 km against roughly 1,000 km — which is itself part of the comparison, because the longer line is the heavier one to build.

    Why the freight credit matters so much

    The carbon saved by taking a passenger out of a car shrinks every year as more cars become electric. By the 2050s it is close to nothing. The carbon saved by taking a truck off the road and putting the load on a train does not shrink the same way, because trucks stay diesel far longer — and it grows as the electricity grid gets cleaner.

    So the brownfield route’s carbon case rests on something that strengthens with time. The greenfield route’s rests on something that weakens.

    That shows up most clearly in how long each takes to pay back its construction carbon. The brownfield line breaks even in 12 to 18 years and stays in credit after that, and the timing barely changes with passenger numbers because freight carries it. The greenfield line depends entirely on passengers: about 22 years at 10 million a year, 39 years at 6 million, and at lower ridership it does not break even within fifty years at all.

    2. Habitat: a new barrier in the wrong place

    A railway is a barrier to animals. Where you put the barrier decides whether it cuts through habitat that is still whole, or adds one more strand to ground that is already crossed by a highway and a freight line.

    The greenfield alignment runs through or beside three of eastern Ontario’s most sensitive landscapes.

    The Frontenac Arch

    A billion-year-old granite ridge linking the Canadian Shield to the Adirondacks, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 2002, and the narrowest point on the wildlife corridor running from Algonquin to the Adirondacks. It holds Blanding’s turtle, the grey ratsnake, the eastern whip-poor-will and somewhere between half and two thirds of Canada’s cerulean warblers, along with fisher, black bear, moose and eastern wolf.

    Because it is already the tightest pinch-point in a continental corridor, a new barrier laid across it does disproportionate harm. It does not just disturb habitat; it narrows the last gap animals still move through.

    The Napanee Limestone Plain

    Alvar — flat limestone pavement with almost no soil, flooded in spring and parched in summer. It exists in only two places on Earth, the Great Lakes basin and the Baltic, and about 85 per cent of North America’s alvar is in Ontario. It supports part of Ontario’s remaining eastern loggerhead shrike population, a bird now down to a handful of nesting pairs province-wide.

    A brownfield route is not ecologically free. Its right-of-way still crosses natural land. The point is comparative: it adds a strand where a barrier already exists, rather than opening a fresh one through the ground that the biosphere designation exists to protect.

    We say that plainly because it matters. The corridor audit in Chapter 4 finds the brownfield spine still crosses about 41 per cent natural cover. It is not a route through nothing. It is a route through ground that a four-lane highway and a Class I freight main already run down.

    3. Construction: where the trucks go

    A 479-kilometre construction site has to be fed. The brownfield spine needs roughly 9.8 million tonnes of fill, ballast, track and concrete — about 20,400 tonnes for every kilometre built. Delivered entirely by road, that is around 390,000 loaded truck trips, running on the same Highway 401 the railway is being built beside, during the decade that highway is itself being widened.

    Britain has already run this experiment. HS2 moved more than 10 million tonnes of material by rail, and the reason it did is the instructive part: it was not a carbon measure. Local councils refused the lorry routes the project had planned. Moving material by train was how the works stayed consented.

    The honest size of the carbon saving

    Moving 60 to 80 per cent of the material by rail instead of road would avoid somewhere between 0.05 and 0.08 Mt of carbon. That is one to two per cent of the line’s construction emissions. It is a real saving and a small one, and the carbon case on this page does not rest on it.

    What it changes is something else: whether people along the route can live with the construction. That is the variable that decides whether a corridor gets built at all.

    And this is not a strategy a project can simply decide to adopt. It is a property of where the line is. A route beside an existing freight railway has yards at Belleville, Kingston, Brockville, Cornwall and Coteau available as railheads, and on the Ottawa legs runs on publicly owned track. A greenfield route through the Frontenac Arch has no railway to deliver to. Materials arrive by road on haul roads built for the purpose, and excavated rock leaves the same way, through the same rural communities.

    4. Communities: friction is priced into the cost

    We score this two ways. The Latent Friction Index measures the structural friction a route will generate, before any opposition has appeared. The Community Friction Index measures opposition that has actually materialised. On the forward measure the brownfield spine scores about 29 and the greenfield corridor about 65. On the realised measure the greenfield project has already reached 54, and is rising.

    This is not only a political point. In our reference-class cost model, community friction is a statistically significant predictor of cost escalation — it carries most of the explanatory power in what a kilometre actually costs to build, across the international sample. The friction a new corridor generates gets priced into the bill.

    A low-friction route is not just quieter. It is cheaper, and those are the same fact seen from two sides.

    The difference comes down to where the land is taken from. Both routes need new land; a railway cannot be laid inside a live highway. But land taken beside an existing highway and freight line is already fragmented, already severed, and already next to infrastructure. Land taken across open country is none of those things, and the people it is taken from had no prior relationship with the project.

    One thing that cuts the other way

    The margin beside Highway 401 that makes the brownfield route cheap is being consumed — by interchange development, logistics parks moving east, subdivisions at growth centres and utility lock-in. Chapter 4 puts the extra capital cost of waiting until the corridor fills in at around $20 billion — land that has become developed by the time it is bought, plus the premium of building elevated through a filled-in strip rather than at grade on open ground. That alone would roughly halve the route’s benefit-cost ratio and erase the advantage that is the reason to prefer it. Counting the benefits forgone during the delay as well, Chapter 4 puts the full cost of letting the corridor close at about $42.6 billion.

    The brownfield option is the low-friction one, but only while the window is open.

    5. What the corridor could give back

    Everything above treats the corridor as something done to the land it crosses. There is a reciprocal question worth asking.

    Against the intuition that Ontario’s sun improves as you go south and west, the province’s strongest solar yields are in the east. Kingston records about 1,194 kilowatt-hours per installed kilowatt per year and Ottawa about 1,140, against roughly 1,096 for Toronto and 1,084 for London. The railway is proposed through the sunniest ground in southern Ontario — and developers noticed first. Four ten-megawatt solar farms stand within a few kilometres of the 401 around Ingleside alone — Rutley, Cornwall, David Brown and South Stormont, built between 2012 and 2015 — and at Edwardsburgh Cardinal a partnership including the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation is building the largest battery storage system in Canada.

    This matters for a reason that has nothing to do with electricity. A right-of-way takes a strip of land and pays for it once. A generation lease pays on the land that remains, every year, for decades. The awkward leftover parcels created by a railway are poor ground for crops and perfectly good ground for solar panels. The Rutley farm gives a sense of the scale: ten megawatts across about ninety acres.

    Being clear about the numbers

    The contracts that built the existing solar farms paid up to 44.3 cents a kilowatt-hour and are closed to new entrants. At today’s rates a ten-megawatt facility earns closer to a million dollars a year than the five to seven million those contracts paid. The existing arrays are a poor guide to what a new one is worth.

    A million a year through a lease and a tax roll is still a different thing from a single expropriation cheque.

    The limits deserve stating as plainly as the opportunity. Solar output peaks in summer and stops at night, while a railway’s demand is flat and year-round — so this is a commercial and community proposition, not a way to power trains. Provincial policy restricts ground-mount solar on prime farmland. Connection capacity governs what can actually be built. None of that is a reason to leave it unexamined; it is a reason to examine it while the route is still being decided, rather than after the land has been taken and the relationships have set.

    How to read the numbers on this page

    Figures attributed to a named source — Alto, HS2, the C.D. Howe Institute, Metrolinx, Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Treasury Board, Natural Resources Canada, UNESCO, or a named developer — are quoted from the full chapter’s source lists and can be checked there.

    Everything else is output from our own models: both columns of the carbon table, the freight credit, the breakeven years, the friction scores, the land-cover audit, the materials tonnage and the delay-escalation estimate. These are estimates built on stated assumptions, not measurements. The assumptions are set out in the full report so that any of them can be replaced and the arithmetic re-run.

    Where Alto has not published a figure, we say so rather than inferring one, and we make no claim about why any figure has not been published.

    Read the full chapter

    Chapter 5 — Environmental and Community Impact (PDF)

    Nineteen pages. The full lifecycle carbon account with its discount-rate sensitivity, the traction comparison including bi-mode trainsets, the species and habitat assessments, the materials-by-rail analysis against HS2 outturn, the friction indices, the corridor solar assessment, and the complete source lists for each section.

    Sources and notes

    1Discount rates: Metrolinx Business Case Manual Volume 2 (3.5 per cent); Environment and Climate Change Canada, social cost of greenhouse gas emissions (2 per cent near-term Ramsey rate); Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Canadian Cost-Benefit Analysis Guide: Regulatory Proposals (8 per cent); US Office of Management and Budget Circular A-4, revised November 2023, in which the 7 per cent capital rate was withdrawn.
    2Jones, D. and Fariha, T., All Aboard: The Benefits of Faster, More Frequent Passenger Trains between Ontario and Québec and The Costs of Delay, Commentary 676, C.D. Howe Institute, February 2025 — 3.5 per cent social discount rate over a 60-year appraisal, and the only published benefit analysis of this corridor. cdhowe.org
    3Habitat: UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme, Frontenac Arch Biosphere Reserve; Birds Canada, cerulean warbler profile; COSEWIC and Environment and Climate Change Canada recovery strategies; Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas Canada, Napanee Limestone Plain (ON152); Wildlife Preservation Canada, eastern loggerhead shrike. Initiative assessments of the Frontenac Arch (A. Hyett) and the Napanee Limestone Plain (S. Moore and K. Hennige), March 2026.
    4Materials by rail: HS2 Ltd, Materials by Rail, HS2 Learning Legacy, and HS2 media releases 2020–2023; Crossrail Excavated Materials Story; Railway Association of Canada on rail fuel efficiency.
    5Solar: Natural Resources Canada photovoltaic potential data; Canada Energy Regulator market snapshot; Firelight Infrastructure Partners, Saturn Power and Clearlight Energy project data; The Energy Mix on the Skyview 2 storage project at Edwardsburgh Cardinal.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative Independent, non-partisan citizen research on the proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. This page is a plain-language summary of Chapter 5 of the HPR Research Report. The full chapter sets out the models, the tables and the complete source lists. Nothing on this page is a statement about the motives or conduct of any person or organisation. It is a comparison of two route choices and of what follows from each.

  • Counting the crossings

    Counting the Crossings

    ALTO says it will not wall off communities, and points to France and Spain. Those countries did something else as well, and the letter leaves it out.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Analytical Brief · Published August 2026
    ⚠ What ALTO Told Kingston Readers

    On 14 August 2026, a letter in the Kingston Whig-Standard from ALTO’s Chief Project Management Officer and Cadence’s Project Director told corridor residents the railway “will not create a wall between communities”, nor a barrier to wildlife or water. As proof it can be done, the letter offered two numbers: France has built more than 4,000 structures across roughly 2,700 km of high-speed line, and Spain more than 900 across roughly 750 km.

    The letter does not mention Kingston, the route, where stations would go, what any of it costs, or expropriation. It does say preserving access has been a key principle from the beginning. ALTO’s own Preserving Access and Movement page carries a last-modified date of 7 May 2026 — after the consultation closed on 24 April.

    The Short Version

    Take ALTO’s own figures and divide them through. France works out to about one structure every 675 metres. Spain, about one every 833 metres. Those are the rates being offered as reassurance.

    The trouble is that a count of structures built tells you nothing about how many crossings were closed. A railway can put in 900 bridges and still cut off 3,000 field entrances, farm lanes and township roads. The letter gives the top half of the fraction and leaves out the bottom.

    Kingstonians already have ALTO’s own answer to this. In February 2026, ALTO’s Vice-President of Systems Engineering told Kingston City Council that crossings would be consolidated to bring costs down, and that the company would try to limit how many overpasses get built. That was six months before the letter, to the same city, on the same subject.

    There is a larger omission. France did not solve farm severance with bridges. It has a legal procedure that lets the state reorganise the surrounding farmland so that a farm cut in two can be put back into a workable shape, paid for by the project. On one French high-speed line, 3,700 hectares of land were bought up in advance so that farmers could be compensated in land rather than only in cash. Ontario has nothing of the kind.

    Download
    Counting the Crossings — Full Brief (PDF)
    The arithmetic behind ALTO’s France and Spain comparison, and the land instrument the letter leaves out

    Download PDF

    The Arithmetic

    What ALTO’s own numbers work out to

    Neither figure in the letter is disputed here. They are simply divided through. A structure count only becomes meaningful once you know how far apart the structures are, and how far apart the things they are meant to replace used to be.

    ~675 m
    average gap between structures on the French network, using ALTO’s figures
    4,000 structures over 2,700 km
    ~833 m
    average gap on the Spanish line ALTO cites
    900 structures over 750 km
    1.25–2 km
    typical spacing of public roads across eastern Ontario’s concession grid
    before counting farm lanes and driveways

    There is a third number the letter does not offer, and it cuts the other way. HS2 in Britain is the most recent comparable project of this kind: a brand-new high-speed line built through peri-urban and rural England. Its first phase runs about 225 km and will carry more than 500 bridging structures, including over 50 major viaducts — roughly one structure every 450 m. That is about half again the French rate, through country a good deal more built up than eastern Ontario. The most recent comparable project provided more, not fewer, than the average ALTO offers as reassurance.

    The spread between the three is itself worth noticing. A fifty per cent difference between two European networks tells you that these totals are governed by terrain, by how much of a route sits in tunnel or on viaduct, and by what each project counts as a structure. About nine tenths of HS2’s first phase runs in tunnel, in cutting or on structures, so a large share of those 500 exist to carry the railway over the landscape rather than to carry a community across the railway. A structure count is a construction statistic, not a standard of community access.

    Eastern Ontario was surveyed on a grid. Roads run at regular intervals, and between them sit farm lanes, private driveways and municipal drains. Whether a European average is enough for that grid is exactly the question people along the corridor are asking. Quoting the French figure does not answer it. It assumes the answer.

    There is a comparison closer to home that nobody has yet made. Highway 416 is a modern, fully grade-separated corridor built through the same survey grid, the same farmland and several of the same municipalities. How many crossings Ontario provided on that road is not something this brief has established, but it is the obvious yardstick, and it ought to be established before a French average is relied on.

    The Missing Number

    How many roads are we talking about?

    The denominator is not actually a mystery. Canada’s own transport department has published it.

    In a briefing note prepared for a Parliamentary committee in March 2023, Transport Canada set out what a full high-speed line between Québec City and Toronto would require: a fully enclosed and fenced corridor, a straighter alignment, double tracking throughout, and complete grade separation on a route that currently carries more than 1,000 public and private crossings.

    That figure described the northern route, through comparatively empty country — Canadian Shield, wetlands, big rural lots. The southern corridor now being prioritised runs through some of the most intensively farmed land in eastern Ontario, where the concession grid is tightest. On the southern option, 1,000 is more likely a floor than a ceiling.

    The Initiative’s own road severance analysis puts the proportion of crossings permanently closed rather than bridged on rural high-speed corridors at somewhere between 30 and 60 per cent. Applied to a floor of 1,000, that is 300 to 600 roads dead-ended — our estimate, not a figure ALTO or Transport Canada has published.

    1,000+
    public and private crossings on the alignment
    Transport Canada, March 2023
    300–600
    roads likely closed, on the Initiative’s estimate
    30 to 60 per cent of crossings
    $3.2–8.4B
    Initiative’s estimated cost of the crossings that would be built
    never shown as a separate line

    That last figure matters for a different reason. Grade separation is one of the most expensive parts of any high-speed corridor, and a sum of that size has never appeared as its own line in ALTO’s published capital estimate. Neither has any methodology explaining how many crossings will be built, or to what standard, or how it will be decided which roads are simply stopped up.

    The reassurance in the August letter is offered in the absence of the one document that could support it. Further detail is set out in the Initiative’s technical analysis of road severances.

    On the Record

    What ALTO told Kingston in February

    Six months before this letter appeared in Kingston’s paper, ALTO’s Vice-President of Systems Engineering and Interface sat before Kingston City Council and was asked about exactly this. The transcript is the fullest account ALTO has given in public of how it approaches road crossings, and it does not read the way the letter does.

    The reassurance

    Asked by a councillor whether there would be a standard distance between crossings, he described a working assumption that every road would get some form of duct or overpass, since the roads belong to municipalities or road authorities and cannot be cut unilaterally.

    The qualification, in the same answer

    He went on to say that in reality some crossings would be looked at for consolidation, to lower costs and improve construction, subject to discussion with the road authority.

    The objective

    Pressed by the Deputy Mayor, he set it out plainly: grade separations would vary by area, would be settled during route selection, and ALTO would “try and limit the number of overpasses that we’ll need to get created”.

    And the fencing

    He confirmed that modern high-speed rail must be completely segregated and fully fenced anywhere level access is possible, whether the line runs at 200 or 300 km/h.

    Read together: a starting assumption that is subject to cost-driven consolidation, an explicit goal of building as few overpasses as possible, and continuous fencing between whatever crossings survive.

    The councillor’s actual question — is there a standard distance between crossings — was not answered, and no standard has been published since. February’s statements and August’s letter were addressed to the same city.

    Three Problems

    Why the structure count does not settle it

    You are being shown half a fraction

    The number that answers the severance question is a ratio: structures built, divided by accesses cut off. The letter supplies only the first. Every complaint recorded by French and Spanish farmers over the last forty years is perfectly compatible with the figures quoted.

    Not every structure reconnects anything

    “Engineering structures” and “viaducts” include everything the railway needs to build itself: bridges over rivers, crossings of existing motorways and railways, tunnels through hills. A viaduct over a river gorge restores nobody’s access to their back field. How many of the 4,000 exist to reconnect a severed local road or laneway is not stated, and is certainly a much smaller number.

    A different landscape

    The French network largely runs through consolidated farming country. Eastern Ontario is a survey grid of concession roads, side roads, long farm lots and dead ends. The same rate of crossings produces a very different result depending on how much there was to cross in the first place.

    The Missing Piece

    What France also built

    The most important thing missing from the letter is not a number. It is a law.

    Two of the countries with the longest high-speed rail experience did not leave farm access to be worked out project by project. They legislated it. France did so through its rural code; Germany passed a federal land consolidation statute in 1953 that covers exactly this situation. In both, farmers sit on the body that decides, that body can compulsorily redraw the farms and the farm tracks together, the proponent pays, and there is a right of appeal to the courts.

    France has a statutory procedure called aménagement foncier agricole et forestier — land reorganisation, formerly known as remembrement. Its stated purpose includes repairing the damage that major linear projects, high-speed railways among them, do to rural land. Where a line slices a farm in half, the surrounding parcels can be legally reorganised so that holdings are handed back in a shape a farmer can actually work. Local commissions run it under departmental authority, and the project pays for it.

    Land is also bought up ahead of time. A national rural land agency, SAFER, holds first refusal on farmland coming up for sale, so that displaced farmers can be given land instead of only a cheque. Spain has its own version of the same idea.

    This matters for who gets a say. In Canada there is no seat and no statutory role. On 4 June 2026 the five organisations representing effectively the whole farm sector in Ontario and Quebec concluded that ALTO’s proposed collaboration agreement was not in their members’ interests to sign. In France they would not have had to negotiate for a place at the table. They would already have had one, in law.

    This is not a minor administrative detail. On the Le Mans to Rennes high-speed line, roughly 3,700 hectares were placed in reserve, with agricultural land bought up as it came to market within three kilometres of the future route. In Ille-et-Vilaine alone, 48.5 km of new railway took about 480 hectares of crops and pasture — and against that, 720 hectares of land reserve were assembled and parcels across some 1,200 hectares either side of the track were reorganised, affecting more than 4,400 landowners, financed by the project and delivered through intercommunal commissions.

    In France and Germany In Ontario
    A legal procedure to reorganise farmland around a new line, whose express purpose includes repairing damage done by major linear infrastructure. No equivalent. There is no statutory land reorganisation for farms severed by infrastructure.
    Farmers hold seats on the deciding body, and decisions can be appealed to the courts. No seat and no statutory role. Five farm organisations declined ALTO’s collaboration agreement in June 2026 rather than accept its terms.
    A rural land agency with first refusal on farmland coming to market, used to assemble land reserves years ahead of construction. No equivalent agency and no statutory land reserve mechanism.
    Local commissions empowered to redraw parcel boundaries, operating under departmental authority. No equivalent body. No one can redraw the neighbours’ boundaries to make a severed farm whole again.
    Compensation in land is possible: a farmer who loses acreage can be given workable acreage back. Compensation in money only, for what is physically taken. Expropriation and negotiated purchase are the available tools.

    So the comparison in the letter is accurate and, at the same time, does not carry over. The French result rests partly on a legal instrument Canada does not have. A letter that cites France’s bridge count while saying nothing about France’s land reorganisation is describing half of how the problem was solved.

    Cadence’s Project Director is quoted in French farming trade coverage of that same Le Mans to Rennes project, explaining that the land reserve had to account for the right-of-way, the land reorganisation and the environmental compensation together.

    That gap is a problem in Canadian law rather than a failing of the project sponsor. It is still a gap, and it has to be closed before European results can reasonably be promised here. Closing it is not something ALTO can do on its own.

    Not Just How Many

    A structure is not automatically an answer

    Even where a crossing is built, two questions decide whether it is any use, and ALTO has published nothing on either.

    Size

    A livestock crossing and a machinery crossing are not the same structure. A standard cattle underpass runs about 2.1 metres high. A modern combine or grain cart needs 4 metres or more. A structure built to the wrong dimension is a closure as far as the equipment is concerned. No minimum dimensions have been published, and no spacing standard.

    Upkeep

    Nobody has decided who maintains these crossings over the decades that follow. ALTO describes its approach as still being developed. France took roughly a decade of litigation and legislation to settle the same question. Municipalities along the corridor have a direct interest in the answer.

    What closure pushes onto the road

    When a farm crossing is extinguished, the equipment does not disappear. It goes onto the public road. By the Ontario Federation of Agriculture’s own figure, slow-moving farm vehicles are 3.8 to 4.8 times more likely to be involved in a fatal collision per kilometre travelled. Severance is therefore also a road-safety question, and one that has not been assessed.

    The Initiative has examined the two halves of this problem separately: road severances and wildlife crossings.

    The Wall

    One claim that cannot be tested as written

    A railway running at over 300 km/h is fully grade-separated and fenced along its entire length. That is what grade separation means. The structure is a continuous barrier by engineering necessity. The real question is where the openings are and how many there are, not whether the barrier exists.

    What ALTO could reasonably promise is that severance will be mitigated at designed crossings, to a stated standard, at a stated spacing. A flat undertaking that no wall will be created is not something anyone can test — and it is a sentence that will be read back to ALTO by every landowner and every township that later finds an access closed.

    The same applies to wildlife. Continuous fencing is a barrier to animals except where crossings are designed in, and how well those crossings get used varies a great deal by species — a question examined at length in the Initiative’s work on wildlife crossings.

    An early study along a Spanish high-speed line, monitoring fifteen underpasses and two overpasses over two years, recorded no deer or wild boar crossings at all. That was 1996, and crossing design has moved on a great deal since; it should not be read as the last word. But the more recent evidence does not settle the question the other way either. A systematic review of crossing structures across roads and railways found that animals did cross them in almost every study examined — and yet a decline in wildlife movement after construction was prevented in fewer than 40 per cent of cases, with many structures poorly built or poorly monitored.

    On Spain’s network the best-documented harm is to birds. Camera monitoring from on board trains estimated 60.5 bird collisions per kilometre per year on a stretch carrying 53 trains a day, and 26.1 on a stretch carrying 25. Later work found the surrounding bird community changing species by species, and uncapped catenary poles acting as pitfall traps for birds that nest in cavities. Anti-birdstrike screens are routinely fitted to viaducts, and how well they work is still being studied.

    None of this says the corridor cannot be crossed by wildlife. It says that whether it can depends on design decisions and monitoring commitments not yet made, and that a flat undertaking given before them is not one a reader can test. Of the three promises, the one about natural water flows is the most straightforward to deliver.

    What Can Be Asked Now

    Six questions ALTO can answer today

    The letter makes commitments specific enough to be checked. None of the following requires a finalised route.

    The ratio
    Against Transport Canada’s figure of more than 1,000 crossings, how many are assumed to get a structure, and how many will be closed?
    Composition
    Of the French and Spanish structures cited, how many exist to reconnect a severed local access, as opposed to carrying the line over a river, motorway or railway?
    Ontario benchmark
    What crossing rate is assumed for the Ontario segments, and how was it arrived at? A comparison with Highway 416 through similar country would be useful to communities along the route.
    Criteria
    What method decides whether a road is bridged or dead-ended, and what detour distance is treated as acceptable in the countryside?
    Cost
    What provision for grade separation sits inside the capital estimate, and why has it never been shown as a separate line?
    Dimensions
    What minimum height and width will agricultural crossings meet, and what spacing standard applies? Will structures be sized for machinery or only for livestock?
    Maintenance
    Who owns and maintains each crossing structure over its life, and who carries that cost — ALTO, Cadence, or the municipality?
    Detours
    Where an access will not be reinstated, how much further will people have to drive to reach the nearest crossing, and what work supports that figure?
    Emergency access
    Which paramedic services and municipal fire departments have been consulted about response routes, on what dates, and what did they find?
    Severed farms
    Is any land reorganisation or land reserve contemplated for farms cut in two, and under what legal authority would it operate?

    The letter is right that decades of international experience exist and should be drawn on. The difficulty is that it draws on one half of that experience and leaves out the other. France built more than four thousand structures. France also rebuilt the farms. The second of those depended on machinery Ontario does not have, and no number of overpasses substitutes for it. Meanwhile the company’s own engineering executive has told this city’s council that the aim is to build as few overpasses as it can.

    Download Full Brief
    Counting the Crossings (PDF)
    Full analysis for municipal councils, farm organisations, MPs and residents along the corridor — with the per-kilometre working, the French statutory provisions and the complete source list

    Download PDF

    How to read the numbers on this page

    The French and Spanish structure counts are as given in the 14 August letter and used here as stated. The Transport Canada crossing count, the HS2 figures, the Kingston council statements, the French statutory provisions, the HS2 petition figures, the emergency-response research and the wildlife findings are all quoted from the sources listed below and can be checked there.

    Everything else is our own calculation or estimate, and is marked as such where it appears: the per-kilometre and spacing rates, the 30 to 60 per cent closure proportion and the 300 to 600 closures that follow from it, the $3.2 to $8.4 billion grade-separation range, and the detour arithmetic. Where ALTO or Transport Canada has not published a figure, we say so rather than inferring one, and we make no claim about what anyone knew or intended.

    Sources

    Primary documents and statements

    1.

    Maria Luisa Dominguez and Loïc Dorbec, “Building on decades of high-speed rail experience,” letter to the editor, Kingston Whig-Standard, 14 August 2026. Structure and length figures for France and Spain are as stated in that letter and are used here as given; the per-kilometre rates are the Initiative’s arithmetic.
    2.

    Chambres d’agriculture France, on aménagement foncier agricole et forestier and its role in repairing disruption caused to rural land by the route of major linear works, high-speed railways included. chambres-agriculture.fr
    3.

    Département d’Ille-et-Vilaine, on the LGV Bretagne–Pays de la Loire land reorganisation and land reserve programme: 48.5 km of new line, 480 ha absorbed, 720 ha of reserve constituted, 1,200 ha of parcels reorganised, more than 4,400 landowners affected, financed by the project owner. cg35.fr
    4.

    WikiAgri, on the land reserves assembled through SAFER for the Le Mans–Rennes high-speed line: approximately 3,700 ha placed in reserve, with agricultural land pre-empted within three kilometres of the future alignment. Contains the quoted remarks of Cadence’s Project Director on the composition of that reserve. wikiagri.fr
    5.

    Transport Canada, TRAN Committee Appearance Binder, Item 15: High Frequency Rail, 7 March 2023 — source of the figure of more than 1,000 public and private crossings on the alignment.
    6.

    City of Kingston, Council meeting of 17 February 2026, closed-captioning transcript — remarks of ALTO’s Vice-President of Systems Engineering and Interface on crossing consolidation, overpass numbers and corridor fencing.
    7.

    HS2 Phase 1 structure count: more than 500 bridging structures including over 50 major viaducts, per HS2 Ltd’s head of civils structures, reported in New Civil Engineer, 15 June 2022, and repeated on the Institution of Civil Engineers project page. Route length taken as approximately 225 km; some sources give 208 route km, which would raise the per-kilometre rate rather than lower it.
    8.

    Wildlife. Rodríguez, Crema and Delibes (1996), on underpass and overpass use along Spanish high-speed line. Rytwinski and others, systematic review and meta-analysis of crossing-structure effectiveness, for the finding on movement decline. Barrientos and Borda-de-Água, “Railways as Barriers for Wildlife: Current Knowledge,” in Railway Ecology (Springer, 2017). García de la Morena and others (2017) for the on-board camera collision estimates; Malo and others (2017) on bird response and catenary-pole mortality; and work on high-speed rail and bird-community change published in PLOS One (2024).
    9.

    Erin Durant, “Alto: Which farm roads stay open and who pays?” 16 August 2026 — source for the German Flurbereinigungsgesetz parallel, the seats-and-appeal structure of the French and German commissions, crossing dimensions for livestock versus machinery, the unresolved maintenance question, the OFA slow-moving-vehicle collision figure, and the last-modified metadata on ALTO’s agricultural pages.
    10.

    Joint statement of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, l’Union des producteurs agricoles, National Farmers Union (Ontario), Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario and Union des cultivateurs franco-ontariens, 16 June 2026, following their 4 June meeting on ALTO’s proposed collaboration agreement.
    11.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, Road severances (technical analysis, March 2026 — source of the closure proportions and grade separation cost range) and Wildlife crossings.
    12.

    Ontario road spacing reflects the concession survey pattern across the corridor study area. Highway 416 is proposed here as a benchmark for comparison; no crossing-provision figure for that corridor has been established for this brief.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Analytical Brief  ·  August 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • 50000 jobs

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Plain Language Brief

    Where do 50,000 jobs come from?

    Alto says building the railway will support about 50,000 jobs. We checked that figure against two railways that publish both what they spend and who they employ.

    September 2026

    50,000

    Jobs Alto says the project will support during construction. Its report defines the figure once, in an appendix.

    ~18,000

    People actually working on the railway, on our estimate, at Alto’s own budget and schedule.

    The number is not wrong. It is a standard output of a standard economic model, and when we rebuilt it from scratch we got almost exactly the same answer. But roughly two thirds of it is not people building a railway, and Alto’s report says so in only one place.

    What Alto says

    Alto’s report Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, published in August 2026, says the Québec City–Toronto line will support approximately 50,000 jobs while it is being built, and more than 5,000 once it is running. The figure has been repeated in federal announcements and in news coverage since. Almost everywhere it appears, it appears on its own: 50,000 jobs during construction.

    An earlier version of the number was slightly different. The federal announcement of 19 February 2025 gave over 51,000 jobs and a GDP gain of up to $35 billion a year. Transport Canada was still publishing that pairing in its 12 December 2025 release. Canada’s Moment, eight months later, gives 50,000 jobs and $24.5 billion. The report does not explain the difference between the two GDP figures, which is about 43 per cent.

    What the report actually says

    Further into the report, in section 4.3.3 and in two identical tables — Table 7 in the body and Table A4 in the appendix — the figure is described much more fully. There it is:

    • 50,000 full-time equivalent jobs. A full-time equivalent is work converted to a standard full-time measure. It is not a count of people.
    • Spread across a ten-year construction period.
    • Three kinds of work counted together. Direct work on the project; supply chain work at the firms that supply it; and induced work, meaning jobs supported when those workers spend their wages in shops, restaurants and everywhere else.
    • Produced by the 2019 Statistics Canada input-output model. This is a standard tool that estimates how spending in one part of the economy ripples through the rest of it.
    • Labelled an upper estimate.

    The appendix is careful about what this does and does not mean. It says the results describe economic activity supported by spending rather than a net gain to the country. It leaves them out of the project’s benefit-cost ratio. And it notes that the method does not allow for labour shortages or other limits on how much the economy can absorb.

    That is a fair and reasonably candid description. The difficulty is where it sits. Those two pages of an eighty-four page report carry it, and nothing else does. The summary at the front, the table comparing high-speed rail with the alternative, Alto’s website, the government announcements and the news coverage all carry the number without any of it.

    The number reaching the public is not the number the appendix defines. It is the same figure with its definition left behind.

    How we checked it

    Two railways publish both halves of the equation — how much they spend in a year, and how many people that spending puts to work.

    • HS2 in Britain publishes audited capital spending and a programme workforce figure every year.
    • The Réseau express métropolitain in Montréal, built by CDPQ Infra, published a jobs claim and periodic counts of workers on site. It is also the closest match anywhere to the way Alto has been set up.

    Both land in the same place: roughly 2,200 to 3,300 people working for every billion dollars spent in a year.

    Alto’s own published figures are $60 to $90 billion of capital over ten to fourteen years. That works out to $4.3 to $9.0 billion a year, which is around half the rate HS2 is spending at present. Applying the observed rate from those two projects to Alto’s own budget and schedule gives 13,000 to 21,000 people working on the programme in the central cases, and a ceiling near 30,000 if the project spends at the top of its range on the fastest possible build.

    We then rebuilt the whole 50,000 the way the appendix says it is built — adding supply chain and induced work on top of the people on site, using standard multiplier ratios.

    Rebuilding the 50,000 — ten-year build at the top of Alto’s capital range
    LayerWhat it meansPeople
    Owner and engineeringAlto’s own staff and the designers700 – 2,000
    Site and contractorPeople building the railway16,000 – 17,300
    Supply chainStaff at firms supplying the project14,400
    InducedJobs supported when those wages are spent18,200
    TotalAlto publishes 50,00050,600

    Initiative estimate, built from HS2 and REM published spending and workforce figures and standard supply-chain and induced multiplier ratios, applied to Alto’s own published capital range and schedule.

    What the check found

    50,600, against Alto’s published 50,000. The two agree to within one per cent, using the same three categories Alto names in its own appendix, by a route that borrows nothing from Alto’s model. On that basis the figure stands up as an output of the model that produced it.

    What the agreement also does is fix what is inside the number. On Alto’s own budget, roughly 18,000 of the 50,000 are people working on the railway. The rest — nearly two thirds — are jobs at supplier firms and jobs supported when wages are spent again. Fewer than four in ten are on the railway itself.

    A second and completely separate check gives the same answer. Direct labour usually accounts for 30 to 40 per cent of spending on heavy civil construction. Applied to $75 billion over ten to twelve years, at a fully loaded cost of $100,000 to $140,000 per worker-year, that supports somewhere between 13,400 and 30,000 people, centred near 19,000. Two methods that share no inputs bracket the same range.

    The other way of reading it

    Turn the question round and the arithmetic bites. If 50,000 really meant 50,000 people working on the railway, the project would need to spend $15.2 to $22.7 billion every year — a programme of $152 to $273 billion, against the $60 to $90 billion Alto has published. That is close to the $142 billion the Initiative’s own cost model predicts for this corridor. On the arithmetic set out here, Alto’s employment claim implies a more expensive railway than the one Alto has costed.

    The question the report leaves open

    “50,000 full-time equivalent jobs during a ten-year construction period” can be read two ways. It can mean 50,000 full-time equivalents working in each year of the decade. Or it can mean 50,000 years of work in total, spread across the decade. The two readings are ten times apart, and the report does not say which is meant.

    Only the first works arithmetically. The second would put the project at 0.67 job-years for every $1 million spent, against 2.6 at HS2 and 2.6 to 3.3 at the REM — roughly a quarter of the labour intensity of any comparable railway now being built. So this analysis treats the figure as an annual average, which is the reading that makes it defensible. A reader has no way to know without being told.

    Two more things in the tables

    Upper, not central

    Both tables head their value column “upper estimate”. One appendix earlier, the $24.5 billion GDP figure is labelled a central estimate, drawn from a stated range of sensitivity tests. So a range exists behind the 50,000 as well. What has been published is its top. The Initiative has recorded the same pattern twice before in this report: ranges that appear in the commissioned studies but not in the public summaries.

    The comparison figures have no source

    Table 2 sets high-speed rail against the alternative, “high-frequency rail”, and credits that alternative with 44,000 construction jobs at a capital cost of $45 to $75 billion. Neither figure carries a footnote, a source or a method anywhere in the document. The implied job intensity is internally consistent with the high-speed figures, so the numbers do not look wrong. The point is that a reader has no way to check them.

    This has been released before

    Employment modelling for this corridor has been published once already, and what happened to it is worth knowing. The Joint Project Office — VIA Rail and the Canada Infrastructure Bank — produced a business case for High Frequency Rail, the slower predecessor to this project, in December 2021. It gives construction employment as 71,000 to 96,000 annual equivalent jobs. That is a third unit of measure again, different from Alto’s 50,000 and from the 51,000 in the 2025 announcement, but stated plainly enough that a reader knows what is being counted.

    The Canada Infrastructure Bank released that document in full in November 2025. The same document, released under a separate access request, cuts the identical sentence: “an estimated ___ annual equivalent jobs could be created,” with the sentence left grammatical around the missing number and no exemption provision marked against it. We hold both versions.

    So the same employment figure, for the same corridor, has been treated as releasable by one federal body and withheld by another. That is worth putting on the record now, before anyone argues that the modelling behind the 50,000 is too commercially sensitive to publish.

    What we are asking Alto to publish

    Alto holds all of this already. None of it would cost anything the organisation does not have.

    1. Whether the 50,000 is an annual average, or a cumulative count of full-time-equivalent years.
    2. How it splits across the three categories Table A4 names: direct, supply chain and induced.
    3. The range the upper estimate was drawn from, and the central value within it.
    4. The year-by-year profile across the ten-year construction period.
    5. The assumption made about imports and Canadian content in the input-output run.
    6. The capital and operating spending profile that was fed into the model.
    7. The source of the 44,000 jobs and the $45 to $75 billion attributed to high-frequency rail in Table 2.

    And, more simply than any of that: carry the appendix definition alongside the number, wherever the number appears.

    How to read the numbers on this page

    Every figure attributed to Alto, HS2, CDPQ Infra, the California High-Speed Rail Authority or a Government of Canada release is quoted from the published source listed below, and can be checked there.

    Every other figure on this page is a calculation by the Initiative from those published inputs, and is described as an estimate where it appears. The reconstruction is an estimate rather than a measurement: it applies labour intensity observed on two comparator projects, together with standard supply-chain and induced multiplier ratios, to Alto’s own published capital range and schedule.

    Where Alto has not published something, this page says so rather than inferring it, and makes no claim about why any particular figure was or was not published.

    Read the full paper

    50,000 Jobs? — the research paper (PDF)

    Ten pages. Sets out the method in full, the year-by-year spending and workforce figures for HS2 and the Réseau express métropolitain, the layer-by-layer reconstruction, the job-years-per-dollar comparison against California and the US Federal Highway Administration, and the complete source list.

    Sources and notes

    1Alto, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, August 2026. Section 4.3.3 and Tables 7 and A4 (50,000 full-time equivalent jobs across direct, supply chain and induced effects, ten-year construction period, upper estimate; $86 billion value added; $23 billion tax revenue). Appendix A.2 methodology box (2019 Statistics Canada input-output model; static; excluded from the benefit-cost ratio; no account taken of labour shortages or capacity limits). Table A2 ($24.5 billion GDP, central estimate). Table 2 (44,000 construction jobs and $45 to $75 billion capital for high-frequency rail, unsourced). Section 4.3.3 sidebar (Canadian materials commitment).
    2Prime Minister of Canada, news release, 19 February 2025 (over 51,000 jobs during construction; GDP gain of up to $35 billion annually).
    3Transport Canada, news release, 12 December 2025, naming Ottawa–Montréal as the first segment (51,000 jobs during construction; up to $35 billion in GDP).
    4HS2 Ltd, Annual Report and Accounts 2022–23 to 2025–26 (capital expenditure and workforce), and six-monthly reports to Parliament, December 2024, July 2025 and May 2026 (jobs supported, supply chain businesses, spend to date, cost range and schedule).
    5CDPQ Infra, REM fact sheet and project pages; REM news releases of April 2018, November 2020 and June 2021 (34,000 jobs; over 30,000 direct and indirect jobs; more than 2,000 and then more than 3,000 workers on site).
    6California High-Speed Rail Authority, economic impact analyses for FY2023–24 and FY2024–25, and the March 2024 release on construction jobs and daily dispatch.
    7US Federal Highway Administration, Employment Impacts of Highway Infrastructure Investment (13,000 job-years per US$1 billion; 64/36 split between direct-and-indirect and induced).
    8Exchange rates: Bank of Canada daily rates, 1 September 2026. 1 GBP = C$1.8795; 1 USD = C$1.3896. Per-kilometre cost comparison uses the Initiative’s own ECI/CFI cost model.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative Independent, non-partisan citizen research on the proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. This page is a plain-language summary of the research paper 50,000 Jobs?, September 2026. The full paper sets out the method, the tables and the complete source list. Nothing on this page is a statement about the motives or conduct of any person or organisation. It is an analysis of published figures and of what those published figures do and do not say.

  • Where the line goes

    Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · The HPR Research Report

    Where the line goes, and what it costs

    Pick the route first and the speed follows. Pick the speed first and the route picks itself — expensively.

    Chapter 4 · The HPR Research Report

    Every rail project has one decision that cannot be undone. Not the trains, not the timetable, not whether the line runs on diesel or electricity — all of those can be changed later. The route is the one that is fixed for a century. This chapter is about that decision: where an HPR line would run, why, and what it would cost.

    It also explains the single choice that separates the two proposals. ALTO decided on 300 km/h and then had to find ground straight enough to carry it. HPR starts from what the corridor already offers and lets the speed come out of that. The result is a railway that costs roughly a third as much per kilometre — and arrives about twenty-five minutes later.

    Download
    Chapter 4: Route Alignment and Capital Cost (PDF)
    The full chapter, with the cost model, maps and sourcing
    Download PDF
    4.1 · The Window

    Is the corridor still available?

    Speed decides how straight a railway has to be, and the relationship is steep. A curve for 200 km/h needs a radius of about 1,900 metres. At 240 km/h it is about 2,700. At 300 km/h it is about 4,250 — nearer 7,000 for a comfortable ride. Anywhere in the 177–240 km/h band, those curves are gentle enough to follow a route that has already been cut through the landscape, easing the bends here and there. At 300 km/h the curves run for kilometres, and no amount of easing fits them alongside Highway 401 or the existing rail corridor. The line has to strike out across open country. That is physics, not preference.

    This is why the project’s own history matters. What became ALTO went into the procurement as VIA High Frequency Rail — a plan the government itself described as running at up to 200 km/h on dedicated track along mostly existing rights-of-way. The 300 km/h target that emerged is what closed the existing corridor off.

    The window is closing, but not mainly because of the highway

    The Highway 401 widening is the visible threat, but it is only the leading edge. What really closes the corridor is ordinary growth: commercial development at the interchanges, then logistics parks moving east from the GTA, then housing, then the utility corridors — hydro, gas, fibre, water — that lock in behind them.

    None of it reverses. A logistics park is not removed; a subdivision is not un-built; a utility corridor is not moved cheaply. Each step is fast and cheap to build and slow and expensive to undo. By late in the century the corridor that is open today is set solid, and a surface railway through it is no longer possible — only an elevated or tunnelled one, at a cost approaching ALTO’s.

    We put a number on what that closure would cost: roughly $42.6 billion, in a range of about $28 to $55 billion. It has three parts — farmland on the margin re-valued as developed land when it finally has to be bought ($2.6B); the jump from an at-grade build on open ground to elevated and tunnelled construction through built-up areas ($19.3B); and the value of the benefits lost during the decades of delay ($20.7B). The headline is that the cost of missing the window is about the same order as the cost of building the railway — and it is incurred by waiting, not by building.

    4.2 · The Route

    Take the speed the ground gives you

    Inside the Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal triangle the route has two parts. A spine of roughly 479 kilometres from Pickering Junction to Dorval, built and upgraded as a dedicated passenger route. And the Ottawa legs, about 200 kilometres of upgrades on track the public passenger operator already owns.

    In each stretch the line follows whichever existing corridor runs straighter — Highway 401 or the existing rail corridor — sitting beside it rather than on it, separated from road traffic throughout. The two run roughly parallel for most of the way, so the ground the railway follows is already a transport corridor rather than open farmland. No major tunnels, and only a limited number of viaducts.

    The reversal at the heart of the chapter

    ALTO fixes the speed and lets it dictate the route — which is exactly how the corridor came to be closed off. HPR does it the other way round: it takes the highest speed each stretch of corridor already offers, up to a 240 km/h ceiling, and never buys speed the ground does not give away free.

    Where the ground is generous, the trains go fast

    The dead-straight run along the St. Lawrence from Brockville to Cornwall, the riverside stretch to Coteau, the inland 401 across the Napanee plain — all support 240 km/h with routine curve easing alone.

    Where it isn’t, they go slower

    Through the Frontenac Arch, where the line follows the least-bad path the 1850s builders found through the Shield, and on the tight approaches through Durham and into Montréal, trains simply run slower. Buying speed there would mean buying tunnels, viaducts and a new right-of-way.

    One consequence matters for the costing: the whole spine is priced at the 200 km/h standard — conventional structures, curves near 1,900 metres. The stretches that can run faster are a bonus in service, not an extra cost to build. The cost model never pays for speed the corridor gives away.

    4.3–4.6 · The Cost

    What it would cost, and what we commit against

    The spine is priced two ways, and the difference between them is the discipline this whole report is built on.

    FigureWhat it means
    $19.0 billion
    as specified — about $40M per km    		What the 479 km diesel spine costs if everything goes to plan, grade separations included.
    $26.1 billion
    de-biased — about $54M per km    		What comparable projects have actually cost when things didn’t go to plan. This is the figure to commit against — not because this project is expected to overrun, but because comparable ones reliably have.
    +$3.1 billion
    electrification    		A separately priced option that can be deferred, rather than a fixed requirement. The line opens on diesel and electrifies when demand warrants.

    Adjusting for the record is not pessimism. The as-specified figure is what the corridor costs if everything goes right; the adjusted figure is what similar projects have actually cost when it didn’t. Committing against the second is the discipline ALTO never applied to itself.

    Why deferring electrification matters more than it sounds

    Eastern Ontario’s electricity system is already under active capacity assessment — the system operator is testing whether the existing grid can meet ordinary demand growth over the next two decades before any railway load is added. A 300 km/h electric line is a heavy new customer on exactly that system, and its electric design makes that load mandatory and up front.

    A diesel-first railway opens on the traction it carries with it. Electrification — lighter in any case at 200 km/h — follows once the grid has headroom and the ridership justifies it. The railway’s opening is not tied to the grid’s expansion timetable.

    Cold climate cuts the same way. Leda clay, karst and freeze–thaw are real hazards, and the international record shows what they can do: China’s Harbin–Dalian line cost about 25% more than its original budget, had sections rebuilt before opening because of frost-heave deformation, and opened roughly a year late. But that is a 300 km/h record. At 200 km/h the tolerances are far more forgiving, and frost heave that would force a speed restriction on a high-speed line is a maintenance item on a slower one. The lower design speed buys a smaller penalty.

    4.7 · The Comparison

    Three and a half times the price per kilometre

    The chapter’s figures resolve into a single comparison. Measured the same way, the HPPR spine costs about $40 million per kilometre. ALTO costs about $142 million per kilometre. Two railways, the same corridor, the same cities — one priced at roughly three and a half times the other for every kilometre of route.

    The gap splits roughly one-third engineering, two-thirds friction. About 35% is engineering complexity: a 300 km/h line across open country with its tunnels, viaducts and fresh cut through difficult ground, against a 200 km/h build that needs no major spine tunnels. The other 65% is corridor friction: the consultation, land-tenure and political burden of a new corridor, against a route that asks far less of the land and the people it crosses. The gap is not the product of one assumption. It is about a third from how the line is engineered and two-thirds from where it is put.

    RailwayCost per kilometre
    TGV Paris–Lyon~$26M — flat, low-friction early French high-speed line
    Tokaido Shinkansen~$35M — dense, high-utilisation Japanese line
    HPPR spine~$40M — among the most efficiently delivered railways in the international record
    ALTO~$142M — above the international range
    4.8 · Journey Time

    What the speed difference actually buys

    Speeds are only interesting for what they add up to. Toronto Union to Montréal’s Gare Centrale, on an express stopping once at Kingston, works out at a little over three and a half hours.

    ServiceToronto–Montréal journey time
    VIA Rail today~5h00 — scheduled service on shared freight track
    VIA HFR base case, 177 km/h3h59–4h19 — the only journey time ever actually simulated for this corridor
    HPPR express, Kingston stop~3h32 — estimated from segment speeds and corridor geometry
    ALTO, 300 km/h3h07 — ALTO’s published figure, a spreadsheet estimate rather than a simulation

    One caution and one conclusion. The caution is that our figure is an estimate of the same kind as ALTO’s — distance divided by speed, with allowances. Neither has been simulated, and we say so.

    The conclusion is that the honest gap between the two railways is about twenty-five minutes, and about nineteen against a non-stop run. ALTO buys that quarter of an hour at roughly three and a half times the capital cost per kilometre.

    Toronto–Ottawa works out at about 2h55 — the spine as far as Brockville, then the upgraded Ottawa leg — against roughly four and a quarter hours today. And the towns along the route gain proportionally more than the endpoints do, because they start from a slower and less frequent service: Cobourg in under an hour, Belleville in about 1h20, on a regional train calling at every station.

    4.9 · The Long View

    What the corridor becomes a century from now

    A rail corridor is not a project. It is an asset that lasts a century, and the decision taken now is the corridor the region lives with long after today’s arguments about cost and timetable are forgotten. The right test of a route is not only what it costs to build this decade, but what kind of corridor it leaves to the people who inherit it.

    That is why the questions in this chapter matter most. They are the irreversible ones. The trains, the traction and the timetable can all be changed later. The route cannot.

    Chapters 5 through 8 take these figures forward — into the environmental and community comparison, the ridership modelling, the operating economics, and the full cost-benefit and financial analysis.

    Coalition for Better Rail  ·  ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  The HPR Research Report · Chapter 4
    Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • Procured and then

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Brief · September 2026

    Procured, and Then?

    ALTO commissioned the outside view. Whether it changed anything is the one question the record does not answer.

    Independent, non-partisan research · citizenresearch.ca
    In Plain Language

    The standard fix for over-optimistic infrastructure forecasts is to check them against what comparable projects actually cost and carried, rather than trusting the project’s own bottom-up numbers. That check is called reference-class forecasting, and ALTO commissioned one. It hired the firm founded by the researcher who developed the method.

    That is to ALTO’s credit. But commissioning a check and acting on it are different things, and only one document would show which happened: a comparison putting ALTO’s own published figures beside the ones the check produced. The Initiative asked for that record. The response was extended to 18 September 2026, with notice that a third party would be consulted — a step the Act provides for where an institution intends to release records that may contain a supplier’s commercial information.

    Meanwhile, in June 2026, ALTO published two studies putting large dollar values on the project’s benefits. Neither sets those benefits against what the line would cost. This brief looks at all three documents and asks what they show about how the project’s numbers are being assembled — and what a single unredacted release would settle.

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    Procured, and Then? (PDF)
    The full brief, with sources
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    Related
    HPR Research Report, Chapter 1
    The forecasting framework this brief applies, set out in full
    Read Chapter 1
    01 · The Instrument

    ALTO commissioned the outside view

    Chapter 1 of the HPR Research Report sets out the method this brief relies on, so it is only summarised here. Large infrastructure forecasts miss in a consistent direction: costs come in high, benefits come in low. The established corrective is to stop treating a project as unique and instead compare it against the recorded outcomes of projects like it. The technique has a name — reference-class forecasting — and a literature behind it.

    In 2024 ALTO issued an advance contract award notice, PAS240625-002-00, for reference-class forecasting, should-cost and should-schedule modelling, and a series of Challenge Boards. An advance contract award notice is the instrument used when a department intends to award without competition, on the basis that only one supplier can do the work. The named supplier was Oxford Global Projects, the consultancy founded by Bent Flyvbjerg and Alexander Budzier.

    This is worth stating plainly, because it cuts against the easy criticism. ALTO did not ignore the outside view. It went out and procured it, from the people who developed it.

    02 · The Question

    Buying the instrument is not the same as letting it bind

    Reference-class forecasting corrects a forecast only if the number it produces is permitted to move the decision. A should-cost that is commissioned, delivered and then filed next to an unchanged inside-view estimate has not corrected anything. The method’s own literature is explicit that the failure mode is not the absence of the outside view but its subordination — the number produced, and then declined.

    So the decisive record is not the existence of the forecast. It is the comparison: does ALTO’s published capital cost reflect its own reference-class should-cost, or diverge from it? One document would answer that — the inside view and the outside view set side by side.

    A test, not an accusation

    This yields something better than a claim about anyone’s conduct: a prediction that can be checked. If the commissioned reference-class figures are more conservative than the numbers ALTO has published, the outside view was procured but not applied. If they match, the Initiative’s cost critique weakens accordingly.

    We do not know which. Nothing in this brief asserts that ALTO set the analysis aside. The point is that the question is answerable, that a single document answers it, and that the document exists.

    03 · The Clock

    The record will arrive after the decision has moved on

    The Initiative requested the reference-class records under access to information — the workbook, the should-cost and should-schedule outputs, and above all any document setting the inside view beside the outside view. Request A-2026-0004 was met in June 2026 with a ninety-day extension carrying the response to 18 September 2026, together with a notice invoking third-party consultation under section 27.

    Section 27 consultation is a routine step, and it is worth being precise about which way it points. The section applies where the head of an institution intends to disclose a record that may contain a third party’s commercial information: the notice tells that third party of the intention to release and gives it twenty days to make representations against disclosure, and invoking the section is what permits the response time to be extended. The notice on A-2026-0004 therefore records that Alto has turned its mind to releasing the reference-class records and has given Oxford Global Projects the opportunity to object. It is not a signal that the material will be withheld.

    What remains is a question of timing rather than intent. The third party may object and the institution may then withhold some of the figures; equally it may not. What can be said is the sequence: the record capable of testing the decision will arrive after further commitment has been made. What it contains, the disclosure itself will settle.

    Why timing decides this

    An outside-view check disciplines a decision only while the decision is still open. Once enough money is committed, the arithmetic changes: the cost of stopping is subtracted from the cost of continuing, and a project can show better value for money the more has already been spent on it. Britain’s High Speed Two reached exactly that point — the National Audit Office found in June 2026 that the ratio for completing the programme had risen even as the programme grew more expensive, because the estimated cost of cancelling had more than quadrupled.

    The cheapest moment to apply the test is before that crossover, not after it.

    04 · The Benefit Case

    Two studies, no cost side

    In June 2026, two months after the consultation closed, ALTO released two commissioned studies. A computable general equilibrium assessment by Aviseo Consulting reports a national real GDP gain of about $24.4 billion a year. A corridor tourism study by CPCS with HDR adds up to $3.9 billion in GDP and 43,000 jobs.

    Neither nets a cost. The macroeconomic study excludes construction and operating expenditure by design; the tourism study has no cost side to exclude. Both are benefit totals unaccompanied by the outlay required to obtain them. Both, to their credit, describe their outputs as illustrative and order-of-magnitude rather than forecasts, and make the largest figures conditional on tourism policy the railway itself does not deliver.

    The scenario range has a floor and no ceiling on the downside

    Each study is built as a fan of scenarios, from pessimistic to optimistic. In both, the entire fan sits above zero. The macro study reports welfare increasing in every scenario; the tourism study’s weakest case is still $177 million and two thousand jobs. The modelled question is how large the gain is, never whether there is a loss.

    Adverse mechanisms are identified but do not reach the total

    The tourism study acknowledges that faster trains shorten stays and convert overnight visits into day trips, and shows length of stay falling in several cities. The aggregate rises regardless.

    The two studies disagree, and each resolves the disagreement upward

    The macro study omits domestic tourism on the ground that it is largely substitution from other household spending, with little net effect on national output. The tourism study builds most of its $33.7-billion base, and most of its headline uplift, from precisely that in-corridor domestic travel — counted through gross multipliers that assume no such displacement. The two treatments diverge, and in each case the treatment adopted is the one that yields the larger figure for that study.

    The studies import the literature’s upside but not its realisation record

    Both studies draw their benefit magnitudes from the international high-speed rail literature — the same comparison set the Initiative uses. What they import is the size of the upside. What they do not import is that literature’s record on realisation: rail benefits arriving at about two-thirds of forecast, and passenger numbers overstated by roughly a hundred per cent.

    Each of the four observations above is a description of what the documents contain. Taken together they describe a benefit case in which every point of divergence has resolved in the same direction — which is the pattern the forecasting literature says to look for, and the reason an independent outside-view comparison matters more, not less, once numbers of this size are in circulation. The same two studies are examined in detail in the Initiative’s briefs Two Point Two Trillion and At Face Value.

    05 · The Ask

    Publish the comparison

    The Initiative’s recommendation is narrow and does not require anyone to accept a word of its own analysis.

    01
    Release the comparison in full. ALTO should publish its reference-class should-cost and should-schedule outputs alongside its published capital cost and benefit-cost figures, unredacted. The outside view was commissioned to be seen, not filed.
    02
    Publish the benefit studies against a cost. A $24.4-billion annual benefit figure is not interpretable without the outlay required to obtain it. The two June 2026 studies should be accompanied by an appraisal that nets one against the other.
    03
    Apply the test before further commitment. The window in which an outside-view check can still change a decision is open now. It narrows with every disbursement.

    It requires one document to be made public. The framework behind the request is set out in full in Chapter 1 of the HPR Research Report; what ought to be built instead is the subject of the chapters that follow it.

    How to read this brief

    Every figure attributed to Alto, Aviseo, CPCS, the National Audit Office or a published paper is quoted from the source listed below and can be checked there. Nothing else here is a calculation of ours: the argument rests on what the documents contain and on the sequence of dates, not on a competing estimate.

    Where a record has not been released, this brief says so rather than inferring its contents, and makes no claim about why any extension was taken or any figure was or was not published. The prediction in section 02 is stated in both directions and will be settled by the disclosure, not by us.

    Sources

    Documents relied on

    1
    Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.). Advance Contract Award Notice PAS240625-002-00 — project management and control expertise; pre-identified supplier Oxford Global Projects UK Limited. 2024.
    2
    Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.). Notice of extension, Access to Information request A-2026-0004. June 2026. On file with the Initiative.
    3
    Aviseo Consulting. An Overview of the Structural Economic Impacts of Alto: Computable General Equilibrium Modelling Approach to Assessing High-Speed Rail in the Toronto–Québec City Corridor. Prepared for Alto. June 2026.
    4
    CPCS, in association with HDR. Tourism in the Alto Corridor: Current Conditions and Potential Impacts. Prepared for Alto. June 2026.
    5
    National Audit Office. High Speed Two reset. Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, Session 2026-27, HC 52. London: National Audit Office, June 2026.
    6
    Flyvbjerg, Bent. “Quality Control and Due Diligence in Project Management: Getting Decisions Right by Taking the Outside View.” International Journal of Project Management 31, no. 5 (2013): 760–774.
    7
    Flyvbjerg, Bent. “Top-Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management: An Overview.” Project Management Journal 52, no. 6 (2021): 531–546.
    Coalition for Better Rail  ·  ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Brief · September 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • 3 claims 1 fare

    Three Claims, One Fare

    ALTO makes three promises about the high-speed railway. All three depend on one number it has never published — the price of a ticket.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Fare and Ridership Note 1 · Published August 2026
    The argument in plain terms

    ALTO promises three things at once: that 24 million people a year will ride the new railway; that they will save 9.3 billion hours of travel time, worth $49.5 billion; and that ticket sales will cover the cost of running and maintaining the line. Each promise sits in a different part of the report, backed by different evidence.

    All three depend on one number the report never gives: the price of a ticket. Cheap tickets fill trains, which is what the first two promises need. Expensive tickets bring in the revenue the third promise needs. A fare cannot be cheap and expensive at the same time, so the three promises pull against one another.

    Work out the single fare at which all three could hold, and it comes to about 19 cents per kilometre travelled — roughly $83 for a typical 428-kilometre journey. At that price the railway breaks even only if 24 million people ride it, and 24 million people ride it only if the corridor is generating about 74 million intercity trips a year, by all modes. On ALTO’s own population figures, the corridor will generate about 34 million.

    So making all three promises at once means making a fourth one that is never stated: that by 2055 the corridor would have to be generating more than twice the intercity travel that ALTO’s own population figures produce. Nobody forecasts travel on that scale, and that is exactly the difficulty.

    ⚠ How to read the fares on this page

    Fares here are given per kilometre travelled, because that is how railway revenue is calculated. A passenger-kilometre is simply one traveller going one kilometre, so a fare of $0.15 per kilometre means a passenger pays 15 cents for every kilometre of their journey. Multiply by 428 km — the average journey — for a rough ticket price: $0.15 is about $64, $0.22 about $94, $0.28 about $120, and the $0.193 break-even fare about $83.

    Modal Shift Notes and O&M Notes, referred to throughout, are earlier papers in this series and are available at citizenresearch.ca.

    2.19×
    how much more intercity travel the corridor would have to generate for all three promises to hold: 73.9 million trips a year against 33.7 million forecast
    §6.1
    $0.193
    the only fare at which all three could hold — about $83 a journey. At that price the railway carries about 11 million riders, not 24 million
    §6.1
    63%
    the most of its running costs the railway can recover from fares at any price. Fares pay about 63 cents of every dollar; the rest comes from the public
    §8
    Download
    Three Claims, One Fare — Full Brief (PDF)
    The complete arithmetic, set out step by step, with every figure sourced so that any part of it can be checked or rejected

    Download PDF

    The Three Promises

    Three claims that are only ever made separately

    Where this comes from. ALTO is the company proposing the high-speed railway. In August 2026 it published a report, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, making the three claims set out below. This page is a plain-language version of an independent check of those claims against published population and travel data — in effect, a fact-check of ALTO’s report. Every step of the arithmetic is shown so that any part of it can be rejected.

    Three numbers do the persuasive work in ALTO’s report Canada’s Moment. They appear in different chapters, rest on different evidence, and are never set side by side. Put side by side, they turn out to want opposite things from the price of a ticket.

    The Promise What it needs the ticket price to do
    1. Ridership. 24 million passengers a year by 2055, rising after that. Be low. The cheaper the ticket, the more people ride — and for a family of three or more, driving already costs almost nothing extra.
    2. Economic benefit. 9.3 billion hours of travel time saved, worth $49.5 billion. Be low. Every benefit counted in the appraisal — time, car costs, safety, congestion, emissions — depends on how many people actually switch to the train.
    3. Paying its own way. “The railway pays for its own operations and maintenance.” Be high. Most of the cost of running the railway stays the same whether the trains are full or empty, so covering it depends on how much each passenger pays.

    The first two promises pull the fare down. The third pulls it up. That is not a criticism of high-speed rail; every high-speed railway ever built faces the same squeeze. The criticism is that the report presents all three as true at the same time without ever showing the fare that would deliver them.

    Why These Are One Promise

    Everything runs through the ticket price

    Picture a single dial: the price of a ticket. Turning that one dial moves all three of ALTO’s claims at the same time, because all three are calculated from it. Turn the price down and more people ride, which automatically raises the total hours saved, because total hours saved is just hours per person multiplied by the number of people. But turn the price down and each ticket brings in less money, so covering the railway’s costs gets harder. The three claims are not three separate discoveries. They are three readings taken off the same dial — and ALTO’s report never shows you the setting it used.

    The fare is not a detail to be settled later, once the business case is agreed. It is the number the business case turns on. It enters the arithmetic twice, pulling in opposite directions, and everything else follows automatically.

    1 — The fare sets how many people ride

    The fare sets how expensive the train is next to driving or flying, which sets the share of trips that choose rail. Apply that share to the total number of intercity trips in the corridor and you have annual ridership.

    2 — Ridership sets both the benefits and the revenue

    Riders multiplied by the length of the average journey gives total passenger-kilometres. That single quantity drives the hours saved and the ticket revenue. There is no way to improve one without damaging the other.

    3 — So the first two promises are the same promise

    If the hours saved per passenger are held at ALTO’s own figure, the economic benefit is simply the number of riders multiplied by a fixed amount. The $49.5 billion is the 24 million riders, restated in dollars. That leaves two propositions, not three: one about demand, one about covering costs.

    Three numbers agreeing is not three checks passing

    If one team checked ridership, another checked time savings and a third checked whether fares cover costs — each using its own method — and all three agreed, that would mean something. That is not what happens here. All three start from the same unpublished ticket price, so of course they agree. They are three shadows cast by the same object. They will always line up, and their lining up is no evidence that the object is the right shape.

    4 — And two propositions have one joint answer

    Two equations with two unknowns — the fare and the number of riders — will usually have a solution. The claims are not inconsistent with one another. The question is what that solution demands of the corridor.

    The Travel Market

    How much intercity travel there is to win

    The corridor’s total travel market is its population multiplied by the number of intercity trips each resident makes on the routes the railway would serve. Modal Shift Note 3 puts the 2025 corridor population at about 14.9 million across the cities directly served, growing at 1.0 per cent a year, and puts intercity travel at about 1.68 trips per resident per year.

    20.1M
    people living in the corridor in 2055, on the central growth path
    Modal Shift Note 3
    33.7M
    intercity trips a year in 2055, by every mode — car, air, bus and rail combined
    20.1M × 1.68 trips each
    71%
    the share of that entire market ALTO’s 24 million riders would represent
    24.0M ÷ 33.7M

    Seventy-one per cent of all intercity travel — car, air, bus and rail together — is a share no high-speed railway is known to have won. It is worth being precise about this, because the famous European figures look higher and are not the same measure. Roughly 75 per cent of Madrid–Barcelona travellers choose the train over the plane, and more than 80 per cent on Madrid–Seville; those are shares of the rail-and-air market, which excludes the car. Against a car that costs its driver almost nothing extra to fill, no comparable share of the whole market has been recorded. Nor is 71 per cent a forecast that fails at some fares and works at others. As the sections below show, no fare produces it.

    What Each Ticket Price Delivers

    Three realistic fare levels, and what each one buys

    Modal Shift Note 3 sets out three combinations of fare and subsidy spanning the realistic range of policy, and reports the share of the market each one wins. The dollar figures are this note’s translation of those descriptions into a fare per kilometre; Note 3 publishes no dollar figures, so the translation is an inference. Every figure below uses the version most favourable to the project.

    The Fare Level What it delivers
    A — Heavy subsidy. $0.15 per km (about $64 a journey). Fares held at today’s VIA Rail levels, with $2.5–4.5 billion a year of public money covering construction costs. 13.5 million riders a year — 38–42% of the market. $27.8 billion of benefit against the $49.5 billion claimed. Fares cover 54% of running costs.
    All three promises:Not met
    B — Moderate subsidy. $0.22 per km (about $94 a journey). Fares matched to airfares, with $1.5–2.5 billion a year of public money covering construction costs. The arrangement the published business case appears to assume. 10.1 million riders a year — 28–32% of the market. $20.9 billion of benefit. Fares cover 64% of running costs — the best result available at any price.
    All three promises:Not met
    C — Minimal subsidy. $0.28 per km (about $120 a journey). Fares set by a private operator to maximise revenue, above airfare levels, with $0.5–1.5 billion a year of residual public support. Closest to a commercially structured P3; ALTO has published no payment mechanism. 7.3 million riders a year — 20–23% of the market. $15.0 billion of benefit. Fares cover 63% of running costs.
    All three promises:Not met
    ALTO as published. No fare stated anywhere in the report. 24.0 million riders a year — 71% of the market. $49.5 billion of benefit. Fares cover 100% of running costs.
    Fare required to produce this:Never published

    Even on the most generous treatment — the heaviest subsidy, mature ridership rather than the slower build-up of the opening years, and ALTO’s own hours saved per passenger accepted exactly as published — the economic benefit is $27.8 billion, not $49.5 billion. That is a reduction of 44 per cent arising from the ridership side alone.

    Paying the Running Costs

    Why cheap tickets cannot fix the finances

    Think of a gym. It pays rent whether 10 people turn up or 1,000 — that cost is fixed. It also buys more towels and cleaning supplies as more people come — that cost varies with use. A railway works the same way, and the split matters more than it might sound.

    Running a railway costs money in two ways. Some costs stay the same however many people ride — track, structures, signalling, stations, head office, and buying the trains. Others grow with the number of trains you run. On ALTO’s own figures, spread over the life of the assets at its own 3.5 per cent rate, the fixed block is $1,130 million a year, and 61 per cent of the total cost does not move with ridership at all.

    That is why cutting fares to fill the trains does not fix the finances. It helps a little at first — more passengers spread across the same fixed cost — and then makes matters worse, because each extra passenger is paying less. Cost recovery does not simply improve as fares rise. It improves, peaks, and then falls back.

    Chart: economic benefit delivered and share of running costs covered by fares, at each fare. Neither of ALTO's two claims is ever reached.

    Figure 2. Neither promise is ever reached. The economic benefit delivered (navy, left axis) and the share of running costs covered by fares (rust, right axis), at each fare. The two gold lines are ALTO’s two claims. Benefit falls steadily as fares rise; cost recovery rises, peaks well short of covering everything, then falls away as riders drop off. The fare that comes closest to one claim is far from the other. The chart shows cost recovery as a ratio, so its peak of 0.63 is the 63 per cent described here, and the gold line at 1.00 is fares covering costs in full.

    The ceiling is about two-thirds

    The turning point sits at a fare near $0.26 per kilometre, where fares cover about 63 per cent of running costs. The best of the three published levels reaches 64 per cent. At no price in the corridor as forecast do fares cover the cost of running the railway. Fares pay about 63 cents of every dollar; the remaining 37 cents comes from the public, every year, forever.

    And the best fare for the finances is the worst for the benefits

    The fare that comes closest to paying for the railway delivers roughly $16 billion of the claimed $49.5 billion in benefits. The fare that comes closest to one promise is nowhere near the fare that delivers the other.

    Against the cost of building it, nothing reaches a dollar

    Construction of roughly $75 billion, spread across 2027–2037 and discounted at 3.5 per cent, is worth about $57 billion in today’s dollars. Measured against that, every dollar returns 49 cents of benefit at fare level A, 36 cents at level B and 26 cents at level C. ALTO’s own published benefits return 86 cents — and that failure is ALTO’s own arithmetic, not this note’s. None of these figures counts the operating shortfall above, which the public would have to fund on top.

    The Three Promises Joined Up

    There is exactly one answer, and it is about the corridor

    The obvious next step is to check the promises one at a time and report that none of them survives. That is true, and it is set out below. But it is the weaker exercise, because it invites the reply that the whole thing is merely a disagreement with three forecasts.

    A short detour, because the next step depends on it. Suppose you are told two things about a bag of marbles: it holds 18 marbles, and there are twice as many red ones as blue. Neither fact on its own tells you how many are red. Put them together and there is exactly one answer — 12 red and 6 blue. Two facts, each loose on its own, can lock onto a single exact answer once you require both to be true at the same time.

    The same move works on the railway. “24 million riders” is one fact. “Fares alone cover the running costs” is another. Neither tells you the ticket price by itself — plenty of low prices might draw 24 million riders, plenty of high ones might cover costs. Require both at the same price, and as with the marbles there is only one price where that is possible.

    The stronger exercise is to solve the two propositions together and ask what corridor would satisfy them. Covering costs fixes a relationship between the fare and the number of riders; so does the ridership promise. Two equations, two unknowns, one answer.

    The one fare, and the one market, that satisfy all three

    Covering 100 per cent of running costs at exactly 24 million riders requires a fare of $0.1935 per kilometre. At that fare the train wins 32.5 per cent of the market. For 32.5 per cent to equal 24 million riders, the corridor must be generating 73.9 million intercity trips a year. It is forecast to generate 33.7 million. The ratio is 2.19×.

    There is only one such point, and it is worth being clear about why. Above $0.193 the railway covers its costs but carries fewer than 24 million people; below it, it carries more but cannot pay for them. Only at $0.193 do the two meet, and where they meet is fixed by the size of the market. The three promises do not contradict each other. They contradict the corridor.

    That unstated assertion has a value, and it can be put in whichever units a reader finds easiest to judge:

    Expressed as Required by the three promises, against the forecast
    Intercity trips a year, all modes 73.9 million required, against 33.7 million forecast — 2.19×
    People living in the corridor in 2055 44.0 million required, against 20.1 million forecast — more people on the Toronto–Québec City axis alone than live in Canada today
    Intercity trips per resident, per year 3.68 required, against 1.68 — corridor residents travelling more than twice as often as the evidence supports, at a time when remote and hybrid working push the other way
    Annual population growth, 2025–2055 3.7 per cent a year sustained for three decades, against a central forecast of 1.0 per cent and a high forecast of 1.6

    Anyone wishing to defend all three promises therefore has exactly one thing to defend, and it is a claim about demand rather than about engineering or financing. Cheaper construction, faster trains and a different discount rate do not reach it. Only a larger travel market does.

    The Gap That Does Not Close

    No ticket price escapes the problem

    Within the corridor as forecast, is there some fare — between the three levels above, or beyond them — that escapes the problem? There is not, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of forecasting.

    Two things happen at once as the price goes up. The number of riders the railway needs in order to break even falls gently and steadily, like walking down a slope — each rider is worth more, so fewer are needed, but that effect fades out gradually. The number of riders available falls away sharply, because once the train costs about what driving costs, people stop switching to it very quickly. A gentle slope and a cliff do not meet.

    Put more precisely: raising the fare lowers the number of riders needed to break even, because each remaining passenger contributes more. But raising the fare also lowers the number of riders available, and it does so faster. The first effect tails off gradually. The second accelerates, because once the train loses its price advantage over a car that costs almost nothing extra to fill, passengers fall away sharply. The second effect always wins.

    Chart: the market share the railway needs to cover its costs, against the share it can win, at each fare. The two curves never meet.

    Figure 1. The two curves never meet at any fare. The rust curve is the share of the market the railway would need to cover its running costs; the solid navy curve is the share it can actually win. The shaded area between them is the gap. The dashed navy curve is the same demand curve in a corridor generating 2.19 times as much travel — it touches the rust curve at exactly one point, $0.193, and that point sits on the gold line marking the 71 per cent share ALTO’s 24-million forecast implies. The chart labels this share “capture”, and the fare “fare yield, dollars per passenger-kilometre”.
    At this fare Market share needed, against market share achievable
    $0.15 per km — fare level A
    about $64 a journey    		 Needs 117.7% of the entire intercity market. Can win 40%. The railway would have to carry more trips than exist in the corridor at all, across every mode, simply to cover its running costs.
    $0.22 per km — fare level B
    about $94 a journey    		 Needs 57.3%. Can win 30%.
    $0.28 per km — fare level C
    about $120 a journey    		 Needs 39.8%. Can win 21.5%. This is as close as the gap ever comes: 1.85×, at about $0.29.
    $0.40 per km
    about $171 a journey    		 Needs 24.7%. Can win 12.1%. The gap has started widening again as the ridership base collapses.

    Read the last figures as the size of the gap: at every fare, the railway needs between roughly twice and three times the market share it can actually win. There is no fare at which it closes.

    What Would Have To Change

    Fixing one promise at a time

    These are the terms a proponent is most likely to reply in. Three of the four turn out not to reach the joint answer at all.

    A larger travel market — reaches all three

    A corridor population of 34.0 million by 2055, or 2.85 trips per resident, brings 24 million riders within reach. Covering the running costs as well takes the 44.0 million of the joint answer. This is the only repair that reaches all three promises.

    Longer journeys — does not move ridership

    An average journey of 793–1,259 km, against the 428 km assumed — meaning essentially every passenger riding Toronto to Québec City end to end, and at fare level A a journey longer than the line itself. It would help cover costs. It puts nobody extra on a train.

    Lower running costs — covers costs only

    Running costs 37–46 per cent below the O&M Note estimates, with the fixed block down from $1,130 million to about $564 million. Again, nothing on the cost side puts passengers on trains.

    A stronger switch to rail — the same claim in different units

    The whole demand curve lifted by a factor of 2.19 at every fare. This is arithmetically identical to a bigger market, and equally a claim about demand.

    This is the asymmetry the brief turns on. Repairs on the cost side rescue the cost-covering promise and leave the ridership promise exactly where it was, because nothing on the cost side puts passengers on trains. Only a larger travel market reaches all three, and both routes to one — more people, or a greater willingness to switch — are the same claim in different units.

    Where Things Stand · August 2026

    Summary ledger

    Taking the promises one at a time, in the corridor as forecast, at every fare examined:

    Not met
    24 million riders a year. The ceiling across the whole fare range is 13.5 million. At the break-even fare of $0.193 it is about 11 million.
    Not met
    $49.5 billion in economic benefits. The ceiling is $27.8 billion, and that figure accepts ALTO’s own hours saved per passenger without challenge.
    Not met
    Fares cover the cost of running and maintaining the railway. The ceiling is 63–64 per cent, at any price, in the corridor as forecast.
    Robust
    The ceiling on cost recovery is the solid half of this finding. It sits inside the range of fares the modelling actually covers, and needs no projection beyond it.
    Softer
    The ceilings on riders and benefits involve projecting beyond the tested range at fares below $0.15, and a proponent is entitled to challenge them. The joint answer at $0.193 does not depend on any such projection.
    Answerable
    A proponent who accepts a 73.9-million-trip corridor is entitled to hold all three promises at once — and should be asked to say so plainly.

    The three promises are not logically inconsistent with one another, and this brief does not claim they are. There is a genuine joint answer. The difficulty is that the answer describes a corridor that does not exist — and that the fourth promise, the one about how much travel the corridor generates, is the only one ALTO has never had to defend, because it has never been stated.

    That distinction is not a technicality. A single claim that says “this project needs more than twice the travel demand anyone forecasts” invites immediate scrutiny. Three separately sourced numbers that merely happen to agree do not. Splitting one unproven assumption across three chapters is what allowed it to travel through public debate unchallenged — and catching that before tens of billions of public dollars are committed is the whole point of a review like this one.

    Download Full Brief
    Three Claims, One Fare (PDF)
    The complete arithmetic with every step shown, for anyone who wants to check or reject any part of it

    Download PDF

    Limits

    What this brief does not claim

    The translation of the three fare levels into dollars is an inference

    Modal Shift Note 3 defines the three levels by how much subsidy they need and how they compare with airfares, not in dollars per kilometre. The $0.15, $0.22 and $0.28 figures are this brief’s reading of what those descriptions imply. Anyone who rejects the reading should supply the fares the business case actually assumes — and the conclusion holds across the whole range of fares, not only at those three points.

    The 428-kilometre average journey is an assumption

    Carried over from revised O&M Note 3. It matters a great deal: revenue and hours saved both rise and fall with it.

    The construction cost figure is not ALTO’s

    The $75 billion is the midpoint of the $60–90 billion range used elsewhere in this series. ALTO publishes no comparable figure. The returns per dollar should be read as indicative, and they measure benefits against construction cost alone.

    Nothing here depends on the 9.3-billion-hour figure being correct

    It is held at ALTO’s own value throughout. If it is correct, the findings stand as stated. If it turns out to be overstated, the benefit column falls further still and every conclusion here becomes firmer, not weaker.

    The model of the train service is coarse

    A single 450-seat train type, uniformly 65 per cent full over a 1,000-kilometre corridor, is a simplification. A real railway would vary train length and frequency by section, which would cut the ridership-related costs somewhat when ridership is low. It would not touch the fixed costs, which is where the problem lies.

    Sources

    Primary documents and companion notes

    1.

    ALTO, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, August 2026. The 24-million ridership forecast, the 9.3 billion hours of travel time saved and the $49.5 billion total benefit figure at a 3.5 per cent discount rate.
    2.

    ALTO, Canada’s Moment, August 2026. The claim appears three times: in the chief executive’s foreword, where revenues are expected to cover all operating and maintenance costs and to offset the ongoing public subsidies conventional passenger rail has historically required; in the executive summary, where operating revenues are expected to fully cover operating and maintenance costs, transitioning passenger rail from a publicly subsidised service to a commercially viable operation; and in the financial chapter, where the project is expected to operate on a self-sustaining basis. The same chapter distinguishes day-to-day operating costs from initial capital investment and lifecycle costs, and states that revenues do not cover all costs once those are included — the distinction examined in revised O&M Note 3, which finds the claim true for day-to-day operations alone, marginal once renewals are included, and failing once the trains themselves have to be replaced.
    3.

    Modal Shift Note 3 — corridor population, starting point and growth path; intercity trips per resident. The 1.68 figure is the 2025 baseline; the working range is 1.6–1.8. Using 1.68 is marginally conservative against this brief’s own conclusion.
    4.

    Modal Shift Note 3 — market shares of 38–42, 28–32 and 20–23 per cent for the three fare levels, which Note 3 calls Regimes A, B and C.
    5.

    Revised O&M Note 3 — infrastructure $1,016M, operations $700M and fleet $127M a year, spread over the life of the assets at 3.5 per cent real; the fixed and variable split giving $1,130M fixed and $8.91M for each train per day.
    6.

    Statistics Canada, The Daily, 17 June 2026 — Canada’s total population estimated at 41,417,056 on 1 April 2026, a decrease of 55,025 over the preceding quarter.
    7.

    Fare levels, service assumptions and the joint solution are set out in full in the PDF brief, including the two equations solved simultaneously in §6.1.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Fare and Ridership Note 1  ·  August 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor. All figures are reconstructions from published sources and companion notes in this series; the arithmetic is set out in full so that any step can be checked or rejected. Corrections welcome.

  • At face value

    At Face Value

    Five numbers from ALTO’s economic report are now in wide circulation. Each one is either the top of a range or the middle of one. In every case the range exists. In every case it was not printed.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Economic Claims Brief · Published August 2026
    ⚠ The numbers you will hear

    $49.5 billion in benefits · $24.5 billion in added GDP · 1.1 per cent of Canada’s economy · 50,000 jobs · 24 million riders a year

    None of these figures is invented. Every one comes from real modelling work by real economists, and each is accurate on its own terms. But each describes something narrower, or more conditional, than it sounds — and in every case the report prints one number where the work behind it reports a range.

    Critical Finding

    $49.5 billion is labelled an upper estimate — the good end of a range whose other end is nowhere in the document. $24.5 billion is a central estimate from a range its own modeller published as $14.8 billion to $41.0 billion. 24 million riders is prefixed “up to.” 50,000 jobs sits in a table headed “upper estimate” — and ALTO’s own appendix states those figures are not net economic gains.

    Meanwhile the report declines to publish a benefit-cost ratio — the single number that would tell you whether the benefits exceed the costs.

    The point of this brief is not that ALTO’s numbers are wrong. It is that they are being used as though they were settled, when the documents behind them show they are not.

    The document under examination
    Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail
    ALTO, August 2026 — 83 pages. All figures on this page are from that report or the studies it commissioned.
    Read ALTO’s report
    Number One

    “$49.5 billion in benefits”

    What you’ll hearWhat it actually is
    ALTO delivers $49.5 billion in benefits to Canadians. The upper estimate of benefits, added up over 60 years, adjusted downward for the fact that most of them arrive decades from now. Nearly four-fifths of it is saved travel time.
    In plain language — what “discounted” means

    Economists assume a benefit arriving in 2085 is worth less to us today than the same benefit arriving next year — the same reason $100 now beats $100 in twenty years. So future benefits get shrunk before they are added up. This is standard, required, and correct.

    It also does a great deal of work here, and the Initiative’s brief Hours Are Not Dollars sets it out in full. The report says ALTO saves 9.3 billion hours of travel time, and values an hour at $22.32. Multiply those together and you get $207.6 billion. The figure that appears in the benefit table is $38.4 billion. Discounting removes about 82 per cent of the face value, because most of those hours are saved by people who have not been born yet.

    In plain language — what “upper estimate” means

    The benefit table is headed “upper estimate.” Every narrative figure is prefixed “up to” — up to 24 million riders, up to 9.3 billion hours, up to 400 lives saved. An upper estimate is one end of a range. The other end does not appear anywhere in the 83 pages.

    There is one more thing about this number worth knowing. The report opens by making traffic congestion the problem — Highway 401, Pearson airport, journeys that are too slow and too unreliable. In the benefit table, easing congestion is worth $570 million out of $49.5 billion: about 1.2 per cent. Cleaner air is worth $27 million, roughly one part in two thousand.

    The problem the report leads with and the benefit the report counts are almost entirely different things.

    Number Two

    “$24.5 billion in added GDP”

    What you’ll hearWhat it actually is
    ALTO adds $24.5 billion to the Canadian economy. The middle of a range running from $14.8 billion to $41.0 billion, produced by a different model, in a different year’s dollars, and measured as an annual figure rather than a 60-year total.
    Can it be added to the $49.5 billion? No — the report says so on page 9

    The Initiative examined this figure in detail in Two Point Two Trillion. It is the number ALTO’s website states most confidently: the analysis “concludes that Alto will permanently uplift Canada’s GDP by 1.1%.” The study behind it is more careful, and it publishes its range.

    $14.8B
    the low end of the modeller’s published range
    Aviseo, Table 1
    $24.4B
    the baseline — the only figure that reached the public
    Aviseo, Table 1
    $41.0B
    the high end — nearly three times the low end
    Aviseo, Table 1
    In plain language — where this number comes from

    It comes from a computable general equilibrium model — a simulation of the whole Canadian economy that works out what happens to wages, prices, trade and output when you change one thing. These are legitimate, widely used tools. Governments run them all the time.

    The thing being changed here is a single assumption: that firms in Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa and Québec City become three per cent more productive because the train exists. That one assumption produces $21 billion of the $24.4 billion — 86 per cent of the total.

    In plain language — how three per cent was chosen

    The modellers say so openly, and deserve credit for it. Studies in Germany and Sweden found productivity gains of two to four per cent. So, they write, “it seems reasonable to consider a baseline scenario” of three per cent.

    They also tested two per cent and five per cent. Two per cent gives the $14.8 billion; five per cent gives the $41.0 billion. There is no scenario in which the productivity gain fails to appear at all — even the pessimistic case assumes a two per cent uplift across four city economies.

    One further detail. Because nobody yet knows where the stations will go, the modellers applied that productivity boost to the entire metropolitan areas of Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa and Québec City — standing in for the 30-kilometre radius around a station that the research actually supports. Peterborough, Laval, Trois-Rivières and Kingston appear nowhere in that calculation.

    Number Three

    “1.1 per cent of Canada’s GDP”

    What you’ll hearWhat it actually is
    ALTO raises Canada’s GDP by 1.1 per cent. 1.1 per cent of the Canadian economy as it was in 2019 — the last pre-pandemic year, used because 2020 and 2021 were distorted.

    The modeller says this plainly: the gain is “roughly 1.1% of Canada’s 2019 GDP.” Canada’s Moment drops the year. The website drops the year and adds the word “will.”

    Taken across the published range rather than the midpoint, the same calculation gives roughly 0.6 per cent at the low end and 1.8 per cent at the high end. One of those three numbers is in circulation.

    Number Four

    “50,000 jobs and $86 billion”

    What you’ll hearWhat ALTO’s own appendix says
    Building ALTO creates 50,000 jobs and adds $86 billion to GDP. These figures “represent spending-supported economic activity rather than net economic gains” and are “therefore not included in the benefit-cost ratio.”
    In plain language — why jobs numbers are not benefits

    If you spend $60 billion on anything — a railway, a bridge, a very large hole — people get paid to do it, and those people spend their wages locally. Counting that as a benefit of the project would mean any spending is a benefit, which cannot be right: the money had to come from somewhere, and would have employed someone else.

    ALTO’s appendix says this outright, and adds that the model used “does not account for potential constraints in the economy, such as labour shortages or capacity limits.” Most promoters present numbers like these as benefits and say nothing. ALTO explicitly refuses to — on page 80. The 50,000 jobs appear on page 5.

    The caveat is genuine and creditable. It sits in an appendix seventy-five pages behind the figure it qualifies, and it has not travelled with the number. The Initiative examines this figure in full in Where Do 50,000 Jobs Come From?, which rebuilds it from the annual spending and workforce figures HS2 and the Réseau express métropolitain both publish, and finds that roughly 18,000 of the 50,000 are people working on the railway.

    Number Five

    “24 million riders a year”

    What you’ll hearWhat it actually is
    ALTO will carry 24 million passengers a year. “Up to” 24 million a year by 2055 — the output of scenarios and sensitivity tests whose range the report describes but does not show.

    ALTO’s own methodology appendix explains exactly what it should have published. Sensitivity testing, it says, gives decision-makers “a range of plausible outcomes rather than relying on a single forecast.” The flowchart’s stated output is “a range of plausible ridership outcomes.”

    The report then prints one number.

    That number matters more than it looks, because four of the seven benefit lines depend on it — car running costs, road safety, congestion and greenhouse gases all flow from an estimate of 90.1 billion kilometres of driving avoided. And how much driving is avoided depends on who the new passengers are. Someone who switches from a car takes kilometres off the road. Someone who switches from a plane takes none. Someone making a brand new trip takes none. That breakdown is published nowhere.

    And One Number That Is Missing

    There is no benefit-cost ratio

    The standard test of whether a public investment is worth making is simple: divide the benefits by the costs. Above one, it pays. Below one, it does not.

    Canada’s Moment does not publish that number. Page 62 explains why: the cost estimate is too early-stage for the ratio to be meaningful. The same absence runs through ALTO’s public benefits page, examined in Many Benefits, One Missing Number.

    In plain language — what the cited manual says about early-stage uncertainty

    ALTO names a Metrolinx appraisal manual as the authority for two of its key figures — the subject of It Left the Rules Behind. That manual treats early-stage uncertainty as the reason to test and publish ranges — not as a reason to withhold them. Its instruction for the earliest project stage is to conduct sensitivity testing to understand the level of uncertainty.

    The same manual also requires early-stage rail costs to be marked up by 64 per cent before being compared with benefits, because rail megaprojects are systematically undercosted. That would put ALTO’s $60–90 billion into the comparison at roughly $98–148 billion. No such uplift is applied, and the concept is not mentioned.

    So the report does not divide the benefits by the costs, while placing $49.5 billion in benefits and $60–90 billion in costs on the same spread.

    It has been done before — on this corridor, at this stage

    In December 2021 the Joint Project Office — a body formed by VIA Rail Canada and the Canada Infrastructure Bank — completed a business case for High Frequency Rail, the slower and cheaper predecessor to ALTO along the same corridor. It was at a comparable point in its development.

    That document published a benefit-cost ratio.

    Project
    High Frequency Rail — the same Toronto–Québec City corridor, at a comparable stage of design
    Capital cost
    $27.71 billion in 2020 prices
    Benefit-cost ratio
    Approximately 0.13 — rising to about 0.4 on an expanded basis that also counts agglomeration effects and a resource correction
    Net present value
    −$21.1 billion over thirty years
    Public subsidy
    $37.1 to $42.2 billion over thirty years, under the delivery models assessed
    Parameters
    Drawn from Metrolinx and Ministère des Transports du Québec guidance — the same two sources Canada’s Moment cites five years later

    It was not published at the time. It became public in November 2025, when the Canada Infrastructure Bank released it under the Access to Information Act — almost four years after it was written.

    In plain language — what a ratio of 0.13 means

    A benefit-cost ratio of 1.00 means a project returns exactly what it costs. Above 1.00 it pays for itself in economic terms; below 1.00 it does not.

    A ratio of 0.13 means that for every dollar spent, about thirteen cents of measurable benefit came back. On the wider basis, which counts effects that are harder to measure, about forty cents. The Joint Project Office published those figures anyway, alongside the subsidy the project would need.

    Read this part carefully — these are not ALTO’s numbers

    0.13 is not ALTO’s ratio, and it is not an estimate of ALTO’s ratio. High Frequency Rail was a different project: slower, at $27.71 billion rather than $60–90 billion, assessed over thirty years rather than sixty. The Joint Project Office described its own results as preliminary. None of its figures transfers to ALTO by arithmetic, and this brief does not offer them as a forecast of anything.

    What the document establishes is narrower, and harder to answer: a benefit-cost ratio can be produced for a project on this corridor at this stage of design — because one was. Immaturity did not prevent it then, on a cost estimate roughly a third the size.

    There is one further detail worth recording. The same document, released under a different access request, comes back with one section withheld in full, the capital cost and revenue sentences cut off mid-clause, and the subsection headings of its Economic Case not shown in the table of contents. No exemption provision is marked against any of these.

    What Cannot Be Checked At All

    The benefit table cannot be audited by a reader

    Each row of the main benefit table gives you a quantity and a dollar value. The natural thing to do is divide one by the other and see what price has been put on an hour, a tonne of carbon, or a life. You cannot.

    The dollar figures are discounted. The quantities are not. And the prices that would connect them are referenced by source but never stated — only the $22.32 hourly value appears anywhere.

    One row does not appear to add up at all. The report says ALTO avoids up to 400 deaths and 26,000 injuries, valued at $610 million. Working backwards, that is roughly $1.2 billion before the time adjustment — which 26,000 injuries alone would exhaust at $50,000 each, a low figure by Canadian standards, leaving nothing for the 400 lives. Either the casualty counts and the money cover different periods, or the values placed on a life and an injury are far below what Canadian governments normally use. The report does not publish enough to say which.

    The Takeaway

    The same thing has happened to every number

    Top of a range
    $49.5 billion in benefits — the table is headed “upper estimate”; the lower estimate is nowhere in the document.
    Middle of a range
    $24.5 billion in GDP — the modeller published $14.8 billion to $41.0 billion. Only the midpoint travelled.
    Top of a range
    24 million riders — prefixed “up to,” from a process whose stated purpose is to produce a range.
    Top of a range
    50,000 jobs — in a table headed “upper estimate,” for figures the appendix says are not net gains.
    Not published
    The benefit-cost ratio — the one number that would put the others in proportion. The last time one was produced for this corridor, it took an access-to-information request to see it.

    This is the finding. Not that any figure is fabricated — none is. Not that the modelling is incompetent — the underlying studies are careful, and say so about their own limits. But wherever the underlying work reported a range, the document carries a single figure from the optimistic end of it, and it is that single figure which has reached councils, newspapers and the public.

    The ranges are not secret. Most of them are in ALTO’s own commissioned studies, sitting on ALTO’s own research page. They simply did not make it into the document that everyone reads.

    None of these figures should be repeated at face value, in either direction. They are the optimistic end of work that its own authors describe as uncertain — and anyone quoting them, for or against the project, should say which end of the range they are quoting.

    In Fairness

    What this brief is not saying

    Credit where it is owed

    The modellers were transparentThe economic study behind the GDP figure publishes its full range, states its assumptions, and explains how each was chosen. This brief is only possible because that work was published.
    ALTO refuses a claim it could have madeIts appendix states that the construction jobs and spending figures are not net economic benefits — a caveat most promoters simply omit.
    Some choices are genuinely cautiousThe value of an hour is held flat for 60 years rather than rising with incomes, which lowers the benefit total substantially. Safety benefits are capped after 20 years.

    And the limits of what we show

    Some arithmetic here is oursEvery figure attributed to ALTO, Aviseo, Metrolinx, the Joint Project Office or Transport Canada is quoted from the source listed below and can be checked there. Everything else is our own calculation from those published inputs: the $207.6 billion undiscounted time total, the 82 per cent that discounting removes, the 0.6 and 1.8 per cent at the ends of the GDP range, the $98–148 billion uplifted cost, and the casualty reconciliation. The reconciliations use assumptions about timing that ALTO does not disclose. They show the numbers cannot be reproduced from what is published — not that they are wrong.
    This is about disclosure, not competenceThe underlying modelling may be entirely sound. The objection is that a reader cannot tell, because the working is not shown.
    We do not say whyWhere a range or a caveat does not appear in the report, this page says so rather than inferring it. It makes no claim about why any particular figure was or was not published.
    A range is not a refutationThat the GDP figure could be $14.8 billion does not mean it will be. It equally could be $41.0 billion. The point is that one number is being presented as though the others do not exist.
    What To Ask

    Five questions for anyone quoting these figures

    1. Is that the top of the range, or the middle?

    For four of the five headline numbers, it is one or the other.

    2. What is the lower estimate?

    The benefit table is explicitly labelled an upper bound. Every range has another end.

    3. What is the benefit-cost ratio?

    Not published. It is the number that puts every other number in proportion — and one was produced for this corridor in 2021, so “too early” is a choice rather than a constraint.

    4. What price was put on a life, or a tonne of carbon?

    Referenced by source, never stated. Without them, no line of the benefit table can be checked.

    5. Where do the new passengers come from?

    Cars, planes, existing trains, or trips that would never have happened? A fifth of the benefits depend on the answer.

    Sources

    Primary documents

    1.
    ALTO, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, August 2026, 83 pp. Benefit table and value of time at p. 72; cost-benefit methodology at p. 73; GDP table and its “central estimate” note at p. 75; the roughly 100 simulations at p. 78; input-output caveat at p. 80; construction figures at Table A4, p. 81; ridership methodology at pp. 81–83; benefit-cost ratio at p. 62; non-additivity of the models at p. 9. altotrain.ca (PDF)
    2.
    Aviseo Conseil, An Overview of the Structural Economic Impacts of Alto: Computable General Equilibrium Modelling Approach, June 2026, 25 pp. Prepared on behalf of Alto. Published range at Table 1; productivity scenarios at Shock 1; labour-supply scenarios at Shock 2; geography assumption at p. 10. Available on ALTO’s research page.
    3.
    Metrolinx, Business Case Manual Volume 2: Guidance, August 2021, 222 pp. Cited by ALTO as the source of its discount rate and value of time. Sensitivity requirements at pp. 87–89; optimism-bias uplift at pp. 90–94; economic parameters at Table 5.8, p. 98.
    4.
    Joint Project Office (VIA Rail Canada and the Canada Infrastructure Bank), High Frequency Rail Project: Business Case Update, V.002, 10 December 2021, 150 pp. Released by the Canada Infrastructure Bank under the Access to Information Act, November 2025. Capital cost at p. 7; benefit-cost ratio, net present value and subsidy comparison at p. 8; appraisal parameters sourced to Metrolinx and MTQ guidance at p. 40; impact results and both ratios at Table 14, p. 43. The same document released as Annexe A to access request 22-2207 withholds section 9.7 in full, truncates the capital cost and revenue sentences mid-clause, and withholds the subsection headings of the Economic Case within its table of contents, with no exemption provisions marked.
    5.
    Transport Canada, Statistics on the social costs of collisions in Canada, and the underlying Ontario social cost model — used here as the comparison for standard Canadian casualty valuations. ALTO does not cite these and may have used others.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Economic Claims Brief  ·  August 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.