ALTO High-Speed Rail: Do the Ridership Projections Hold Up?
— testing ALTO’s 24 million and 43 million passenger targets against the evidence
ALTO has publicly committed to carrying 24 million passengers per year by 2055 and 43 million by 2084. These figures underpin the entire financial case for the project. They have been presented without any disclosed demand modelling methodology, without sensitivity ranges, and without a description of the baseline assumptions used.
This research note tests those projections against the best available international evidence, independent academic modelling, and Canada’s own rail and travel behaviour data.
ALTO’s favoured international comparator is the Madrid–Barcelona high-speed rail line, which carried 14.6 million passengers in 2024 after 30 years of operation and three competing operators driving fares down by 25–50%. ALTO is being asked to surpass that figure — on a corridor where the entire existing train service carries just 3.1 million passengers today — with a single operator and no competitive pricing mechanism, in a country where 67–80% of the population lives in auto-dependent suburbs.
Independent academic modelling projects roughly 9–10 million passengers by year 20 on the Toronto–Montréal segment alone — less than half ALTO’s 2055 target. The most widely replicated finding in megaproject research is that projected ridership on passenger rail averages 65% above what actually materialises.
This analysis also documents a serious and rarely discussed problem: Canada’s newest train fleet — the Siemens Venture cars on the existing VIA Rail corridor — fell below 50% availability in winter 2026, and only 17% of trains ran on time on the Ottawa–Toronto route in February 2025.
The Numbers: A Seven-to-One Starting Gap
Before examining what ALTO projects, it helps to understand where the corridor actually stands today.
Current VIA Rail corridor
Annual passengers on the entire Montréal–Ottawa–Toronto corridor in 2024 — all stations, all stops, all of it. Canada’s entire national rail network carried 4.1 million passengers that year.
Madrid–Barcelona HSR (2024)
Passengers on a single Spanish route — after 30 years of operation, three competing train operators, and fares as low as €40. More than 3× Canada’s entire national rail ridership.
ALTO’s 2055 target
Passengers per year required approximately 12 years after the full corridor opens — an eight-fold increase from today’s baseline, achieved faster than Spain reached half that figure.
“VIA Rail’s total national ridership — all routes, all of Canada — was 4.1 million passengers in 2024. Madrid–Barcelona alone now carries more than three times that figure.”
Reaching 24 million from a 3.1 million baseline in roughly 12 years of full-corridor operation would require an eight-fold increase in corridor ridership. Spain’s entire national HSR network — 47 cities, 3,100 km of track, the result of 30+ years of investment — carried approximately 39 million passengers in 2024. ALTO’s 2084 projection of 43 million would require a single 1,000 km Canadian corridor to exceed what Spain’s entire mature national HSR network carries today.
Scale check
24M by 2055 = 11× current corridor ridership in ~12 years, surpassing Madrid–Barcelona’s 2024 peak.
43M by 2084 = more than Spain’s entire 2024 national HSR network on a single corridor. No single HSR corridor outside Japan and China has achieved this.
Neither figure has been supported by a disclosed demand modelling methodology.
What Spain Actually Achieved — and Why Canada Is Different
Madrid–Barcelona is the international benchmark most often cited by Canadian HSR advocates. Its success is real: when the line opened in 2008, air passenger numbers on the route fell 40% almost immediately, and by 2024 approximately 75% of travellers between the two cities chose train over plane. But understanding why it succeeded is essential before applying it to Canada.
Why Madrid–Barcelona worked
The AVE offered a 2h30m city-centre-to-city-centre journey, versus roughly 3.5 hours total for air once you add airport transfers. Madrid and Barcelona are Spain’s two dominant economic cities — the business travel base between them is structurally thick, recurring, and time-sensitive. And from 2021, open-access competition from Ouigo, AVLO, and Iryo drove average fares down from €80–100 to €40–72, opening the route to price-sensitive travellers who would otherwise have driven.
An important nuance Spain’s own data reveals
Even with all these structural advantages, the private car was not displaced for domestic leisure tourism. Research on the Spanish HSR network found that the private car represented over 84% of the modal split in domestic tourist trips even after decades of HSR. This finding directly applies to the Canadian corridor, where cottage, national park, and rural heritage travel is a significant share of potential demand.
Side-by-side: structural factors that drove Spanish ridership vs. Canadian equivalent
| Demand factor | Madrid–Barcelona | Toronto–Montréal ALTO corridor |
|---|---|---|
| Current ridership | 14.6 million/yr (2024) | 3.1 million — all modes, full corridor (2024) |
| Rail culture | AVE since 1992; 30+ years of travel behaviour change | VIA Rail chronically underfunded; no HSR precedent in Canada |
| Urban transit at destination | Excellent — Madrid Metro 300+ km; Barcelona Metro integrated | Moderate in core only; poor beyond downtown in both cities |
| Employment geography | Dense city centres, high transit-accessible job density | 81% of Toronto jobs outside downtown; suburban job sprawl |
| Leisure tourism profile | International tourists; city-to-city; low car dependency | Dispersed; cottage and rural destinations; 84%+ car modal split even in Spain post-HSR |
| Operator competition | 3 operators post-2021; fares fell 25–50% | Single operator (Cadence consortium); no open-access framework proposed |
| Winter on-time performance | >95% punctuality; thermally mild corridor | 17% OTP Feb 2025; fleet availability below 50% winter 2026 |
Canada’s Car Culture: The Structural Problem HSR Must Overcome
ALTO’s demand model requires millions of Canadians to change how they travel. The evidence suggests this will be far harder than European comparators imply — because the population along the corridor has organised its spatial existence around the car in ways that Madrid and Barcelona have not.
Who lives along the corridor
Research using 2016 Census data found that 67% of Canadians in major metropolitan areas live in automobile suburbs, with a further 8% in even more car-dependent exurbs. In the Toronto and Montréal metro areas, the suburban share exceeds 80%. This population is growing five times faster than inner-city transit-served neighbourhoods.
The Highway 401 reality
Highway 401 is the corridor’s cultural and economic spine. An average of 442,900 vehicles pass through one Toronto stretch per day — the busiest freeway in the world. Statistics Canada data shows suburban residents spend an average of 1 hour 23 minutes per day in their car, and 81% make at least one car trip daily.
The last-mile problem
ALTO’s modal-shift case requires passengers to complete their journey without a car at the destination city. In Canada, this assumption is structurally difficult. A Toronto resident can reach 4.5 times as many jobs by car as by public transit in 30 minutes. Only 19% of employment is located in downtown Toronto — the 81% majority is scattered across suburban zones that are car-accessible but transit-inaccessible.
The Competition That Built Spain’s Numbers Won’t Exist in Canada
One of the most under-examined aspects of the Madrid–Barcelona success story is that a large part of the post-pandemic ridership surge was driven by three operators competing aggressively on price. ALTO will have none of that. The Cadence consortium will operate under an integrated monopoly concession with no structural provision for open-access competition.
“Prior to liberalisation, Madrid–Barcelona fares ranged €80–100. After three operators competed, average economy fares fell to €40–72 — and ridership surged 33% in a single quarter.”
When Ouigo entered the Spanish market in 2021, followed by Iryo in 2022, fares fell 25–50%. On the Madrid–Valencia corridor, where all three operators competed from December 2022, average fares fell to approximately €22. In the third quarter of 2023, ridership on competitively operated Spanish routes increased 33% to over 8.4 million in a single quarter.
VIA Rail’s Reliability Crisis: A Warning for ALTO
European HSR demand models are built on an assumption of operational reliability that Canadian rail has never achieved and has recently moved further from.
On-time performance 2023
VIA Rail trains reaching their destination on time in the 2023 fiscal year. Worse than Air Canada’s 63%. Industry standard for rail is 90%+.
On-time performance Feb 2025
VIA Rail trains on time on the Montréal–Toronto run in February 2025 — down from 72% the previous February. On the Ottawa–Québec City segment, fewer than 6% of trains arrived on time.
Fleet availability winter 2026
Availability for VIA Rail’s brand-new Siemens Venture trainsets during winter 2026 — well below the 90% industry standard, triggering at least seven consecutive days of cancellations.
New trains, same Canadian winter: the Siemens Venture failure
This is not a story about ageing infrastructure. The Siemens Venture trainsets are modern equipment delivered from 2022 onwards. They failed because snow was entering equipment bays and causing the trains to shut down — a cold-weather failure on brand-new rolling stock. In December 2025, more than 100 passengers spent approximately 10 hours stranded overnight on a disabled train near Brockville, Eastern Ontario.
What this means for ALTO
The Siemens Venture trains operate at conventional speeds on shared track. ALTO would run at 300 km/h on dedicated open-country infrastructure through Eastern Ontario’s freeze-thaw cycle — a qualitatively more demanding environment. At that speed, the consequences of snow, ice, and catenary icing are substantially more severe.
VIA Rail’s own internal documents confirm that unreliability caused passengers to switch away from rail to other modes on the existing corridor. A business traveller who cannot rely on punctuality stays on the plane, or drives. Demand projections calibrated against Europe’s 95%+ reliability must account for a Canadian baseline where the newest equipment has demonstrated sub-50% winter availability.
The Forecast Gap: What Independent Analysis Actually Projects
ALTO’s demand figures do not exist in an analytical vacuum. There is independent academic modelling for this specific corridor, and a substantial international literature on how reliable megaproject ridership forecasts have historically been. Both point in the same direction.
Independent modelling: Munk School GEPL
The Global Economic Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School projected 9.44 million passengers by year 20 and 10.45 million by year 30 on the Toronto–Montréal segment alone — using a disclosed methodology incorporating induced and dynamic demand effects. This is less than 40% of ALTO’s 24 million target.
Flyvbjerg megaproject reference class
The most widely replicated finding in transport planning research: projected ridership on passenger rail projects averages 65% above actual patronage. Applying this adjustment to ALTO’s 24 million 2055 projection yields an adjusted central estimate of approximately 8.4 million — broadly consistent with the GEPL figure.
Why do forecasters consistently overestimate?
Research identifies two reinforcing mechanisms. The first is optimism bias — the tendency of project planners to make systematically over-positive assumptions about population growth, modal shift, and induced demand. The second is strategic misrepresentation — the deliberate inflation of projections by project promoters with a vested interest in securing political approval and public funding.
Five structural conditions ALTO’s projections assume but haven’t established
1. Full corridor on schedule. The 24 million figure implicitly requires the entire Toronto–Québec City corridor to open well before 2055. Any construction delay compresses the ramp-up window.
2. Urban transit connectivity. Poorly sited suburban HSR stations without robust onward transit generate significantly lower ridership than city-centre stations.
3. Competitive pricing. No mechanism exists under the Cadence monopoly concession for the demand-inducing price reductions that drove Spain’s post-2020 surge.
4. Reliable winter operations. Sub-50% fleet availability with modern equipment in winter undermines the business traveller modal shift that European HSR revenue depends upon.
5. Pre-2020 travel baselines. If ridership modelling uses pre-pandemic business travel patterns, it overstates the market that will actually exist when ALTO opens in 2040 at the earliest.
ALTO’s Ridership Projections Are Not Independently Supported
The public consultation closes April 24, 2026. Questions about ridership methodology, demand modelling assumptions, and the revenue case for ALTO are all within scope.
References cited in this analysis
Research by the ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative. Independent estimates derived from international precedent. March 2026.