Tag: High Performance Rail

Where you put a railway

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

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 · 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 at 200 km/h 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 counts	Brownfield (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 Mt	none
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 the ridership its reference class suggests, 39 years at a more central figure, and at low 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 cost of waiting until the corridor fills in at around $20 billion, which would roughly halve the route’s benefit-cost ratio and erase the advantage that is the reason to prefer it.

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.

2C.D. Howe Institute, All Aboard: The Benefits of Faster, More Frequent Passenger Trains between Ontario and Québec (D. Jones and T. Fariha), February 2025 — 3.5 per cent social discount rate over a 60-year appraisal, and the only published benefit analysis of this corridor.

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.

Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · beyondalto.ca · citizenresearch.ca · The HPR Research Report · Chapter 5 Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. This page is a plain-language summary of Chapter 5; 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.

September 5, 2026

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.

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Chapter 4: Route Alignment and Capital Cost (PDF)

The full chapter, with the cost model, maps and sourcing

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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.

Figure	What 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 ran about 25% over budget and carried a multi-year frost-heave speed restriction. 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 HPR 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.

Railway	Cost per kilometre
TGV Paris–Lyon	~$26M — flat, low-friction early French high-speed line
Tokaido Shinkansen	~$35M — dense, high-utilisation Japanese line
HPR 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.

Service	Toronto–Montréal journey time
VIA Rail today	~5h00 — scheduled service on shared freight track
VIA HFR base case, 177 km/h	3h59–4h19 — the only journey time ever actually simulated for this corridor
HPR express, Kingston stop	~3h32 — estimated from segment speeds and corridor geometry
ALTO, 300 km/h	3h07 — 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 is in 2125

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.

September 2, 2026

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

Two incompatible traffic types share one corridor

Why North America’s freight railways work the opposite way from Europe’s—and what that means for the passenger problem.

Chapter 3 · The HPR Research Report

The Toronto–Montréal corridor’s passenger problem has a single physical cause: intercity passenger trains and heavy freight trains are competing for the same tracks. This chapter explains why that conflict is the real problem—and why the solution isn’t to build a new line somewhere else, but to separate the traffic on the corridor that already exists.

3.1 · The Opposing Models

North America and Europe run railways in opposite ways

Europe’s model: Railways are run by the state or with heavy state support. The network is built around passenger service first—high-speed trains get priority over freight. Freight competes for capacity on a passenger-focused network and often loses money or relies on subsidies.

North America’s model: Railways are private companies that own their own tracks. Freight is the core business, and it comes first. Intercity passenger trains are tenants that run in between freight movements. The freight railways have spent 30 years optimizing for moving more tonnage at lower cost.

What the freight model bought. The clearest physical expression of the North American model is the size of the trains it runs. Because crew and locomotive costs are largely fixed per departure, length is leverage. North American freight trains routinely run beyond three kilometres and the longest exceed four, against a European standard of roughly 740 metres. The second and larger efficiency is double-stack, introduced in North America in 1984 and now carrying the majority of US intermodal traffic: two containers stacked vertically in a single well car, roughly doubling the container payload of a train of a given length. Europe cannot do either, because siding lengths, signalling design and overhead electrification on a passenger-first network cap both train length and loading gauge.

The numbers tell the story. In the United States, freight carries roughly 40 percent of long-distance goods movement by weight—among the world’s highest. In Europe, it’s fallen to about 17 percent and still dropping. Why? Because Europe invested in passenger railways, and freight became the secondary user. North America invested in freight railways, and passenger service became secondary.

This matters because

Canada’s proposed Toronto–Montréal corridor would run on North American freight railway tracks owned by Canadian National Railway. That means it’s joining a corridor governed by North American logic: the freight railway owns the track, and its tonnage comes first. A passenger plan modelled on Europe won’t work here.

3.2 · The Incumbent Railway

CN is constrained, and its problem is capacity—not speed

Canadian National Railway (CN) owns and operates the Kingston Subdivision, the main freight line through the Toronto–Montréal corridor. CN’s story over the past three decades is a master class in what makes private railways valuable: squeezing more output from existing track without building new infrastructure.

When CN was privatized in 1995, it was a struggling Crown corporation. By the 2000s, under new leadership, CN adopted “Precision Scheduled Railroading”—moving individual cars on fixed schedules, cutting dwell time in rail yards, and lengthening trains. The operating ratio—the industry’s efficiency measure, where lower is better—fell from 76 percent to 56 percent. CN’s share price went up roughly 60 times.

Figure 3.1. CN market capitalisation versus operating ratio since privatisation, 1995–2025. Market capitalisation in CAD billions; operating ratio expressed ×100. The inverse relationship is this chapter’s central premise: as the operating ratio fell, market capitalisation compounded — value created by operating discipline on existing track, not by network construction. Sources: CN annual reports; Bloomberg; Railway Age.

The lesson: The market rewarded CN not for building new railways but for extracting more value from the railway it already owned. This is the capital-light path to rail value: efficiency on assets in the ground, not greenfield construction.

Why this matters to the corridor

CN’s problem today is not speed—it’s capacity. Its three main intermodal terminals in the Greater Toronto Area are running at full capacity. It proposed a new terminal at Milton in 2015 and met a decade of local opposition, environmental assessment and litigation before construction could start; the approval was ultimately upheld on appeal and the terminal is now being built. This tells us something crucial: the cost of building new capacity in a populated landscape is measured in years, not just dollars — Milton took roughly a decade from proposal to construction on a facility of about $250 million — and community resistance is as big a factor as engineering difficulty.

3.3 · The Other Railway

What about CP? It runs on its own track

CN isn’t the only major freight railway on the Toronto–Montréal axis. Canadian Pacific—since its 2023 merger with Kansas City Southern, now Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC)—also runs a line through the corridor. It’s reasonable to ask whether CPKC changes the picture. It doesn’t, and the reason is geographic.

CPKC runs west out of Toronto on its Galt Subdivision. Its main Toronto–Montréal line is the Belleville Subdivision, which runs roughly parallel to CN’s Kingston Subdivision through the central part of the corridor, then turns north toward Smiths Falls and continues to Montréal on CPKC’s own tracks. CPKC’s eastern freight travels on its own metals, not on CN’s. Since the KCS merger, CPKC’s strategic focus has shifted decisively north–south—to the continental Canada–US–Mexico network that is now its primary growth story.

Why this matters

The passenger–freight conflict is specific to CN’s Kingston Subdivision, where VIA’s trains share track with CN’s freight. CPKC, on its separate Belleville Subdivision, is not a party to it—so the freight capacity that separation liberates accrues to CN, the line’s owner. The Belleville Subdivision matters in one further respect: it’s a second existing rail right-of-way running parallel to the CN line and Highway 401 through the corridor’s central section—further evidence that the ground HPR would follow is already a multi-track transport spine rather than open country.

3.4 · The Root Problem

Entanglement: two traffic types, one track

VIA’s intercity passenger trains and CN’s freight trains share the Kingston Subdivision. They have opposite operating needs.

Freight trains

Long, heavy, slow to accelerate. Can tolerate delays. Run to commercial schedules. Need to be as long as possible to spread fixed locomotive costs across more cargo.

Passenger trains

Short, light, quick to accelerate. Cannot tolerate delays. Need frequent, reliable service. Need short platforms and quick turnarounds.

Under the “host railway priority” rules that govern shared track across North America, when a freight train and a passenger train want the same track at the same time, the freight train proceeds and the passenger train waits in a siding. VIA cannot unilaterally add frequency because every additional passenger train needs to be negotiated around CN’s freight schedule. CN controls the dispatcher, and under this ownership structure nothing requires the track owner to give up freight capacity to improve passenger reliability.

This creates a two-sided failure: every passenger path is capacity CN cannot use for freight; every siding meet is friction on a network built and operated to move tonnage without interruption. They are entangled—neither can be optimized without degrading the other. And the owner of the track whose traffic comes first has no incentive to give ground.

The corridor’s real problem

It’s not a shortage of speed. It’s not an engineering problem. It’s a structural conflict over who owns the capacity and whose traffic comes first. No schedule adjustment solves this while the two traffic types remain on one set of rails.

3.5 · The Solution

Separation: give each traffic type its own path

If entanglement is the disease, separation is the cure—and it’s the single design principle behind HPR.

The idea is simple: build a dedicated passenger path engineered for passenger requirements, and hand the shared corridor back to freight. Each traffic type then runs on infrastructure suited to it. The capacity conflict that produces the corridor’s present failure simply ceases to exist. This doesn’t ask a private freight railway to subordinate its tonnage to passenger priority—it removes the passenger trains from the freight railway’s tracks altogether.

Separation can be achieved cheaply or expensively. The difference between the two approaches is the difference between HPR and ALTO.

HPR pursues separation through a brownfield-led philosophy: Build the dedicated passenger path along the geometry of corridors that are already disturbed—Highway 401 and the existing rail right-of-way. Upgrade and reuse infrastructure wherever engineering permits; build new only where geometry or capacity genuinely demands it. This keeps the new passenger alignment adjacent to the freight corridor it is relieving.

What that means in practice: a roughly 479 km new-build passenger spine from Pickering Junction to Dorval, plus about 200 km of upgrade on the VIA-owned Smiths Falls and Alexandria Subdivisions. The spine is the capital project; the upgrades extend it using track already in public hands.

ALTO pursues separation through greenfield construction: Build a new high-speed line through Eastern Ontario, engineered for 300 km/h, away from the existing freight corridor. This imports the European passenger-first model—a dedicated high-speed line as an end in itself—into a North American freight corridor whose economics it doesn’t engage.
3.6 · The Insight

Build one, make one free: the dual-asset structure

This is where HPR differs fundamentally from ALTO, and where the economics become positive-sum rather than single-purpose.

When HPR moves passenger trains onto their own dedicated path, they vacate the Kingston Subdivision. The capacity they were consuming—the paths, the priority negotiations, the siding meets—reverts to CN as liberated freight capacity on the line it owns. That capacity bears on the operating ratio and the terminal congestion CN’s own public reporting identifies as central. CN has taken no public position on HPR, and none should be inferred here — the point is that the incentives run in the same direction.

Think of it this way:

“Build one” is High Performance Passenger Rail (HPPR)—the dedicated passenger path. That’s the capital project.

“Make one free” is High Performance Freight Rail (HPFR)—the freight capacity liberated on the shared corridor the moment passenger trains vacate it. No additional construction required to create it. It falls out of the geometry of the build.

One capital project produces two separable outputs. The passenger business case needs only to justify itself on passenger benefits. The freight-capacity dividend is surplus—untouched by any reference-class reduction of passenger ridership forecasts. This is a deliberate bias countermeasure against the benefit-shortfall failure mode that sinks megaprojects.

Why this structure matters

On the reference-class basis used throughout this report, ALTO builds one thing — a passenger-only line — at the corridor’s maximum per-kilometre cost of about $142M/km, and captures one benefit stream. HPR builds one thing at about $54M/km de-biased and captures two. The difference isn’t in execution quality; it’s in whether the design is aligned with the corridor’s actual economics and incentives.
3.7 · Who Gains

The freight dividend: how the freed capacity translates to real benefits

The liberated freight capacity is not abstract. It lands on named, motivated beneficiaries:

The host railway (CN)

Recovers paths previously consumed by passenger service. Uncongested freight paths translate to higher network fluidity, more predictable transit times, and the ability to grow tonnage without hitting a capacity ceiling. Where clearance is addressed, it enables double-stack container operation—which roughly halves the per-container cost of moving goods by rail. A freight railway that no longer dispatches around passenger priority is materially more valuable on the same physical asset.

Shippers and supply chain

Reliable, uncongested rail capacity on the busiest goods corridor in the country is a resilience asset. It raises the ceiling on how much freight moves by rail and reduces variability that pushes shippers toward more expensive or higher-emission alternatives. Combined with on-dock terminal design of the kind the Montréal Port Authority is building at Contrecœur, it extends competitive intermodal service to a larger share of corridor flows.

The public

Freight capacity that would otherwise be unavailable on rail is capacity that can absorb goods movement currently carried by road. Each tonne shifted from truck to rail reduces highway congestion, road wear, and—most consequentially—carbon emissions, given the substantial per-tonne-kilometre advantage of rail over road haulage.

3.8 · The Contrast

Why ALTO cannot capture the freight dividend

ALTO is also a separation scheme—it too gives passenger trains a dedicated line. But the freight dividend is not equally available to it, and the reasons are fundamental.

First, routing: ALTO’s dedicated line runs away from the existing freight corridor, through new terrain in Eastern Ontario. It doesn’t reorganize the freight corridor; it builds a parallel facility through different ground and leaves the freight network’s configuration, congestion, and clearance constraints essentially as it found them.

Second, design: ALTO is a single-purpose asset—a passenger-only line engineered for 300 km/h. It cannot carry freight and is not designed to. The only benefit it can capture is the passenger benefit.

Third, accounting: ALTO’s own business case books no freight benefit at all. The freight dividend does not appear in ALTO’s appraisal because ALTO’s design does not produce it.

Fourth, cost: ALTO solves the single problem it addresses — passenger throughput — at the maximum per-kilometre cost the corridor admits: a new greenfield high-speed alignment through sensitive terrain. The capital cost analysis in Chapter 4 places HPPR at roughly $39 million per kilometre as specified and about $54 million per kilometre on the de-biased central estimate, some $18.6B to $26.1B for the 479 km spine, against ALTO at approximately $142 million per kilometre on the same reference-class basis.

On a like-for-like de-biased comparison, ALTO therefore costs roughly two and a half times as much per kilometre to produce one benefit stream — and considerably more in total, once its far longer corridor is counted. HPR’s lower-cost, corridor-aligned build produces two benefits, and leaves CN’s capacity and clearance problems measurably better than it found them.

The core difference

ALTO builds one and makes nothing free. HPR builds one and makes one free, at roughly two-fifths of the per-kilometre cost. The difference is not in how well each is executed; it is in whether the concept is aligned with the corridor’s actual economics and the incentives of the parties who own and operate it.

Key Findings · Chapter 3

The concept in eight parts

3.1 — North America runs the opposite railway

North American freight railways are private, profitable, vertically integrated, and freight-priority. Rail’s freight share is far higher in North America (~40% of US long-distance ton-miles vs ~17% of EU inland tonne-km). A passenger plan modelled on Europe imports passenger-first assumptions into a freight-first corridor.

3.2 — CN is the incumbent, and it is constrained

CN’s extraordinary returns came from efficiency on existing track, not construction. Its valuation has stalled; it struggles to add capacity (Milton took a decade from proposal to construction); and its corridor economics improve on uncongested paths and double-stack clearance.

3.3 — CP is not a party to the conflict

CPKC runs its own Belleville Subdivision on the Toronto–Montréal axis, parallel to the CN Kingston Sub, and shares no track with VIA. The entanglement, and the freight dividend, are CN’s. CPKC’s parallel line is also a second disturbed right-of-way in the corridor.

3.4 — Entanglement is the root cause

Passenger and freight share the Kingston Subdivision with opposite operating characteristics. The corridor’s failure—sub-64% on-time performance, four-hour schedules, low frequency—is one capacity conflict seen from two sides, on track owned by the party whose tonnage comes first.

3.5 — Separation is the design principle

Give passenger service its own dedicated path and hand the shared corridor back to freight—resolving the conflict with the North American model, not against it. HPR does this brownfield-led, along Highway 401 and existing rail geometry: a ~479 km Pickering Junction–Dorval spine plus ~200 km of upgrade on the VIA-owned Smiths Falls and Alexandria Subdivisions.

3.6 — Build one, make one free

One capital project—HPR—produces two separable assets: HPPR (the dedicated passenger path) and HPFR (the freight capacity liberated on the shared corridor), created at no incremental cost by the geometry of the build.

3.7 — HPFR lands on a motivated beneficiary

The liberated freight corridor benefits the host railway (fluidity, operating-ratio gains, double-stack where cleared), shippers (resilience, Contrecœur-style reach), and the public (road freight diverted to rail, with emissions and safety gains). It is carried as a measured quantity: a Chapter 8 benefit-cost stream and Chapter 5 emissions.

3.8 — ALTO cannot capture it

ALTO builds a greenfield passenger-only line at ~$142M/km against HPPR’s ~$54M/km de-biased (~$39M/km as specified) — roughly two and a half times the unit cost — and captures one benefit. HPR captures two. ALTO builds one at maximum cost and makes nothing free.

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The HPR Concept: Untangling the Corridor

PDF · 3.2 MB · Full technical chapter with figures and tables

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Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · beyondalto.ca · citizenresearch.ca · The HPR Research Report · Chapter 3
Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. This chapter explains why North America’s freight-first railway model makes the entanglement between passenger and freight the corridor’s defining constraint, and why HPR’s separation principle—rather than ALTO’s European-modelled greenfield approach—aligns with the continent’s actual economics.
August 12, 2026
Deconstructing the Megaproject Playbook

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

Deconstructing the Megaproject Playbook

Why big rail projects almost always cost more and carry fewer riders than promised — and how to check a project’s numbers against the real-world record, not just its own promises.

Chapter 1 · The HPR Research Report

This chapter explains the method behind every number in this report. It’s based on the work of Bent Flyvbjerg, an Oxford researcher who has spent decades studying how big infrastructure projects around the world actually turn out, compared to what they promised. His findings have been confirmed again and again, across many countries and many kinds of projects. We use his method for every forecast in this report — and we’re explaining it here first, before any of our own results, so you can see the rules before you see the numbers.

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Chapter 1: Deconstructing the Megaproject Playbook (PDF)

The full chapter, with footnotes and sourcing

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1.1 · The Track Record

The iron law of megaprojects

Here’s an uncomfortable fact: big public infrastructure projects almost always cost more, take longer, and carry fewer passengers than promised. This isn’t bad luck on any one project — it’s been true again and again, everywhere records have been kept, for decades. Researcher Bent Flyvbjerg calls this the iron law of megaprojects: over budget, over time, under benefits — over and over again, regardless of country, project type, or how sophisticated the planning was.

1.40×
What rail projects actually cost, on average, vs. what was first promised

0.66×
The benefits rail projects actually deliver, on average, vs. what was promised

52%
Average budget overrun for high-speed rail specifically

106%
How much rail projects overestimate rider numbers, on average

9/10
Rail projects that predicted more riders than they actually got

+45%
How much longer construction takes than planned, on average

Our own analysis of ALTO finds the same pattern. The published benefit-cost ratio — a standard measure of whether a project’s benefits are worth its costs — is already far short of break-even. The December 2021 business case for the predecessor project put it at about 0.13 over 30 years, or about 0.4 once some newer and less established benefit categories are counted. A ratio of 1.0 is the point where benefits merely equal costs. Correct the cost and ridership numbers using the real-world track record, and that ratio falls further still. This doesn’t mean going over budget is inevitable. It means any assessment that ignores this well-documented pattern is starting from an unrealistic place — not by accident, but by leaving out the most relevant evidence available. ALTO’s risk profile isn’t an unlucky exception. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a project of this size, this type, and this level of political backing.

1.2 · Two Reasons Forecasts Go Wrong

Honest mistakes and strategic misrepresentation

There are two different reasons a project forecast can turn out to be wrong — and it matters which one is at play, because they call for very different fixes.

Optimism bias — the honest mistake

Planners genuinely believe their numbers. They aren’t lying — they’re not even aware they’re being too optimistic. This is a well-documented pattern in psychology: people naturally focus on the details of their own project and forget to check how similar projects have actually gone in the past. It’s a fixable process problem — the fix is forcing real-world comparisons into every estimate.

Strategic misrepresentation — telling people what they want to hear

Costs get underestimated and benefits get overestimated on purpose, to get a project approved and funded. Writing about the research record as a whole, Flyvbjerg borrows a word from ethics and calls this what it is: lying. It’s an incentive problem — and it’s only fixed by changing what forecasters are rewarded and held accountable for.

In real projects, both are usually present together, and the mix shifts with the stakes. For small, low-attention projects, honest mistakes tend to be the bigger factor. For large projects with strong political backing — the kind a minister or a Crown corporation needs approved — strategic misrepresentation tends to dominate, with honest optimism layered on top rather than absent.

The pattern, stated plainly

Underestimate the cost, overestimate the benefit, and you get funded. This isn’t random. It points in exactly the direction that wins the competition for a limited pool of money.

1.3 · Structural Profile

Where ALTO sits on the scale

Flyvbjerg’s research lets us predict, in general terms, which kind of error is more likely for a given project — without needing to know what’s in anyone’s head. For small projects that don’t attract much political attention, honest mistakes are usually the bigger factor. For large projects with major political weight behind them, strategic misrepresentation usually is — with honest mistakes still layered on top.

Figure 1.1. How the mix of honest mistakes and strategic misrepresentation changes as a project gets bigger and more politically important. Honest mistakes (dashed line) matter more for small, low-pressure projects and fade — but never fully disappear — as projects grow. Strategic misrepresentation (solid line) is close to zero for small projects but rises sharply and takes over for large, high-pressure ones. Large, politically backed projects competing for scarce funding sit at the right-hand end of this scale.

ALTO checks every box that predicts heavy political pressure. It’s run by a federal Crown corporation with a multi-billion-dollar budget. It has had public backing from successive governments. And it’s competing against every other federal priority for a limited pot of money. By this framework’s own logic, projects in that position sit at the end of the scale where the research expects political pressure, rather than honest error, to account for most of the pattern across the class. The pressure to look good is strongest exactly where the numbers matter most for getting funded.

Flyvbjerg calls this the survival of the unfittest: it isn’t necessarily the best projects that get built — it’s the ones that look best on paper. The approval process quietly rewards optimistic numbers over honest ones: a proposal with realistic costs and realistic ridership loses the funding contest to one that doesn’t. Seen this way, the fact that ALTO has survived several rounds of budget approval isn’t proof its numbers are wrong — but it is a reason to look at them carefully rather than take them at face value.

To be clear

None of this requires anyone at ALTO to be lying. An honest mistake would produce errors that go in both directions about equally — some projects under budget, some over. What actually happens, again and again, is that the errors all point the same way: costs come in higher, benefits come in lower. That one-directional pattern is the tell. It is why this report checks ALTO’s published figures against the real-world record instead of accepting them on their own terms. Nothing here identifies the cause of any particular number, and this report makes no claim about the honesty of any person or organisation.

1.4 · The Uniqueness Trap

Why “it’s different this time” doesn’t hold up

One of the most common — and most costly — mistakes in big project planning is treating a project as one-of-a-kind, and therefore exempt from comparison with anything else. ALTO has been promoted as Canada’s first true high-speed railway, on uniquely Canadian geology, on an unprecedented corridor. That’s exactly the kind of claim researchers have found, again and again, opens the door to over-optimistic forecasting.

Figure 1.2. The uniqueness trap. Claiming a project is unique (left) leaves nothing to compare it to, so all you can do is trust the project’s own estimate. Looking at similar projects elsewhere (right) means checking that estimate against real-world evidence instead. This report takes the second approach throughout.

Here’s why the “unique” claim matters so much. If a project is truly one of a kind, there’s nothing to compare it to — which means the only evidence left is the very estimate you’re trying to check. Every comparable project, every real-world outcome from similar lines, gets waved away as not relevant. This report takes the opposite view: ALTO is one example of a well-studied category — high-speed and intercity rail megaprojects — and there’s plenty of real-world data on how that category actually performs. That data is the most relevant evidence available.

What the disagreement is really about

The disagreement between this report and ALTO’s own numbers isn’t really about any single figure. It’s about whether ALTO should be judged purely on its own terms, as a one-off case — or against how similar projects have actually turned out.

1.5 · Risk of Bad Surprises

Why standard contingency budgets fall short

Standard project planning assumes cost risk is spread fairly evenly around a central estimate — like a bell curve — so a reasonable contingency budget can be calculated with simple statistics. The real-world data don’t support that assumption. Big infrastructure projects almost never come in significantly under budget, but they regularly come in massively over — by two or three times the original estimate in the worst cases. Statisticians call this a fat-tailed distribution: the chance of a very bad outcome is much higher than a normal bell curve would suggest.

Figure 1.3. The real pattern of cost overruns on rail megaprojects (solid line) has a much bigger chance of large overruns than a normal bell curve (dashed line) would predict. A typical 10–15% contingency budget looks safe against a bell curve — but against the real-world pattern, it may only cover half of projects, or fewer. The shaded area shows the range of bad outcomes a standard contingency budget doesn’t account for.

This matters directly for how much money a project should set aside for the unexpected. A standard 10–15% buffer looks adequate if you assume a bell curve — but against the real-world pattern, it may only protect against half of possible outcomes, or fewer. That’s why this report carries three cost figures all the way through its financial model — the number as originally specified, a corrected central estimate based on similar projects, and a worst-case scenario — instead of relying on one confident number that history suggests is likely to be wrong.

1.6 · The Fix

Checking the numbers against the real-world record

The standard fix for both problems above is simple in principle: find a group of similar past projects; look at how their costs, benefits, and ridership actually turned out compared to what was promised; then use that real-world pattern to sanity-check the new project’s own estimate, rather than taking that estimate at face value. This flips the usual burden of proof — the real-world pattern becomes the starting assumption, and anyone predicting something better has to explain why.

Figure 1.4. Where the comparison projects are. They span Europe, East Asia, North Africa, and North America — different countries, different governments, different planning systems. That range matters: it shows the patterns we rely on aren’t specific to any one country’s way of doing things. ALTO’s corridor is shown for reference.

What it costs

We compared 16 real high-speed rail projects worldwideWe looked at what actually drove the final cost per kilometre on 16 comparable projects, and found two things matter most: how difficult the engineering is, and how much local resistance and land-use friction a project runs into.

Local resistance is the stronger driver in our modelOf the two, local and political resistance is the stronger predictor of final cost per kilometre — carrying roughly twice the weight of engineering difficulty in the fitted model.

What this means for ALTOBased on ALTO’s engineering difficulty and level of local resistance, this points to a realistic cost of around $142 million per kilometre, with a likely range of $76–264 million per kilometre.

How many people would ride it

We compared 12 real high-speed rail systems worldwideWe looked at how car-dependent a region is against how many people actually use rail there.

No car-dependent region has high ridershipNot one of the 12 systems combines heavy car dependence with high rail ridership. ALTO’s corridor scores as heavily car-dependent.

ALTO’s target vs. the realistic estimateALTO’s own target of 24 million riders a year by 2055 is far above what any comparable region has achieved. Three independent forecasts for this corridor instead cluster around 10 million riders a year.

The standard this report holds itself to

A forecast that looks better than the real-world pattern isn’t more accurate — it’s less accurate. This report’s numbers are, on purpose, less flattering than what a typical project pitch would produce for the same corridor. That’s the point: this report is built to hold up under tough scrutiny, which means accepting an honest, sometimes unwelcome, comparison to how these projects actually turn out.

1.7 · Why Now

Canada’s changed circumstances

The case against ALTO isn’t only about method — it’s also about timing. ALTO was approved during a period of relative calm with the US, a stable trade agreement, extra federal money after the pandemic, low interest rates, and confident population-growth predictions that made ambitious ridership numbers easier to defend. Nearly all of those conditions have since changed. Today, Canada faces US tariff pressure, pressure to diversify trade away from the US, a tighter federal budget, and a public more focused on economic resilience than on amenity projects. A passenger project of this scale — on the Initiative’s reference-class estimates, $100–200 billion — has to clear a much higher bar today than it did when it was first approved.

Figure 1.5. Canada’s income per person compared to the US, 2000–2025. Canada came close to matching US income per person during the 2011–2012 resource boom, then fell steadily as oil prices dropped. By 2025, Canada’s income per person is roughly 61% of the US level — a gap of about $35,000. ALTO was approved near the peak of Canada’s post-pandemic economic rebound, in conditions that have since tightened considerably. Sources: World Bank World Development Indicators 2000–2024; IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2025.

The question this raises

ALTO is a project built for good economic times. The question for Canada in 2026 isn’t whether high-speed rail would be nice to have. It’s whether this corridor is worth the cost — and whether this design is the right answer to the problem.

The high-speed rail systems that have actually succeeded — in Japan, France, Spain, Taiwan, South Korea — share things the Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal corridor doesn’t have: low car use, dense cities at both ends, strong local transit, and a rail culture that already existed before high-speed rail arrived. What’s left, globally, are second-tier projects on car-dependent corridors where the ridership case relies on optimistic in-house projections rather than real-world evidence. California’s high-speed rail project is the best-known example: years behind schedule, billions over budget, and in political trouble, for exactly these reasons. On the real-world evidence, the Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal corridor shares that second-tier profile.

What’s Next

What’s in the rest of this report

This chapter sets out the method. The chapters that follow apply it — to ALTO, and to the alternative this report proposes, HPR (High-Performance Rail).

Ch. 2
Why the current plan doesn’t add up. Checks the case for doing something about intercity travel on this corridor — which we don’t dispute — against whether ALTO’s specific design actually makes financial sense.

Ch. 3
The HPR alternative. How a passenger line built along the existing Highway 401 and rail corridor can free up freight capacity at the same time, instead of building an entirely new line elsewhere and leaving the freight problem untouched.

Ch. 4
Route and cost. Where the line would go and what it would cost, using the same cost model applied consistently to both ALTO and HPR.

Ch. 5
Environment and communities. How the two options compare on carbon emissions and disruption to the communities along the route.

Ch. 6
How many people would ride it. Ridership estimates built on the real-world pattern from this chapter, checked four different ways.

Ch. 7
Running costs. The ongoing yearly balance between what it costs to operate and maintain the railway, and what fares plus any subsidy bring in.

Ch. 8
Is it worth it. A full cost-benefit and financial analysis across a range of scenarios, including the value of the freed-up freight capacity.

Ch. 9
Getting it built. How to phase construction, manage the risk of cost overruns, and keep the project accountable to the numbers in this report.

Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · beyondalto.ca · citizenresearch.ca · The HPR Research Report · Chapter 1
Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. This chapter explains the method used throughout the HPR Research Report.

August 4, 2026

Would an Alto stop help kingston

Would an ALTO Stop Help Kingston?

Kingston has one of the busiest stations on the network. The question that matters is not whether it gets a stop, but whether a stop would leave more people riding the train, or fewer.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Policy Brief · July 2026

⚠ What has been said, and what has not been published

On 22 July 2026 ALTO’s chief executive, Martin Imbleau, told CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning that Kingston will probably get a station, and that most ALTO trains would pass through without stopping.1 Neither the timetable nor the location of the station has been published.

Those two missing facts are exactly the ones that decide the outcome. This brief therefore tests the range: today’s railway, a faster conventional railway using the existing station, and ALTO with a station either inside the city or a twenty‑seven‑minute drive north of it, at normal fares and at fares 25 per cent higher. Every number that goes into the model is listed, so any of them can be argued with.

The short answer

Of the options tested, only one leaves Kingston with more rail trips than it has today: a faster conventional railway serving the existing station, at about 12 per cent more. The best ALTO case — a station inside the city, at normal fares — roughly matches today. Every other ALTO case comes out below today’s service, by 8 to 17 per cent.

The reason is simple. Speed is only one part of what makes a train trip worth taking. ALTO’s faster run to Toronto is worth about 10 per cent more trips on its own. But cutting the number of daily stops from eighteen to eight gives that back. Charging 25 per cent more gives it back again. Moving the station twenty‑seven minutes north of the city costs another 6 to 8 points on top.

Running more trains cannot rescue it by itself. Even at eighteen stops a day, matching what Kingston has now, an out‑of‑town station at a premium fare still comes out around 9 per cent below today. And about 8 per cent of Kingston’s trips — Belleville, Brockville, Cobourg, Napanee, Oshawa — have no ALTO equivalent at any frequency, because high‑speed trains do not stop at those places.

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Kingston’s ALTO Ridership Analysis — Full Brief (PDF)

Full method, all parameters, sensitivity ranges and break‑even tables

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The Comparison

Six versions of Kingston’s railway

The table below is the whole brief in one place. The first row is what Kingston has today. The second is a faster conventional railway from the same station. The last four are ALTO, differing only in where the station sits and what the ticket costs.

+12%

faster conventional railway, existing station, same number of trains, normal fares

the only option that grows ridership

best ALTO case: station in town, normal fares, eight stops a day

matches today, does not beat it

−17%

ALTO station 27 minutes north, eight stops a day, fares 25% higher

central case for an out‑of‑town station

Table 1 · Headline comparison

Option	To Toronto	Stops a day	Fare premium	Annual trips	Change
Today’s service	135 min	18	none	450,000	—
Faster conventional railway, existing station	95 min	18	none	502,000	+12%
ALTO, station in town	80 min	8	none	449,000	0%
ALTO, station in town	80 min	8	+25%	403,000	−10%
ALTO, 27 min north	80 min	8	none	416,000	−8%
ALTO, 27 min north	80 min	8	+25%	376,000	−17%

All four ALTO rows assume eight stops a day and that today’s conventional service is withdrawn. They differ only in where the station is and what the ticket costs. No fare structure for intermediate stations has been published, so both possibilities are shown rather than assumed. The faster conventional railway is the 240 km/h new‑build line proposed under the High Performance Rail framework, serving the existing station.

Starting Point

Why Kingston already rides the train

Kingston’s place among the busiest stations on the network gets cited as the reason it should have a high‑speed stop. But what produces that ridership decides whether a different kind of station would reproduce it. Four things do most of the work, and a high‑speed alignment north of the city removes two of them.

It gets two sets of trains, not one

Kingston sits halfway along the Toronto–Montréal mainline, and the Toronto–Ottawa trains use the same track as far as Brockville. So Kingston collects two timetables instead of one, and ends up with a level of service beaten only by the three biggest cities on the corridor. Frequency matters to ridership on its own, quite apart from speed: in intercity rail, a 10 per cent increase in service typically brings 4 to 7 per cent more trips.

The station serves a region, not a city

Napanee, Gananoque, Amherstview and the western Thousand Islands have no intercity rail of their own, so people drive to Kingston to catch the train. Ridership credited to a city of 132,485 is actually generated by an area several times larger; the Kingston census metropolitan area is 172,546.6

The population is unusually inclined to take the train

Some thirty‑nine thousand post‑secondary students study in a city of 132,485: Queen’s enrols 32,585, St. Lawrence College about 4,000 full‑time equivalents at its Kingston campus, and the Royal Military College of Canada 2,418.5 That is about twenty‑nine students for every hundred residents — against roughly twenty‑three in Sherbrooke and twenty‑one in Guelph, the two Canadian cities most often set beside Kingston on this measure.7 Many come from the Toronto and Ottawa regions and travel without a car. Kingston also has a large retired population, for whom avoiding the highway is the point of the trip, and an unusually high share of hospital, university, military and public‑sector jobs where travel is expensed and defaults to rail.

But that ridership is hard to charge a premium for

This travel is not spread evenly. It piles up at term boundaries, Thursday and Sunday afternoons, reading weeks and holidays, and it creates a matching flow of families travelling to Kingston. These are the travellers most sensitive to how often trains run and how far the station is from where they are going, and the least able to just drive instead. They are also the least profitable: peaked, price‑sensitive, and largely outside the weekday business hours a high‑speed operation’s revenue depends on.

Two things worth being clear about

The ridership figure itself is not published. Kingston’s standing as one of the busiest stations rests on statements by the operator and the Minister, not on released station‑level data. That is the first item on the list of things that should be published, at the end of this brief.

Existing demand is not the same as new demand. Busy today proves Kingston already travels by train. It does not prove that a different station would generate additional trips. Only new trips add ridership to the corridor.

There is also no flight from Kingston to Toronto. Elsewhere, high‑speed rail wins its premium passengers off aircraft. In Kingston those passengers are already on the train, so there is nobody to convert. Extra trips can only come out of cars, or be created from nothing.

Both of the things that built Kingston’s ridership — frequent trains, and a station within the city, roughly ten minutes from the core and the university — are the two things a high‑speed alignment north of the city takes away. That is what the model is built to test.

Method

How the numbers were worked out

Every trip is priced in minutes. Add up the time on the train, the time getting to and from the station at each end, the waiting created by having fewer trains, and the fare converted into minutes using what an hour is worth to that kind of traveller. Time spent driving to a station or standing on a platform counts for more than time sitting on a moving train, because people dislike it more. Journeys that involve changing trains carry an allowance for the change. That matters for one market in particular: ALTO reaches Montréal from Kingston by way of Ottawa, so some of those journeys involve a change, where a direct lakeshore railway does not.

That total is the real cost of the trip. If it goes up, fewer people travel. If it goes down, more do. The response used here is roughly one for one: make the total 10 per cent better and you get about 10 per cent more trips.

Travellers are split into four destinations and four types, each divided by whether they have a car available: thirty‑two groups, each worked out separately and then added up. That matters because a student without a car and an expensed public‑sector traveller react to a distant station in completely different ways.

Table 2 · Everything the model assumes

Input	Value used
Trips today	450,000 a year through the station (tested from 400,000 to 550,000)
Where people go	Toronto 58%, Ottawa 22%, Montréal 12%, other corridor stations 8%
Who travels	Students 30%, seniors and leisure 25%, public sector 20%, other 25%
Share without a car	Students 85%, seniors and leisure 50%, public sector 15%, other 20%
Worth of an hour	$14, $20, $48 and $24 respectively, in the same order
Time on the train	Today 135 / 120 / 160 min; ALTO 80 / 45 / 105 min (Toronto / Ottawa / Montréal)
Getting to the station	Existing station 10 min by car, 20 by transit; ALTO 27 by car, 35 by shuttle
How that time is weighted	1.5 times if a car is available, 2.0 times if not
Waiting	Half the gap between trains, weighted at 0.5, across a fifteen‑hour day
ALTO fare premium	25% in the central case; 0% and 40% also tested
Sensitivity of demand	One for one in the central case (tested from 0.8 to 1.2)

Far‑end access time is held identical in every scenario, which is a conservative choice: it gives ALTO the benefit of the doubt at the Toronto and Ottawa ends.

Two possible futures for today’s trains

Every service level is tested twice, because the answer depends less on ALTO than on what happens to the service Kingston already has.

Replacement

ALTO becomes Kingston’s rail service to Toronto, Ottawa and Montréal, and conventional service is withdrawn or cut below a useful level. Trips to Belleville, Brockville, Cobourg, Napanee and Oshawa lose their train altogether.

Both together

Today’s service keeps running at present frequency and ALTO is added on top. Travellers pick whichever is cheaper in total, and only the improvement over the better of the two creates new trips.

What is assumed rather than known

Four inputs are estimates, not published data: the number of trips today, where those trips go, ALTO’s journey times (the alignment for this stretch has not been published), and where the station would be. All four appear on the list at the end of this brief. The model also applies a constant response to a very large change in trip cost, which is at the outer edge of where this method behaves well. The direction of the results is solid. The exact sizes are indicative.

Result One

Where the speed gain goes

Start with today’s service and change one thing at a time. This is the clearest way to see why a faster train can still end up with fewer passengers.

Table 3 · One change at a time

Step	Annual trips	Change	Effect of this step
Today’s service, as it runs	450,000	—	—
Cut the Toronto run to 80 minutes, change nothing else	496,000	+10%	+10 pts
Cut stops from 18 a day to 8	449,000	0%	−10 pts
Add a 25 per cent fare premium	403,000	−10%	−10 pts
Move the station 27 minutes north	376,000	−17%	−6 pts

The second row is the entire value of high‑speed running time at Kingston: about 10 per cent. Each of the three things that come with it takes back as much or more. This calculation already leaves out trips to other corridor stations, which a high‑speed line cannot serve at any frequency.

Result Two

More trains cannot fix it on its own

Suppose the number of stops is the thing that gets negotiated. Hold the station twenty‑seven minutes north and the fare 25 per cent higher, and vary how often ALTO calls.

Table 4 · ALTO at a station 27 minutes north

Stops a day	Annual trips	Change	Range	If today’s trains stay
6	359,000	−20%	−17% to −24%	0%
8	376,000	−17%	−13% to −21%	0%
10	387,000	−14%	−10% to −18%	+0.2%
18	408,000	−9%	−4% to −14%	+1.6%
12 (six each way)	394,000	−12%	−9% to −17%	+0.5%
16 (eight each way)	404,000	−10%	−6% to −15%	+1.3%
20 (ten each way)	411,000	−9%	−3% to −14%	+1.9%

The range covers the whole plausible span of the model’s assumptions, at a 25 per cent fare premium. The bottom three rows read six, eight and ten as stops each way, which is the most generous reading available. It improves the result without changing the sign. The last column is the “both together” case, where today’s service survives: ALTO then adds almost nothing, because travellers only switch when it is genuinely better for them.

The fare premium matters more than the timetable

Table 5 · What moves the answer

Stops a day	Normal fares	Fares +25%	Fares +40%	Station 25 min out	Station 45 min out
6	−12%	−20%	−24%	−17%	−23%
8	−8%	−17%	−21%	−13%	−20%
10	−5%	−14%	−19%	−10%	−17%

The last two columns hold the fare premium at 25 per cent and vary the drive from the station to downtown; the central case is 27 minutes. Notice that going from normal fares to a 25 per cent premium costs more than doubling the distance to the station.

How many trains would it actually take?

The more useful question is what it would take for an out‑of‑town ALTO station to be no worse for Kingston than the service it already has. At normal fares the answer is nine stops a day for everyone. At a 25 per cent premium, the answer falls apart.

Table 6 · Daily stops needed just to match today, Toronto trips

Who is travelling	At normal fares	At a 25% premium
Public sector and institutional (expensed)	9	13
Other business and leisure	9	27
Seniors, leisure, visiting family	9	48
Students and young adults	9	no number works

Forty‑eight stops a day is a train every twenty minutes all day. For students, no frequency at all makes up for a distant station plus a premium ticket, because their time is worth less than the fare increase costs them.

One case runs the other way and should be said plainly: expensed public‑sector travel between Kingston and Ottawa is better off under ALTO in every scenario tested, because today’s service on that pair is slow and indirect. It is a real gain, and it is a small share of the total.

Under the friendliest assumptions available — normal fares, a station twenty‑five minutes out, today’s trains kept running alongside, ten stops a day — the best figure the model will produce for an out‑of‑town Kingston station is about +8 per cent. Getting there means giving up the premium pricing the revenue case depends on everywhere else.

Result Three

What if you just made today’s trains faster?

Now reverse the test. Keep the existing station, keep eighteen stops a day, keep normal fares, and change nothing but speed on the existing route.

Table 7 · Speed alone, from the existing station

Toronto journey time	Time saved	Annual trips	Change
135 min, as it runs today	—	450,000	—
118 min, reliable 160 to 177 km/h	13%	471,000	+4.6%
95 min, a 240 km/h conventional railway	30%	502,000	+11.6%
80 min, upper bound for this station	41%	525,000	+16.6%

The last row applies high‑speed running time to the existing station. It is there to separate speed from station location, frequency and fare, not as a proposal.

The comparison that matters

Eighty minutes to Toronto from the existing station, eighteen stops a day, normal fares: about +17 per cent. The same eighty minutes from a station twenty‑seven minutes out of town, eight stops a day, fares 25 per cent higher: about −17 per cent.

The time on the train is identical. The two outcomes are thirty‑four points apart, and every one of those points is station location, frequency and fare.

Speed gives diminishing returns

Roughly speaking, every 1 per cent cut in journey time buys about 0.4 per cent more trips. A 30 per cent time saving buys about 12 per cent more passengers. For most of Kingston’s travellers, time on the train is a minority of what the trip really costs them — fare, getting to the station and waiting make up the rest, and speed does nothing about any of those. The gain concentrates where an hour is worth most: on a 95‑minute conventional railway, public‑sector travel grows about 17 per cent, business and leisure 13, seniors and leisure 12, students 10.

A conservative figure, and a warning

These figures are cautious. The response to journey time implied here is weaker than the rail literature usually finds, because the fare term in the calculation dampens it. Using a more standard figure, the same 30 per cent time saving would give about +22 per cent rather than +12. Table 7 should be read as a floor, with the 95‑minute case plausibly worth anywhere from +10 to +25 per cent. The comparisons earlier in the brief are unaffected, because they compare like with like.

The warning is that fares erode the gain fast in either direction. Raising tickets 10 per cent to help pay for an upgrade cuts the benefit from about +12 per cent to about +7 — two‑fifths of the speed gain eaten by a 10 per cent fare rise. That is the same mechanism that sinks the high‑speed cases, working here on the alternative. It is an argument for funding an upgrade from capital rather than from the farebox.

What It Means

A stop is not the same as service

Three things set whether Kingston gains or loses, and speed is not one of them: how far the station is from where people are actually going, what the ticket costs, and whether today’s trains survive. Frequency cannot rescue the result on its own. At eighteen stops a day, matching today, an out‑of‑town station at a premium fare still comes out around 9 per cent down.

A public debate about whether Kingston gets a station, and how many trains stop there, is a debate about the wrong variables.

The two things ALTO has said do not fit together

A station justified by strong ridership, but served by a minority of trains, has its timetable set by the express service rather than by the demand used to justify it. Table 6 shows why that is not a workable compromise: the frequency needed to make the station work at a premium fare is far above what an express pattern tolerates. The usual international answer is two tiers, express and semi‑fast, which needs somewhere for fast trains to overtake at the intermediate station. Whether the cost estimate includes that overtaking capacity is a question with two possible answers, and both are informative.

A conventional railway does better here

A new conventional railway built for 240 km/h, running typically at 200, serves Kingston without moving the station, without the fare premium high‑speed operation needs, and without cutting the number of trains that stop. It captures a smaller share of the theoretical time saving and a larger share of the ridership. That is the trade the tables above quantify.

What Would Change the Answer

Three commitments, and four documents

None of this is a prediction that a Kingston station must fail. The results turn on assumptions, and those assumptions are all things the project could settle.

Would help

A station much closer to the core, or a frequent connection to it that is committed and timed to the trains rather than hoped for.

Would help most

Normal fares on Kingston journeys. Table 6 shows this is the single decisive variable. A premium fare is what makes the arithmetic unrecoverable for students, seniors and leisure travellers.

Would help

A binding commitment that service on the existing line is maintained, which turns the replacement case into the both‑together case, plus a published timetable, so frequency becomes a fact instead of an assumption.

Four things that should be published

Before any of these figures are treated as more than an order of magnitude, four inputs should be replaced with real data:

Not published

Station‑level boardings and destinations. This alone would settle both the number of trips today and where they go. A matter for the operator.

Not published

The calling pattern assumed for the Toronto–Ottawa segment — how many trains actually stop, and where.

Not published

The fare structure for intermediate stations. On the evidence above, this matters more than anything else on the list.

Not published

The station location, with the assumed travel time from it to downtown Kingston.

The first sits with the operator. The other three sit with the project and its joint project office, whose report and business case remain unpublished.

The finding that matters

It is not that a Kingston station would fail. It is that the service Kingston already has is the benchmark the project has never been asked to beat — and on the assumptions set out here, it does not beat it.

How to read the numbers on this page

Every number here other than the two quoted statements is output from our own model, built on the parameters listed in the full brief. Those parameters are assumptions, not measurements, and the four listed above as needing publication are the ones that move the result. The model is set out so that any parameter can be replaced and the arithmetic re-run: the direction of the findings holds across the ranges tested, the exact magnitudes are indicative.

Where ALTO has not published something — a timetable, a station location, a fare — we say so rather than inferring it, and we make no claim about why it has not been published.

Sources

CBC News, “Kingston probably getting high-speed rail stop, says Alto CEO,” 22 July 2026 — interview with Martin Imbleau on CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning. He says Kingston will probably receive a station, citing ridership, and that most ALTO trains would pass through without stopping, along with Laval and Trois-Rivières, to preserve express service between the larger cities. cbc.ca

City of Kingston, Council Meeting Minutes 2026-06, 17 February 2026, Resolution 2026-73, carried as amended 9–2 — support for a southern route contingent on Highway 401 corridor development and on a stop being added in Kingston, as close to the urban core as possible. Examined in the companion brief Which Trains Stop in Kingston?

Elasticity ranges: intercity frequency elasticities of +0.4 to +0.7 and journey-time elasticities of −0.6 to −0.9 are the conventional ranges in the rail demand literature, used here as reference values rather than as findings of this brief. The generalised-cost elasticity of −1.0 central, banded −0.8 to −1.2, is our own choice and is tested across that band throughout.

Current journey times are as timetabled by VIA Rail. ALTO journey times are our assumption, since no alignment has been published for the Toronto–Ottawa segment.

Queen’s University, 2025–26 Enrolment Report, as at 1 November 2025 — 28,561 full-time students, plus 1,704 part-time undergraduate, 1,389 part-time graduate and 931 online undergraduate, giving 32,585 in total. St. Lawrence College reports about 4,000 full-time equivalents at its Kingston campus. Royal Military College of Canada: 1,209 full-time and 587 part-time undergraduate, 276 full-time and 346 part-time graduate students, giving 2,418 in total. RMC’s part-time and graduate enrolment includes serving officers studying at a distance, so it is counted here on the same all-enrolment basis as Queen’s rather than as a resident population; on full-time enrolment alone the city total is about 38,000, and the ratio is about twenty-nine per hundred either way. macleans.ca queensu.ca (PDF)

Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population — City of Kingston (census subdivision) 132,485; Kingston census metropolitan area 172,546, comprising the City of Kingston, South Frontenac, Frontenac Islands and Loyalist Township. statcan.gc.ca

Comparators, on the same all-institutions basis where the data allow. Sherbrooke: about 40,000 students across eight institutions in a city of 172,950, roughly twenty-three per hundred residents. Guelph: 29,617 full-time equivalents at the University of Guelph in a city of 143,740, roughly twenty-one per hundred — a figure that excludes the Conestoga College campus and is therefore a floor. ocul.on.ca

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Kingston’s ALTO Ridership Analysis (PDF)

Full method, all thirty‑two market segments, sensitivity bands and break‑even calculations

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July 26, 2026

Introduction: What is HPR

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

What is HPR?

An alternative built around the journey people actually take — not the top speed on the brochure.

Introduction · The HPR Research Report

High Performance Rail (HPR) is a plan to modernise passenger and freight rail along a corridor that already has track. Instead of one brand-new high-speed line built from scratch, HPR treats the whole corridor as a single system and asks what the smartest fix is for each part. That means new track where new track earns its place, upgrades to existing lines where they deliver more per dollar, and added freight capacity so passenger and freight trains can each run to their own schedule. The goal is a trip that beats driving door to door, reaches city centres and the towns in between, and gets built in affordable stages.

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What is HPR? — Introduction (PDF)

The HPR framework in full: the three-part structure, the 10 Guiding Principles, and the case for a made-in-Canada alternative to greenfield high-speed rail

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The Framework

Three parts, one corridor strategy

HPR is not one thing but a whole-system approach with two working halves. It combines a passenger spine and a freight dimension into one corridor strategy, assessed together and built step by step, so each mode can grow on its own terms instead of being forced onto the other’s infrastructure.

Three names for three things, used consistently across this report. The corridor is the Toronto–Québec City route Alto proposes. The triangle is the Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal network HPR proposes in its place. The spine is the 479-kilometre Pickering Junction to Dorval element of that triangle, on the Toronto–Montréal axis, which is where the new-build cost concentrates. Where a chapter names one of the three, it means that one.

HPR — High Performance Rail · the framework

The whole-system approach. HPR combines the passenger spine and the freight side into one corridor strategy, assessed together and delivered in stages.

HPPR — High Performance Passenger Rail · the spine

The physical passenger railway. New-build and grade-separated where the corridor requires it, engineered to run reliably across a 177–240 km/h band, with 240 km/h (150 mph) the alignment’s design maximum, serving downtowns and the communities along the route.

HPFR — High Performance Freight Rail · the freight dimension

The capacity that separates freight from passenger obligations. Freed from passenger schedules, freight can run to a more flexible timetable and operate longer trains. Those are the levers that lower a railway’s operating ratio, so each mode can grow without crowding out the other on shared track.

The 10 Guiding Principles of HPR

What HPR is built on

01
Look at the whole system. Treat the rail network as one system rather than a set of separate projects, and respect the different business models freight and passenger operations run on. Avoid a single project that monopolises the funding and starves the many smaller improvements that would together deliver more.

02
Build for communities. Make sure the towns along the route benefit from the railway, not just the big cities at each end. A railway that brings those places in rather than bypassing them meets less local opposition, carries less political risk and, in the end, costs less.

03
Separate freight from passengers. Build the capacity to give each its own space, so neither has to run to the other’s schedule.

04
Go fast enough, not the fastest possible. Target speeds of 177–240 km/h. That is fast enough to compete with driving or flying door to door, without the cost of fully new, arrow-straight high-speed lines. A 240 km/h maximum is also the more practical option in extreme Canadian heat and cold (±30 °C).

05
Make the ride safe, comfortable and useful. Grade separation and modern rolling stock make rail among the safest ways to travel, and generous space lets passengers work, rest or talk on the way. Time on the train is usable time, which driving can never offer.

06
Be frequent and on time. Compete on turn-up-and-go frequency and dependable punctuality, with on-time performance above 90% sustained through Canadian winters. Reliability, not peak speed, is what earns a traveller’s trust.

07
Reach downtowns and smaller towns. Put stations in city centres and serve the communities along the route, not only the two endpoints.

08
Mix new construction with upgrades. Use whichever delivers more value for the money: new track, or improvements to what is already there.

09
Share the tracks. Let regional, commuter and intercity trains use the same tracks, with freed freight capacity as a deliberate co-benefit.

10
Build it in stages. Invest where the benefits can be demonstrated, phasing improvements so each stage earns its place, instead of concentrating all the cost and risk in one megaproject.

How HPR Differs

A North American solution

The defining difference is what the railway is optimised for. A design that chases 300-plus km/h commits, almost by necessity, to a new greenfield alignment: long straight sections, wide curves, and bypasses that route around the very communities and city centres a passenger service exists to reach. The speed gained on open track is paid back in access time, capital and carbon.

HPR takes the opposite approach. By accepting typical speeds of 177–240 km/h, it can follow the existing corridor, upgrade what already works, and go straight into downtowns, all while freeing up capacity for freight. The result is competitive door to door at a fraction of the capital exposure, in stages that can be re-scoped as the evidence matures.

It is also a difference of origin. A greenfield high-speed line is essentially an imported design. The French passenger-rail model was built for a temperate, densely settled country on a network that carries no freight. North American railroading is the opposite: freight-dominated, shared-track, and tested by hard winters and long distances.

HPR is engineered for those conditions — made in Canada, for Canadian ones. It builds domestic expertise that transfers to later Canadian projects rather than importing it. HPR is best understood not as a slower high-speed railway but as a different answer for a different continent. The question it sets out to answer is this: how do you move the most people and freight, to the most useful places, at prices that compete with driving, for the most defensible investment at the lowest risk?

Travel Time, Not Speed

The clock, not the speedometer

A journey is not a single dash between two stations. It is a chain: getting to the station, waiting for the departure, the run itself, and then getting to the final destination at the far end. Top speed touches only one link in that chain. Once the time at both ends is counted, the run itself is a fraction of the door-to-door total, and shaving it returns less and less. The gap between 240 and 300 km/h saves minutes on the segment that is already the smallest part of the trip.

Worse, the alignments that allow the highest speeds tend to push stations out of city centres. That adds time at both ends, which can outweigh whatever the faster run saved — so a train that is quicker on paper can be slower in practice. Frequency compounds the point: a train leaving soon beats a faster one you have to wait an hour to board.

The measure that matters

Over a corridor drive of some 540 kilometres, the car is the real competitor. Measured the way travellers actually experience the journey, what counts is the reliable door-to-door clock — not the number on the fastest stretch of track.

The Price Lever

Pricing for a car-centric market

In a car-centric country, the railway’s real competitor is not the airplane or the existing train. It is the private car. Against a car someone already owns, a trip is judged on the fairly small extra cost of just driving it. That makes price the most direct lever on whether people switch.

A line built at megaproject cost has to recover that capital somewhere. Fares set to service debt push budget-conscious travellers straight back into their cars, hollowing out the very ridership the business case assumed. HPR’s lower capital cost is therefore not only a fiscal virtue but a demand strategy: a railway that costs less to build can price to fill trains rather than to service debt.

Frequency, downtown access and reliable door-to-door times create the conditions for people to switch. Price is what converts them into boardings — and where most trips default to the car, the fare is often the difference between a full train and an empty one.

What HPR Is Not

Neither political, nor all at once

HPR is not a political project. Its route, its staging and its scope follow the evidence — engineering, economics and demographics — not political convenience or partisan preference. Where a claim cannot be grounded in that evidence, it is not made.

Nor is it everything at once. Stage 1, the scope of the current report, is deliberately limited. It does not detour via Peterborough, it reaches Ottawa over upgraded existing lines rather than costly new-build, and it leaves Québec City to a later stage. Each further stage is added only when the evidence and the need justify it.

The Pitch

A case built to be checked

HPR does not ask to be believed. It asks to be checked. Every figure in its case is meant to be traced to a source, tested against what comparable projects actually cost and carried, and stated with its uncertainty rather than at its best case. Where a promotional business case leads with a single confident number, HPR leads with a range and the reference class behind it. The honest way to forecast a railway is from the record of railways already built, rather than from a proponent’s own projections for the one not yet built.

The result is a stronger case, not a softer one. Compared with a conventional greenfield high-speed line, HPR offers four things:

Passengers
A service that beats driving on door-to-door time, for a fraction of the cost of a from-scratch high-speed line.

Freight
Upgrades that help freight operators instead of competing with passenger trains for track space.

Delivery
Benefits that arrive in proven stages, each one demonstrated before the next is committed.

Whole life
A cost and environmental picture that improves, rather than worsens, once the entire lifespan of the asset is counted.

None of that needs an optimistic ridership forecast or heroic cost control to stand up. That is the pitch: not the fastest railway that can be drawn on paper, but the one that will actually get built, get used, and pay its way.

Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · beyondalto.ca · citizenresearch.ca · The HPR Research Report · Introduction
Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City corridor. This introduction describes the HPR framework. Later chapters cover corridor geometry, capital cost, ridership, operating economics, environmental impact and benefit–cost analysis.

July 17, 2026

A friendly witness

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Research Brief

A Friendly Witness

How a supportive submission to ALTO lists the things the project cannot deliver.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Research Brief · Published July 2026 · On Trajectoire Québec’s memoir to ALTO, 24 April 2026

Critical Finding

Trajectoire Québec’s memoir endorses high-speed rail. But its nine recommendations describe downtown stations, affordable fares, more intermediate stops, preserved conventional service, and seamless local integration — the specification of a high-frequency conventional railway, not of a 300 km/h greenfield line. Measured against ALTO’s actual design, the memoir substantively meets none of its own recommendations, leaves one open (passenger experience), and runs into structural conflict, adverse economics, or the project’s own premise on the rest. The friendliest submission on the consultation file reads as a list of the project’s gaps.

Two of the adverse assessments depend on ALTO’s unpublished plans — whether airport stations appear, and how central the endpoint stations finally sit — and could improve. The others follow from physics and economics: the severance and peripheral siting a grade-separated 250+ km/h alignment entails, and the cost and ridership figures in the Initiative’s reference-class work.

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A Friendly Witness — Full Brief (PDF)

Recommendation-by-recommendation assessment of Trajectoire Québec’s memoir against ALTO’s actual design

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The Endorsement

An endorsement built on a poll, not a case

Trajectoire was an early backer of VIA Rail’s high-frequency proposal (the TGF). Its memoir now supports high-speed rail — but conditionally, “dans la mesure où” the project delivers accessibility, integration, and equity. The memoir’s own narrative traces the shift from high-frequency to high-speed not to a technical or economic case but to a 2024 opinion poll it cites — 92 per cent preferring high-speed over high-frequency — and to the stated preferences of local mayors. What the organization asks for did not change when its endorsement did. It wanted a frequent, reliable, affordable, well-connected interurban railway before the pivot, and it wants one still. The recommendations describe that railway; the endorsement sits on top of it.

recommendations in Trajectoire’s memoir

memoir summary of recommendations

~0.07

ALTO benefit–cost ratio, central estimate

Initiative reference-class analysis

43 → 54

community friction, before → after the consultation

Initiative friction index

Recommendation by Recommendation

Nine recommendations, measured against the design

The memoir’s own summary lists nine recommendations. Set against the design ALTO is advancing and the Initiative’s research record, each resolves into a verdict.

Trajectoire’s Recommendation	What ALTO’s Design Delivers
1. Downtown stations, universally accessible, integrated with local and interurban networks. Central stations sit inside existing transit networks, enabling efficient connections and reducing car dependence to reach the train.	A grade-separated alignment engineered for 250+ km/h — the speed all three RFP bidders independently proposed — cannot be threaded into dense downtowns at a cost the project will bear, which pushes stations toward the periphery. Trajectoire’s own examples — the pull of the downtown Palais station over Sainte-Foy, the car-inducing effect of Ottawa’s out-of-centre station — are the pattern ALTO’s design tends toward, not away from.
Assessment:Structural conflict
2. Urban integration with no impassable barriers for pedestrians and cyclists. The network should knit into the urban fabric without severing pedestrian and cycle routes or forcing long detours.	High-speed track must be fully grade-separated and fenced along its length. That severance is the impassable barrier the recommendation asks the project to avoid — a condition of running trains at that speed, not an incidental feature. The Initiative’s forward friction measure captures the gap: a high-performance spine scores roughly 29 against ALTO’s ~65.
Assessment:Structural conflict
3. Affordable and accessible to all. A publicly funded project should serve the whole population, with fares that keep the train competitive with the car for youth, families, and seniors.	Central cost near $143 million per kilometre, a benefit–cost ratio around 0.07, and low ridership (~0.29 trips per capita) in the Initiative’s reference-class work create structural pressure toward premium, cost-recovery fares — the opposite of the equity pricing the recommendation requires.
Assessment:Contrary to the economics
4. Tight cost control; private participation if needed; no crowding-out of urban transit. The project must not consume the federal funding that urban transit networks depend on.	The same economics point to fiscal displacement — the exact crowding-out the recommendation fears. Nothing in the record indicates the tight cost control it asks for.
Assessment:Contrary to the economics
5. Stations at Montréal-Trudeau (YUL) and Québec / Jean-Lesage (YQB) airports. Direct airport connections would capture regional and international travellers and spare them a transfer.	As far as ALTO’s public plan shows, airport stations are not included. This verdict depends on plans ALTO has not fully published and could change.
Assessment:Not in the plan
6. Amend ALTO’s mandate to provide more intermediate stations. More stops would broaden ridership and build social acceptance along the corridor.	Every intermediate stop erodes the journey-time advantage that is the sole justification for a 300 km/h greenfield line over higher-frequency upgrades. The recommendation therefore asks the government to partially unwind the project’s premise. Trajectoire half-concedes this, proposing passing loops so express trains can overtake local ones.
Assessment:Against the premise
7. Preserve and improve conventional interurban service on the existing network. The corridor service Trajectoire once championed under the high-frequency banner must not be degraded.	A separate greenfield line does nothing, on its own, to preserve or improve VIA’s conventional service. The Initiative has documented a benchmark substitution in ALTO’s costing material, where the high-frequency baseline is replaced by an undifferentiated “Conventional Rail.” The dual-asset move that would satisfy this — a new spine that also frees the legacy network — is the HPR framework’s, and ALTO does not offer it.
Assessment:Unaddressed
8. European / Asian-standard passenger experience, distinct from air travel. Simple ticketing, clear information, easy baggage, no airport-style check-in.	An operational choice made late in delivery. The record gives no signal either way; it is fair to call this undetermined.
Assessment:Open
9. Secure social acceptability through rigorous, proactive consultation. Acceptability must be built through genuine, early, influential consultation.	Community friction, on the Initiative’s index, rose from 43 to 54 after the consultation round — the process increased opposition rather than building acceptability. Measured against that movement, a supportive organization’s polite call for better consultation is a finding that the consultation so far has failed its own test.
Assessment:Failing

The Pattern

A supportive submission describes a different train

Set the recommendations beside one another and a single shape emerges.

The recommendations describe high-frequency rail

Downtown access, more stops, affordable fares, network integration, preserved conventional service — item by item, this is the value proposition of high-frequency conventional rail, the case the Initiative advances under the HPR framework, restated by an organization convinced it is endorsing something else.

Even the friendly witness describes the gaps

The friendliest submission on the consultation record describes the project by what it lacks. That matters precisely because the witness is favourable: the gap between what ALTO is and what its supporters want is not a partisan artifact. It is visible even to those cheering the train on.

Structural, not merely contingent

Two adverse verdicts — airport stations and endpoint centrality — depend on ALTO’s unpublished plans and could improve. The rest follow from the design itself: the severance and peripheral siting a grade-separated 250+ km/h alignment entails, and the cost and ridership economics in the Initiative’s reference-class work. Those move only with the choice of technology.

Where Things Stand · July 2026

Summary ledger

In summary, against the recommendations in the memoir:

Open

Passenger experience (Rec 8): undetermined — an operational choice made late in delivery.

Not met

Downtown, accessible, integrated stations (Rec 1): structural conflict with a grade-separated high-speed alignment.

Not met

Urban integration without severance (Rec 2): the fenced, grade-separated corridor is itself the barrier.

Not met

Affordable fares for all (Rec 3): the economics push toward premium, cost-recovery pricing.

Not met

Cost control; no crowding-out of urban transit (Rec 4): the economics point to fiscal displacement.

Not met

Airport stations at YUL and YQB (Rec 5): not in the public plan — contingent on ALTO’s plans.

Not met

More intermediate stations (Rec 6): against the express premise of a 300 km/h line.

Not met

Preserve / improve conventional service (Rec 7): a separate greenfield line does not deliver it; the dual-asset HPR move is absent.

Not met

Social acceptability via consultation (Rec 9): friction rose 43 → 54 after the consultation round.

Trajectoire Québec supports the train. Its recommendations, read against ALTO’s actual design, are not — in the main — met by the project as scoped. The organization is not asking for tweaks to a design it accepts; it is describing, recommendation by recommendation, a high-frequency railway that the high-speed greenfield line was never built to be.

Download Full Brief

A Friendly Witness (PDF)

Recommendation-by-recommendation analysis for decision-makers, MPs, and constituents tracking the consultation record

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Source

The submission assessed

Trajectoire Québec, Train à grande vitesse entre Québec et Toronto : une occasion à saisir pour améliorer les transports interurbains au Québec. Memoir presented to ALTO, 24 April 2026. trajectoire.quebec

Assessment draws on the Initiative’s research record — the reference-class cost and ridership models, the community friction index, and Privy Council Office briefing note A-2025-00015, which confirms that all three RFP bidders independently proposed 250+ km/h greenfield alignments.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Note de recherche

Un témoin bienveillant

Comment un mémoire favorable à ALTO énumère ce que le projet ne peut offrir.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Note de recherche · Publié en juillet 2026 · À propos du mémoire de Trajectoire Québec à ALTO, le 24 avril 2026

Constat essentiel

Le mémoire de Trajectoire Québec appuie le train à grande vitesse. Mais ses neuf recommandations décrivent des gares en centre-ville, des tarifs abordables, davantage de gares intermédiaires, le maintien du service conventionnel et une intégration locale fluide — le cahier des charges d’un train à grande fréquence conventionnel, non d’une ligne neuve à 300 km/h. Mesuré à la conception réelle d’ALTO, le mémoire ne satisfait substantiellement aucune de ses propres recommandations, en laisse une ouverte (l’expérience client) et se heurte, pour le reste, à un conflit structurel, à une économie défavorable ou à la prémisse même du projet. Le mémoire le plus bienveillant du dossier se lit comme une liste des lacunes du projet.

Deux des constats défavorables dépendent des plans non publiés d’ALTO — la présence de gares aéroportuaires et le degré de centralité des gares terminales — et pourraient s’améliorer. Les autres découlent de la physique et de l’économie : la coupure et l’implantation périphérique qu’entraîne un tracé dénivelé à 250 km/h et plus, ainsi que les chiffres de coûts et d’achalandage établis par les travaux de l’Initiative sur classe de référence.

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Un témoin bienveillant — note complète (PDF)

Évaluation, recommandation par recommandation, du mémoire de Trajectoire Québec au regard de la conception réelle d’ALTO

Télécharger le PDF

L’appui

Un appui fondé sur un sondage, non sur un argumentaire

Trajectoire a été l’un des premiers appuis de la proposition de train à grande fréquence de VIA Rail (le TGF). Son mémoire soutient désormais le train à grande vitesse — mais de façon conditionnelle, « dans la mesure où » le projet assure accessibilité, intégration et équité. Le récit même du mémoire attribue le passage de la grande fréquence à la grande vitesse non pas à un argumentaire technique ou économique, mais à un sondage de 2024 qu’il cite — 92 % préférant la grande vitesse à la grande fréquence — et aux préférences exprimées par des maires. Ce que l’organisme réclame n’a pas changé lorsque son appui, lui, a changé : un train interurbain fréquent, fiable, abordable et bien connecté. Les recommandations décrivent ce train; l’appui repose par-dessus.

recommandations dans le mémoire de Trajectoire

sommaire des recommandations

~0,07

ratio avantages-coûts d’ALTO, estimation centrale

analyse sur classe de référence de l’Initiative

43 → 54

friction communautaire, avant → après la consultation

indice de friction de l’Initiative

Recommandation par recommandation

Neuf recommandations, mesurées à la conception

Le sommaire du mémoire énumère lui-même neuf recommandations. Mises en regard de la conception qu’ALTO fait avancer et des travaux de l’Initiative, chacune se résout en un constat.

La recommandation de Trajectoire	Ce que la conception d’ALTO livre
1. Gares en centre-ville, universellement accessibles, intégrées aux réseaux locaux et interurbains. Les gares centrales s’inscrivent dans les réseaux de transport existants, facilitant les correspondances et réduisant la dépendance à l’auto pour accéder au train.	Un tracé dénivelé conçu pour 250 km/h et plus — la vitesse que les trois soumissionnaires ont proposée de façon indépendante — ne peut être inséré dans des centres-villes denses à un coût que le projet acceptera d’assumer, ce qui repousse les gares vers la périphérie. Les exemples mêmes de Trajectoire — l’attrait de la gare du Palais plutôt que de Sainte-Foy, l’effet incitatif à l’automobile de la gare excentrée d’Ottawa — sont le motif vers lequel la conception d’ALTO tend, et non dont elle s’éloigne.
Constat :Conflit structurel
2. Intégration urbaine sans barrières infranchissables pour piétons et cyclistes. Le réseau doit s’intégrer au tissu urbain sans couper les cheminements piétons et cyclables ni imposer de longs détours.	Une voie à grande vitesse doit être intégralement dénivelée et clôturée sur toute sa longueur. Cette coupure est la barrière infranchissable que la recommandation demande d’éviter — une condition de la vitesse, non un détail. La mesure de friction prospective de l’Initiative résume l’écart : une dorsale à haute performance obtient environ 29, contre environ 65 pour ALTO.
Constat :Conflit structurel
3. Abordable et accessible à toutes et tous. Un projet financé par des fonds publics doit servir toute la population, avec des tarifs qui gardent le train compétitif face à l’auto pour les jeunes, les familles et les aînés.	Un coût central près de 143 millions de dollars le kilomètre, un ratio avantages-coûts d’environ 0,07 et un achalandage faible (~0,29 déplacement par habitant) dans les travaux de l’Initiative créent une pression structurelle vers des tarifs élevés, de recouvrement des coûts — l’inverse de la tarification équitable qu’exige la recommandation.
Constat :Contredit par l’économie
4. Contrôle serré des coûts; participation privée au besoin; pas d’éviction du transport urbain. Le projet ne doit pas absorber le financement fédéral dont dépendent les réseaux de transport urbain.	La même économie pointe vers une éviction budgétaire — précisément le risque que redoute la recommandation. Rien au dossier n’indique le contrôle serré des coûts qu’elle réclame.
Constat :Contredit par l’économie
5. Gares aux aéroports de Montréal-Trudeau (YUL) et de Québec / Jean-Lesage (YQB). Des correspondances aéroportuaires directes capteraient les voyageurs régionaux et internationaux en leur épargnant un transfert.	À ce que montre le plan public d’ALTO, les gares aéroportuaires ne figurent pas. Ce constat dépend de plans qu’ALTO n’a pas entièrement publiés et pourrait changer.
Constat :Absent du projet
6. Modifier le mandat d’ALTO pour prévoir plus de gares intermédiaires. Plus d’arrêts élargiraient l’achalandage et bâtiraient l’acceptabilité le long du corridor.	Chaque arrêt intermédiaire érode l’avantage de temps de parcours, seule justification d’une ligne neuve à 300 km/h plutôt que d’améliorations à plus haute fréquence. La recommandation demande donc au gouvernement de défaire en partie la prémisse du projet. Trajectoire le concède à demi, en proposant des voies d’évitement pour que les express dépassent les trains locaux.
Constat :Contraire à la prémisse
7. Préserver et améliorer le service interurbain conventionnel sur le réseau existant. Le service du corridor existant — celui que Trajectoire a autrefois défendu sous la bannière de la grande fréquence — ne doit pas être dégradé.	Une ligne neuve et distincte ne fait rien, à elle seule, pour préserver ou améliorer le service conventionnel de VIA. L’Initiative a documenté une substitution de référentiel dans les documents de coûts d’ALTO, où le scénario à grande fréquence est remplacé par un « rail conventionnel » indifférencié. L’approche à double actif qui satisferait cette recommandation — une dorsale neuve qui libère aussi le réseau patrimonial — relève du cadre HPR, et ALTO ne l’offre pas.
Constat :Non traité
8. Expérience client aux standards européens et asiatiques, distincte de l’avion. Billetterie simple, information claire, bagages faciles, sans enregistrement de type aéroportuaire.	Un choix opérationnel arrêté tard dans la réalisation. Le dossier n’offre aucun signal dans un sens ou dans l’autre; il est juste de le dire indéterminé.
Constat :Indéterminé
9. Assurer l’acceptabilité sociale par des consultations rigoureuses et proactives. L’acceptabilité se bâtit par une consultation réelle, précoce et capable d’influer sur le projet.	La friction communautaire, selon l’indice de l’Initiative, est passée de 43 à 54 après le cycle de consultation — le processus a accru l’opposition au lieu de bâtir l’acceptabilité. Mesuré à ce mouvement, l’appel poli d’un organisme favorable à de meilleures consultations est le constat que la consultation a jusqu’ici échoué à son propre test.
Constat :En échec

Le motif

Un mémoire favorable décrit un autre train

Placez les recommandations les unes à côté des autres et une seule forme se dégage.

Les recommandations décrivent un train à grande fréquence

Accès au centre-ville, plus de gares, tarifs abordables, intégration aux réseaux, maintien du service conventionnel — point par point, c’est la proposition de valeur du train à grande fréquence conventionnel, la thèse que l’Initiative défend sous le cadre HPR, reformulée par un organisme convaincu d’appuyer autre chose.

Même le témoin bienveillant décrit les lacunes

Le mémoire le plus bienveillant du dossier décrit le projet par ce qui lui manque. Cela compte précisément parce que le témoin est favorable : l’écart entre ce qu’ALTO est et ce que ses partisans souhaitent n’est pas un artefact partisan. Il est visible même pour ceux qui encouragent le train.

Structurel, non simplement contingent

Deux constats défavorables — gares aéroportuaires et centralité des terminus — dépendent des plans non publiés d’ALTO et pourraient s’améliorer. Les autres découlent de la conception elle-même : la coupure et l’implantation périphérique qu’entraîne un tracé dénivelé à 250 km/h et plus, ainsi que l’économie des coûts et de l’achalandage des travaux de l’Initiative. Ceux-là ne bougent qu’avec le choix technologique.

Où en sommes-nous · juillet 2026

Bilan récapitulatif

En résumé, au regard des recommandations du mémoire :

Indéterminé

Expérience client (rec. 8) : indéterminée — choix opérationnel arrêté tard.

Non satisfait

Gares centrales, accessibles, intégrées (rec. 1) : conflit structurel avec un tracé dénivelé à grande vitesse.

Non satisfait

Intégration urbaine sans coupure (rec. 2) : le corridor clôturé et dénivelé est lui-même la barrière.

Non satisfait

Tarifs abordables pour tous (rec. 3) : l’économie pousse vers une tarification de recouvrement.

Non satisfait

Contrôle des coûts; pas d’éviction du transport urbain (rec. 4) : l’économie pointe vers l’éviction budgétaire.

Non satisfait

Gares aéroportuaires à YUL et YQB (rec. 5) : absentes du plan public — tributaire des plans d’ALTO.

Non satisfait

Plus de gares intermédiaires (rec. 6) : contraire à la prémisse express d’une ligne à 300 km/h.

Non satisfait

Préserver / améliorer le service conventionnel (rec. 7) : une ligne neuve distincte ne le livre pas; le geste à double actif du cadre HPR est absent.

Non satisfait

Acceptabilité sociale par la consultation (rec. 9) : la friction est passée de 43 à 54 après la consultation.

Trajectoire Québec appuie le train. Ses recommandations, lues au regard de la conception réelle d’ALTO, ne sont pas — pour l’essentiel — satisfaites par le projet tel que défini. L’organisme ne demande pas des retouches à une conception qu’il accepte; il décrit, recommandation par recommandation, un train à grande fréquence que la ligne neuve à grande vitesse n’a jamais été conçue pour être.

Télécharger la note complète

Un témoin bienveillant (PDF)

Analyse, recommandation par recommandation, pour les décideurs, les députés et les citoyens qui suivent le dossier

Télécharger le PDF

Source

Le mémoire évalué

Trajectoire Québec, Train à grande vitesse entre Québec et Toronto : une occasion à saisir pour améliorer les transports interurbains au Québec. Mémoire présenté à ALTO, 24 avril 2026. trajectoire.quebec

L’évaluation s’appuie sur les travaux de l’Initiative — les modèles de coûts et d’achalandage sur classe de référence, l’indice de friction communautaire, et la note d’information A-2025-00015 du Bureau du Conseil privé, qui confirme que les trois soumissionnaires ont proposé de façon indépendante des tracés neufs à 250 km/h et plus.

July 11, 2026

The Stations that aren’t there

The Stations That Aren’t There

The tourism ALTO’s line leaves at the station — and the small-town visitor economy an integrated network could reach instead.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Economic Brief · Published July 2026 · ALTO consultation closed April 24, 2026

⚠ A short list of city stops

ALTO’s mandate fixes seven stations — Toronto, Peterborough, Ottawa, Laval, Montréal, Trois-Rivières, and Québec City — only five of them between the endpoints, and every one a city rather than a recreational town. To hold 300+ km/h, the dedicated new alignment stops as little as possible: the original eastern-Ontario option ran a straight line with no stop between Peterborough and Ottawa. Alto FAQ

After consultation, the government signalled in June 2026 a strong preference for a more southerly route nearer Highway 401 with a potential Kingston stop, keeping the northern corridor alive but deprioritised; the final alignment is still being assessed. Either way the pattern holds — a handful of city stops, and access by car: ALTO’s own pitch is that most residents east of Peterborough would be within a 25-minute drive of a station. The small towns and shorelines that draw the corridor’s leisure travel sit off the line. CBC

Critical Finding

ALTO frames tourism as a metro-connectivity product: faster links between big cities. But the corridor’s large, capturable, and better-distributed tourism opportunity is the opposite trip — domestic leisure travel from the four metros out to smaller towns and recreational areas. That market is already huge, overwhelmingly intra-provincial, mostly same-day, and almost entirely car-dependent.

This is not small towns instead of big cities. A faster, more reliable High Performance trunk improves the metro trip too — most of the way, since the large gain is over today’s freight-delayed VIA service, not over ALTO. An integrated network reaches the metro market and the small-town market; ALTO’s express spine reaches the first, marginally faster, and by geometry bypasses the second — and can draw activity toward its hub stations rather than distributing it.

On transparent, adjustable assumptions (a fifteen-minute station catchment, scenario ranges for capture and induced demand), an integrated network could plausibly generate an illustrative band of roughly $30 million to $640 million a year in net-new, locally-retained small-town tourism spending. These are scenario figures, not a forecast; the point is that the benefit is real, net-new rather than displaced, and lands in the communities the express line skips.

The Market

A large market, already on the road

1 in 3

domestic trips is for holidays, leisure or recreation — the market ALTO’s frame overlooks

StatCan National Travel Survey

~14%

of domestic travel spending goes to gas and vehicle operation — the leisure market is car-locked

StatCan National Travel Survey

~$200M

illustrative central net-new small-town tourism per year an integrated network could capture (band ~$30M to ~$640M)

Initiative scenario

The domestic leisure market the corridor sits inside is very large. About one in three domestic trips by Canadians is for holidays, leisure or recreation — on the order of ninety-five million such trips nationally in a normal pre-pandemic year — and travel within Canada has since climbed to new highs, with tens of billions of dollars spent each quarter.

In Ontario, domestic travellers made roughly 116 million visits in a recent full year, over 93 per cent of them Ontarians travelling within their own province; Quebec is the second most-visited province. Most of this travel is same-day — in Ontario about two-thirds — and a same-day trip already means a journey of at least forty kilometres each way.

And it is car travel. Gas and vehicle operation is consistently one of the three largest categories of domestic travel spending, at around 14 per cent — a direct measure of how car-locked leisure travel to non-metro destinations currently is. Per-visit spending is modest (same-day visits average roughly $70 in Ontario and $75 in Quebec) but the volume is the story.

This is the demand pool. It is intra-provincial, high-frequency, price-sensitive, and today almost entirely dependent on the private car — which is precisely the market a convenient, well-priced, integrated rail network could convert, and precisely the market a metro-to-metro express line does not address.

The Geography

Where the leisure map meets the line

The test the Initiative applied is simple: which of the corridor’s recreational regions fall within a fifteen-minute reach of a station ALTO is mandated to build? On that test, most do not.

Recreational region	Relationship to the ALTO line
Prince Edward County (ON)	No station. The nearest existing rail town, Belleville, is bypassed by the northern alignment. Unserved.
Thousand Islands / Gananoque (ON)	Hinges on the Kingston stop, under assessment since June 2026 on the preferred southern route. If confirmed, Kingston would interconnect the existing VIA station and serve as a genuine gateway — though access stays a drive-to-station model. Conditional.
Northumberland shore — Cobourg, Port Hope (ON)	The line routes inland via Peterborough, away from the lakeshore towns and their existing rail. Unserved.
Kawarthas (ON)	Peterborough is a mandated stop and a genuine gateway. Served.
Rideau corridor — Perth, Westport, Smiths Falls (ON)	Off the alignment; no station. Unserved.
Eastern Townships / Cantons-de-l’Est (QC)	South of Montréal, off the Québec-bound line. Unserved.
Mauricie (QC)	Trois-Rivières is a mandated stop and a gateway. Served.
Charlevoix (QC)	Northeast of Québec City, far beyond the line’s end. Unserved.
Laurentians / Mont-Tremblant (QC)	North of Laval; the resort areas lie well beyond any mandated station. Unserved.

Three of the stops are real recreational gateways, and this brief counts them as such: Peterborough for the Kawarthas, Trois-Rivières for the Mauricie, and — if confirmed — Kingston for the Thousand Islands. But even among these, ALTO’s own materials place Peterborough and Trois-Rivières at the city’s edge, near highways rather than in the centre; only a Kingston stop, reusing the existing VIA station, would set a visitor down in the town itself. The pattern is nonetheless clear: the station set is a list of cities, and whether the eastern-Ontario segment runs north or on the preferred southern line, it stops at cities and passes the belt of small towns and shorelines where corridor residents actually spend their leisure time.

The Mechanism

An express spine concentrates; it does not distribute

Two features of a 300+ km/h line work against dispersed tourism. The first is stop spacing. High speed is only worth building if the train rarely stops; every added station erodes the time saving that justifies the cost. A line optimised for Toronto–Montréal in about three hours cannot also be a network of small-town halts — the two objectives are in direct tension, and the metros win.

The second is the straw effect (sometimes the tunnel effect), one of the better-documented findings in high-speed-rail economics: fast, few-stop lines tend to concentrate activity in their terminal cities and can draw it out of the places they pass. For tourism specifically, a traveller moved from metro to metro in three hours has no reason to stop in between, and the towns without a platform capture nothing. The honest reading is therefore not that ALTO is merely unhelpful to small-town tourism, but that its geometry can be actively adverse to it.

An integrated High Performance network works the other way. A trunk at 180–240 km/h on existing corridors, with regional feeders and timed local connections, trades a little top speed for many more points of access — and it is the access, not the speed, that unlocks the leisure trip.

Couldn’t ALTO just add the last-mile links?

It could, and it says it will: ALTO has publicly stated it wants the network interconnected with the REM and metro in Montréal and Laval, the LRT and VIA in Ottawa, and the same in Kingston. Municipal and regional-transit integration is a policy choice open to any operator, not a property of one technology. But last-mile links work on top of stations — they amplify access at stops that exist; they cannot create a stop where the line does not run. And ALTO’s own access model is drive-to-station: its selling point for the Kingston option is that most residents east of Peterborough would be within a 25-minute drive of a platform — car-dependent access, the opposite of the car-free leisure trip. The binding constraint is the number and placement of stops, and no shuttle programme changes it.

The comparison is both-and, not either-or

High Performance Rail does not trade the metro trip away to reach the small towns; it improves both. A more frequent, more reliable trunk on dedicated track would substantially boost metro-to-metro leisure travel over today’s freight-delayed VIA service — and most of that gain comes from leaving freight-priority track, not from the final increment of speed. The Initiative’s own analysis finds ALTO’s extra 17 to 25 minutes per city pair is a small addition to a benefit High Performance Rail has already largely captured. So an integrated network reaches the metro market and the small-town market; ALTO reaches the first, marginally faster, and forecloses the second.

Even where ALTO stops, the platform tends to sit outside the centre

The design privileges speed over central access, and the station choices show it. The one true downtown terminal, Montréal, depends on a tunnel of more than ten kilometres under the Rivière des Prairies and Mount Royal — costed by a McGill analysis at over a billion dollars a kilometre, some 12 to 18 per cent of the whole $60–90 billion budget. As the single most expensive discrete element on the line, with a suburban Laval station already built into the first phase, it is the obvious thing to defer or drop if costs run over — as, on megaproject form, they will. The others already point the same way: by ALTO’s own CEO, Toronto’s first station will be suburban, opening ahead of any downtown stop; the Transport Minister has set aside the historic downtown Ottawa station on cost and geology grounds; Québec City’s central Gare du Palais is largely ruled out as too slow; and Peterborough, Trois-Rivières and Laval are sited near highways and open land to hold the 300 km/h line. Should the Montréal tunnel go the way of the others, not one of the four major anchors would be left with a secure downtown station. Where the design builds fresh for speed, the platform lands outside town and the visitor arrives by car — the opposite of the car-free leisure trip. The one honest exception is reuse: at Ottawa’s Tremblay hub and a possible Kingston on the VIA line, ALTO leans on an existing transit-connected station and access works — which is exactly the High Performance model of keeping the platform where the town already is.

The Estimate

A transparent scenario, not a forecast

The following is deliberately built as visible arithmetic. Every input is a parameter the reader can change; the three columns are a low, central, and high scenario rather than a single prediction. The catchment is set at the fifteen-minute reach used for the geography test above.

Parameter (annual, at maturity)	Low	Central	High
Addressable leisure-trip pool — metro origin, destination within 15 min of a networked station	3.0M	6.0M	9.0M
× Rail capture of addressable car trips	10%	20%	30%
= Shifted rail trips	0.30M	1.20M	2.70M
× Induced-demand uplift	+10%	+25%	+40%
= Rail leisure trips at maturity	0.33M	1.50M	3.78M
× Net local spend per trip (blended same-day / overnight)	$90	$130	$170
= Annual net-new local tourism spend	~$30M	~$195M	~$640M

Illustrative scenario arithmetic. Each parameter is an input, not an observation; the central column is one plausible path through the band, not a point forecast. Pool figures represent a single-digit-millions slice of the corridor’s tens of millions of annual leisure trips.

Read as a band, an integrated network plausibly captures somewhere between a few tens of millions and roughly $640 million a year in net-new, locally-retained small-town tourism spending, with a central illustrative figure near $200 million. The width of that band is the honest expression of the uncertainty; narrowing it is a modelling exercise, not a rhetorical one. What matters for the comparison with ALTO is not that the high scenario approaches ALTO’s $800 million claim, but that these are net-new and locally-retained dollars — not the gross, un-netted, metro-concentrated figure ALTO reports — and that they land in the communities the express line bypasses.

The Reference Class

Integration is the unlock — the Swiss test

The case that rail can distribute tourism to small towns is not hypothetical; it is the everyday reality of the most integrated networks. Switzerland is the standing proof of concept: timed-transfer scheduling, a single ticketing system, and regional and postbus connections that reach valley and lakeside towns make car-free leisure travel the default rather than the exception, and tourism spending is spread across small communities precisely because the network reaches and connects them. The United Kingdom’s community-rail partnerships show the same mechanism at modest scale, turning secondary lines into local visitor economies.

The reference class also carries its warning, which this brief states plainly: where fast lines are built without that integration, the straw effect can leave intermediate places worse off, as parts of the Japanese experience show. The lesson is consistent in both directions. It is integration — ticketing, timed connections, and last-mile links — not raw speed, that determines whether rail distributes tourism or concentrates it. That is a choice about network design, and it is the choice an express spine makes in one direction and an integrated High Performance network makes in the other.

The Condition

The benefit is conditional, and the brief says so

This estimate carries a load-bearing assumption, and honesty requires naming it. The entire small-town dividend depends on the last mile actually existing: a train to a rural station accomplishes little if the visitor still needs a car on arrival. The captured trips in the scenario above are conditional on shuttles, regional transit, bike and e-bike hire, and timed connections being built and funded alongside the line. Where that integration is absent, capture rates collapse toward the low column. This condition is not unique to the alternative — ALTO’s own city stations need last-mile links too, and it is pursuing them; the difference is reach, since integration can only amplify the stops a network has, and an integrated network simply has more of them, closer to the destinations.

Three further limits keep the estimate disciplined. Some premier recreational areas — dispersed cottage country, backcountry, and lakes reached only by private road — are intrinsically car-shaped and fall outside the addressable set at any catchment. Leisure demand is sharply peaked by season and weekend, which is capacity-inefficient and weakens the operating economics rather than strengthening them. And the induced-demand component is the softest parameter in the model; over-reading it would repeat exactly the optimism bias the Initiative documents in ALTO’s own forecasts. The scenario is built to resist that temptation, which is why the low column is deliberately austere.

Where things stand · July 2026

Summary ledger

On the tourism question, measured against ALTO’s own framing:

Overlooked

Market — one in three domestic trips is leisure, and the corridor’s small-town leisure economy is large and car-locked. ALTO’s frame addresses metro-to-metro travel, not this market.

Bypassed

Geography — most recreational regions fall outside a fifteen-minute reach of any ALTO station; whether the line runs north or on the preferred southern route, it stops only at cities. Peterborough, Trois-Rivières, and (if confirmed) Kingston are the exceptions.

Adverse

Mechanism — an express spine concentrates activity in hub cities and can draw it out of bypassed towns (the straw effect), rather than distributing it.

Available

Alternative — an integrated High Performance network reaches the metro market (most of ALTO’s benefit, over VIA) and the small-town market: an illustrative central ~$200M a year in net-new local spend, band ~$30M to ~$640M.

Conditional

Condition — the dividend is contingent on last-mile integration being built and funded; absent it, capture falls to the low scenario.

ALTO reports an $800 million annual tourism benefit as a gross figure, concentrated in the metros its line connects. This brief does not dispute that rail generates tourism value between the metros — High Performance Rail delivers most of that too, over today’s VIA service, and at a fraction of the cost. It adds the value ALTO leaves out: the leisure trip out of the city to the small town. One approach captures both markets; the other captures the first, marginally faster, and skips the second. The difference is a network built to stop, not a spine built to skip.

Download Full Brief

The Stations That Aren’t There (PDF)

Small-town tourism and the express spine — the full brief with sources.

Download PDF

Sources

Documents and data

ALTO, Frequently Asked Questions and About Alto — the seven federally mandated stations (Toronto, Peterborough, Ottawa, Laval, Montréal, Trois-Rivières, Québec City). altotrain.ca

CBC News, coverage of the ALTO route, schedule and land-access surveys, March 2026 — station list, Ottawa–Montréal first phase, and concerns from communities on existing rail routes. cbc.ca

The Canadian Press, “Toronto area could get two high-speed rail stations,” April 30, 2026 — seven mandated stops, a possible eighth in the Toronto suburbs, and the 72-trains-per-day service concept.

CBC News and Ottawa Business Journal, June 22–23, 2026 — the government’s stated preference for a southern route with a potential Kingston stop interconnecting VIA, the “25-minute drive” catchment claim, and ALTO’s stated intent to connect with the REM, metro, LRT and VIA. cbc.ca obj.ca

Station-siting reporting, 2026: ALTO network map (Peterborough near major roadways with bus connections; a northern approach studied at Trois-Rivières owing to downtown density; a Mount Royal tunnel to reach downtown Montréal). altotrain.ca The Canadian Press and The Globe and Mail on Toronto’s suburban-first station opening ahead of a downtown stop; The Globe and Mail and CBC on the Transport Minister setting aside the historic downtown Ottawa station in favour of the existing Tremblay VIA/O-Train hub; and Imbleau largely ruling out Québec City’s Gare du Palais. theglobeandmail.com cbc.ca On the downtown Montréal tunnel — more than ten kilometres, costed by a McGill analysis via The Canadian Press at over CA$1 billion per kilometre, or 12 to 18 per cent of the project budget: trains.com

Statistics Canada, National Travel Survey — domestic leisure-trip volumes, same-day share, mode, and expenditure categories (including gas and vehicle operation). Tables 24-10-0070-01 and 24-10-0071-01. statcan.gc.ca

Statistics Canada, The Daily, National Travel Survey and Visitor Travel Survey, 2025 quarters — recent domestic tourism spending and per-visit averages for Ontario and Quebec. statcan.gc.ca

Reference class (qualitative): the Swiss integrated rail and travel system (timed transfers, single ticketing, regional and postbus links); the United Kingdom’s Community Rail Partnerships; and the high-speed-rail “straw / tunnel effect” literature, including Japanese Shinkansen studies.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, modal-shift research notes and the scenario methodology set out in this brief — fifteen-minute station catchment, and low / central / high ranges for rail capture, induced demand, and per-trip local spend.

July 10, 2026

One missing number

Many Benefits, One Missing Number

ALTO’s benefits page, set against independent estimates for the corridor — and against the cost figure it never states.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Economic Brief · Published July 2026 · ALTO consultation closed April 24, 2026

⚠ What the page does not say

ALTO’s “Discover Alto’s Many Benefits” page presents at least nine distinct benefit figures — GDP, jobs, tourism, road decongestion, emissions avoided, and annual ridership. It states no capital cost, no operating subsidy, and no benefit-cost ratio anywhere on the page. ALTO benefits page

Every figure on the page is a numerator. The one number that would let a reader judge whether the benefits are worth the spending — the cost of the project — appears nowhere on it.

Critical Finding

The page is built on a single asymmetry: benefits are presented gross, and the cost side is absent. Restore the denominator and the picture inverts. On ALTO’s own official $60–90 billion cost the benefit-cost ratio is only about 0.1; on the Initiative’s higher independent estimate, about 0.06 — against roughly 0.44 for the lower-speed HPPR alternative. Whichever cost figure you use, the benefits recover a dime or less on the dollar, far short of the 1.0 a project needs to break even; the page asks readers to evaluate the project on numerator alone.

On the page’s own headline figures, the ridership claim of up to 24 million passengers by 2055 is roughly 2.6 times the Initiative’s central estimate, and the sustainability claim inverts under full-lifecycle carbon accounting: the Initiative finds ALTO a net emitter of about 15 million tonnes CO₂e over fifty years, while HPPR is a net carbon sink.

This is the standard presentation pattern of optimism bias documented in megaproject appraisal: gross benefits foregrounded, costs and risks kept off the page, and ceiling figures — “up to” — offered as though they were expectations.

The Frame

Benefits gross, cost absent

The GDP line is the clearest instance. The page reports a 1.1 per cent increase in Canada’s GDP, valued at $24.5 billion “in today’s value” — a figure discounted to the present without disclosing the capital sum it is being discounted against. The Initiative’s ECI/CFI cost model puts ALTO at approximately $143 million per kilometre central; over a corridor of roughly one thousand kilometres, the capital envelope is an order of magnitude larger than any single benefit line quoted on the page. The HPPR spine, by contrast, is modelled at roughly $28–40 million per kilometre. ALTO’s own official figure, stated elsewhere, is $60–90 billion for the corridor; the conclusion here does not turn on whose estimate you take, since even on that lower number the benefit-cost ratio is only about 0.1, and on the Initiative’s estimate about 0.06.

Presented this way, the benefits cannot be wrong — only incomplete. A gross benefit is a real quantity; it simply says nothing about whether the project earns it back. That judgement requires the two numbers the page withholds: the cost, and the ridership assumption most of the other benefits depend on.

Comparison

The page’s claims against the corridor’s numbers

Each row sets a figure as ALTO states it beside the corresponding finding from the Initiative’s modelling.

ALTO’s Claim	The Initiative’s Finding
Ridership. Up to 24 million passengers annually by 2055.	The Initiative’s central estimate is approximately 9.2 million in 2055, rising to about 12.5 million by 2080 — roughly 2.6 times lower than the page’s figure. “Up to” marks a ceiling, not an expectation, and the figure coincides exactly with the page’s own 2041 corridor population of 24 million, inviting readers to conflate people in the corridor with trips captured.
Emissions. 100% electric — the equivalent of removing about 100,000 cars from the road each year.	“100% electric” describes operational emissions only. Counted over its full lifecycle — the embodied carbon of a 300+ km/h greenfield build, against a ridership that is itself overstated — the Initiative finds ALTO a net emitter of roughly +15 Mt CO₂e over fifty years. The lower-speed HPPR alternative, built largely on existing alignment, is a net carbon sink.
Economic impact. 1.1% increase in Canada’s GDP ($24.5 billion in today’s value).	A gross benefit stated with no cost and no netting, discounted to present value without disclosing the capital figure behind it. Set against the Initiative’s cost model, the corresponding benefit-cost ratio is approximately 0.06.
Jobs. Over 50,000 during construction; a further 5,000 once operational.	Construction employment is a project input — a cost — not a benefit. Counting it on the benefit ledger is double-counting, among the most reliably flagged errors in megaproject business cases. The 5,000 operational jobs are a genuine recurring effect; the 50,000 construction jobs are not a benefit at all.
Road decongestion. Valued at $570 million.	The figure scales directly off ridership. If the 24 million capture is roughly 2.6 times high, the decongestion benefit is proportionally overstated. Induced demand refilling freed road capacity is not addressed.
Tourism. Approximately $800 million in revenue each year.	A gross figure with no displacement netting — spending that would have occurred anyway, or shifted from elsewhere in the corridor, is not removed.
Travel times. Toronto–Montréal ~3h; Ottawa–Montréal ~1h; Montréal–Québec City ~1h30.	These times are the payoff of the 300+ km/h greenfield alignment that drives both the ~$143M/km cost and the community disruption the page does not mention. HPPR achieves competitive times at 180–240 km/h for a fraction of the cost.
Cost of the project.	Stated nowhere on the page. ALTO’s own official range, given elsewhere, is $60–90 billion; the Initiative’s independent estimate is higher, at roughly $143 million per kilometre. This is the number against which every benefit above would have to be weighed — and the one the benefits page omits.

Three Inversions

Where the page’s strongest claims turn over

The sustainability claim inverts under lifecycle accounting

The page’s environmental case rests on ALTO being “100% electric.” That describes how the trains are powered, not what building the line costs in carbon. A 300+ km/h greenfield corridor — concrete, steel, tunnelling, geofoam, land conversion — carries a large embodied-carbon debt that operational electricity does not offset, particularly once the offset is recomputed against realistic rather than headline ridership. The Initiative’s finding is a net carbon deficit of roughly +15 Mt CO₂e over fifty years, while the lower-speed HPPR alternative is a net sink. The single most quotable line on the page — sustainability — is the one the accounting reverses.

“Up to 24 million” is a ceiling offered as an expectation

The headline ridership number does the persuasive work of the page, and “up to” is doing the work inside it. The Initiative’s central estimate is about 9.2 million passengers in 2055. Systematic overstatement of rail ridership at the appraisal stage is one of the best-documented patterns in the megaproject-forecasting literature, and this figure fits it squarely. The Initiative’s brief The Anatomy of an Optimistic Forecast sets out the mechanism in full.

Construction jobs are counted on the wrong side of the ledger

The page presents “over 50,000 jobs during construction” as a benefit. In a proper appraisal, construction labour is an input the project pays for — part of its cost, not part of its return. Presenting it as a benefit counts the same money twice. This is standard in the appraisal literature, and it is one of the easier errors for a general reader to check.

Three Numbers

What restoring the denominator shows

2.6×

the page’s 2055 ridership claim over the Initiative’s central estimate

Initiative ridership modelling

+15 Mt

net CO₂e over fifty years — ALTO as emitter, not saver, on a lifecycle basis

Initiative lifecycle carbon analysis

0.06–0.1

benefit-cost ratio for ALTO — on the Initiative’s estimate and on ALTO’s own $60–90B; both far below 1.0 (HPPR ~0.44)

Initiative cost & benefit model

None of these three figures appears on ALTO’s benefits page. Each is derived from the page’s own claims once the cost and the ridership assumption are made explicit.

Where things stand · July 2026

Summary ledger

Against the benefit claims as the page presents them:

Overstated

Ridership — “up to 24 million by 2055” is roughly 2.6 times the Initiative’s central estimate of ~9.2 million.

Contradicted

Emissions — the “100% electric” sustainability claim reverses to a net +15 Mt CO₂e deficit once lifecycle carbon is counted.

Omitted

Benefit-cost ratio — no BCR is stated anywhere; the Initiative’s central case is ~0.06.

Omitted

Capital cost — no cost figure appears on the page; central estimate ~$143M/km.

Miscounted

Construction jobs — presented as a benefit; they are a cost input, and counting them double-counts.

Overstated

Decongestion and tourism — gross figures that scale off the overstated ridership, with no netting for displacement or induced demand.

Omitted

Land and community impact — the disruption the 300+ km/h alignment requires is absent from the benefits page entirely.

The page is titled “Discover Alto’s Many Benefits.” The benefits are real as gross figures; what the page withholds is the cost against which they would have to be set, the ridership assumption most of them depend on, and the lifecycle accounting that reverses its environmental claim. Read with those three restored, the case the page makes for the project is substantially weaker than the case it appears to make.

Sources

Documents and analysis

ALTO, “Discover Alto’s Many Benefits,” altotrain.ca, page reviewed July 2026. altotrain.ca

ALTO, “Fast Forward: Shaping Canada’s Future with a High-Speed Train,” the explanatory document referenced from the benefits page.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, ridership envelope modelling — central estimates: ALTO ~9.2M (2055) / ~12.5M (2080); HPPR ~8.2M (2055) / ~10.4M (2080).

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, lifecycle carbon analysis — ALTO net +15 Mt CO₂e over fifty years; HPPR net sink.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, ECI/CFI cost model (ALTO ~$143M/km central; HPPR spine ~$28–40M/km) and benefit-cost analysis (ALTO ~0.06 on the Initiative’s cost and ~0.1 on ALTO’s own $60–90B; HPPR ~0.44).

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, “The Anatomy of an Optimistic Forecast” and “A Straighter Line,” citizenresearch.ca.

Bent Flyvbjerg, on optimism bias and reference-class forecasting in the appraisal of major infrastructure projects.

July 9, 2026

The more you look

The More You Look, the Worse It Gets — ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative

The More You Look, the Worse It Gets

Thirty studies of high-speed rail in this corridor, across fifty-six years. One simple pattern runs through all of them.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · A plain-language guide to the record · 2026 · Working synthesis

⚠ The bottom line, up front

The people building the railway say it will pay for itself. The one independent study in 2026 that actually checked the math — using the builders’ own cost estimates — found a hole of about $53 billion over fifty years.

That’s not a fluke. It’s the pattern. For fifty-six years, the case for this railway has looked best in exactly the studies with the most to gain from building it.

In one minute

We read thirty major studies of high-speed rail in this corridor, from 1970 to today, and asked every one the same set of questions — with all the dollar figures put on a level footing.

The verdict almost always matches who paid for the study. Equipment makers, the proponent and paid advocates say build it. Independent governments say wait. And every single study that actually runs the finances finds the same thing: ticket sales can’t cover the cost, so the public pays most of the bill.

The numbers that look great — low costs, huge ridership, big climate wins — come from the promoters. The numbers that survive an independent look are far more sober. The closer and more independent the analysis, the weaker the case.

Read the full report

Corridor Rail Studies, 1970–2026 — A Cross-Decade Analysis

Thirty studies, thirty-four dimensions, nine findings, with the full evidence tables

Download PDF

How we know

Thirty studies. Same questions. Fifty-six years.

We didn’t cherry-pick. We took thirty of the major studies of this railway — going right back to a 1970 federal commission — and put the same 34 questions to all of them, so the answers line up side by side across the decades.

major studies of this railway, read into one matrix

1970–2026

questions asked of every single study

so the answers compare

years of studies, all priced in today’s dollars

a level playing field

The studies come from every side: equipment makers, government task forces, a Crown corporation, universities, Transport Canada, and the builders themselves. That range is the whole point — it lets us tell a real change in the corridor apart from a change in who’s doing the asking.

What we found

Nine things every reader should know

Read across all thirty studies, nine patterns keep showing up. Here they are in plain terms.

1The answer depends on who paid for the study

Line up the verdicts and it’s impossible to miss. The build-it studies come from equipment makers, from a Crown corporation that wanted to run the trains, from the proponent, and from paid advocates. Every independent government that looked said wait. Building new is the sponsors’ answer — not what fifty-six years of evidence actually points to.

2It has never paid for itself. Not once.

Every study that runs the money lands in the same spot: fares can’t cover the cost, and taxpayers foot most of the bill. VIA’s own 1984 numbers came out negative. In 1995, three governments agreed the public would cover 70–75%. In 2026, an independent model put the public subsidy at about $53 billion over fifty years — and found the railway wouldn’t even break even until year 44. The promise that it’ll fund itself is the single most optimistic claim in the whole record.

3The closer you look, the more it costs

Whenever a promoter and an independent body price the same thing, the promoter’s number is lower — and the price climbs as the estimate gets more serious. A 2026 advocacy paper gets the cost down to $63 billion only by assuming rock-bottom construction prices, about a third of our own central estimate of roughly $143 million per kilometre. The cheaper the headline, the thinner the math underneath it.

4The ridership numbers don’t hold up

The passenger forecasts are shakier than they look — and academics, an airline, Parliament and Transport Canada have all said so. One 1994 study showed the forecast could swing fivefold just by changing a single modelling choice, on the same data. Transport Canada’s own reviewers called the assumptions “optimistic and aggressive.” And the biggest numbers always belong to the promoters.

5The freight idea is good — with one catch

Splitting passengers and freight onto the corridor’s two parallel tracks, and freeing up freight capacity as a bonus, is a genuinely sound idea — it was proposed back in 2002. The catch: at the time, the freight railways said they didn’t need the extra capacity. It’s a strong argument, as long as it’s honest about that condition.

6Going faster barely helps

Study after study finds that top speed buys almost no extra riders — one found just an 8% jump going all the way from 300 to 400 km/h, another only about 9% from 200 to 300. So the level-headed studies settle far lower: a 2002 plan judged 240 km/h fast enough, and even the independent 2026 model assumes trains averaging just 200–250 km/h. The “top speed everywhere” designs are the outliers — a moderate railway of roughly 180–240 km/h carries nearly the same riders for far less money, and that’s where the evidence actually sits.

7We’ve seen this financing risk before

Having a private partner build and run the railway while the public owns the assets isn’t new — and neither is the warning. Both Parliament (1998) and Transport Canada (2003) flagged the same danger decades ago: deals like this can hand the risk to taxpayers and the reward to investors, with a rosy headline resting on one convenient assumption.

8The climate math only counts the good half

For decades, no study counted carbon at all. Now they do — but only the savings from getting people out of cars and planes. The huge emissions from pouring hundreds of kilometres of concrete and steel and clearing land? Left out. Count both sides honestly and this design adds emissions for decades. That’s the difference between a climate win and a climate cost.

9When the numbers fail, out comes “nation-building”

There’s a move that shows up again and again: when the dollars-and-cents case comes up short, in come national unity, regional growth, and keeping up with other countries. One 2016 report recommended extending the line even at a benefit-cost ratio of 0.24 — about 24 cents of benefit for every dollar spent. These arguments can be fair. But they do the heaviest lifting exactly where the economics are weakest.

The gap, side by side

What the promoters say vs. what independent studies find

All nine findings come down to one contrast. Same railway, same engineering — but the promoters’ numbers and the independent record split apart at every point that matters, and they split the same way every time.

What the promoters say	What independent studies find
Build it new. Equipment makers, a Crown corporation that wanted the contract, the proponent, and paid advocates all say go ahead.	Wait. Every independent government that studied it held off; the reviews and the airlines said upgrade what’s there instead.
The verdict:Build vs Wait
It’ll pay for itself. The 2025 prospectus says the trains will turn a profit — the rosiest claim in fifty-six years.	Taxpayers pay most of it. From 1984 to 2026, every study that runs the money says fares can’t cover the cost. The 2026 independent model: about $53 billion in public subsidy over fifty years.
The money:Self-funding vs ~$53B public
As low as $63 billion. A 2026 paper reaches that number by assuming bargain construction prices.	More like $80–90 billion. The proponent’s own range tops out at $90 billion; independent build-ups land near $80 billion. Costs rise the closer you look.
Price tag:~$63B vs ~$80–90B
24 to 56 million riders. The 2025–2026 figures are the highest ever produced for this line.	About half that. The only recent independent, survey-based forecast lands near 10 million a year — right in line with fifty years of history.
Yearly riders:~24–56M vs ~10M
A big climate win. The proponent headlines a 39-megatonne cut — counting only the savings from fewer car and plane trips.	A climate cost, for decades. The emissions from building it — concrete, steel, cleared land — are left out entirely. Count both sides and it adds emissions.
On carbon:Half the ledger vs The whole ledger

Ridership

Same railway. Forecasts from 6 million to 56 million.

Put the passenger forecasts next to each other and they span almost tenfold — for one railway line. The high numbers always come from the promoters. The one to trust is the recent independent forecast built on an actual survey of travellers.

~10M

independent, survey-based forecast for 2050

McGill, 2026

24–43M

the proponent’s own forecast

ALTO prospectus, 2025

42–56M

the highest numbers ever produced for this line

2026 advocacy paper

Study (year)	Who produced it	Yearly riders	Basis
Air Canada / CP (1993)	Airline / railway	5.8 M	the low end of the record
Task Force (1991)	Governments	7.8 M	full corridor
Tri-government (1995)	Governments	10–12 M	full corridor
EcoTrain (2011)	Governments	10–11 M	full corridor
Lynx (1998)	Private consortium	11.1 M	Québec City–Toronto
SNCF (2010)	Equipment maker	up to 22.5 M	best-case scenario
ALTO prospectus (2025)	Proponent	24–43 M	full network
Advocacy paper (2026)	Paid advocacy	42–56 M	the highest ever
McGill (2026)	Independent	~10 M	survey-based, 2050

Study (year)

Who produced it

Yearly riders

Basis

Air Canada / CP (1993)

Airline / railway

5.8 M

the low end of the record

Task Force (1991)

Governments

7.8 M

full corridor

Tri-government (1995)

Governments

10–12 M

full corridor

EcoTrain (2011)

Governments

10–11 M

full corridor

Lynx (1998)

Private consortium

11.1 M

Québec City–Toronto

SNCF (2010)

Equipment maker

up to 22.5 M

best-case scenario

ALTO prospectus (2025)

Proponent

24–43 M

full network

Advocacy paper (2026)

Paid advocacy

42–56 M

the highest ever

McGill (2026)

Independent

~10 M

survey-based, 2050

The numbers aren’t perfectly apples-to-apples — they cover different routes and years — which is part of the point. The takeaway is simple: the independent, survey-based forecast is about half the proponent’s.

What it means

Five takeaways

The current project sits right at the meeting point of every pattern above. The prospectus is the most upbeat sales pitch in the whole record. The most careful independent 2026 work finds a multi-billion-dollar hole. And the one favourable outside verdict is reached only by pairing the cheapest possible construction cost with the highest ridership ever forecast for the line. Here’s what that adds up to.

What the record points to

Building new from scratch is the sponsors’ pick, not the safe reading of history. Fifty-six years of evidence leans toward upgrading what exists — or waiting for a full, honest costing.

Expect the public to pay most of it. Three governments said 70–75% back in 1995, and every financial study since has landed in the same place.

A moderate-speed, lower-cost railway fits the evidence better. Extra speed barely adds riders, and costs balloon the closer you look. Both have been true for decades.

What to insist on

Get the ridership numbers independently checked before trusting them. A single forecast from the people who want to build it isn’t enough — the best studies in the record always used more than one independent forecaster.

Make the freight case — but be upfront about the catch. The idea is sound; its real value depends on the freight railways actually wanting the freed-up capacity. Say so plainly.

The evidence

All thirty studies, at a glance

Here’s the whole set, oldest to newest. Read the two right-hand columns together — who did the study, and what they concluded — and Finding 1 jumps out: the “build it” verdicts belong to the sellers and the promoters; the governments that were truly independent said wait.

Year	Study — who did it	Independent of the builder?	Verdict
1970	Intercity Passenger Transport Study — CTC	Federal	Upgrade
1984	High-Speed Passenger Rail in Canada — VIA	Crown corp	Mixed
1990	Review of Previous Studies — TRANSURB	Consultant	Wait
1990	A Pragmatic Approach (SPRINTOR) — ABB	Equipment maker	Upgrade
1990	The Canadian TGV Project — Bombardier / GEC Alsthom	Equipment maker	Build new
1991	Rapid Train Task Force — Ontario / Québec	Governments	Wait
1991	Competition in Rail Carriage — Berkowitz	Academic	Build new
1992	FAST TRACKS — VIA (advocacy)	Crown corp	Build new
1993	HST Market Assessment — Air Canada / CP	Airline / railway	Upgrade
1994	Demand-model re-estimate — Gaudry & Le Leyzour	Academic	No verdict
1995	Industrial Strategy (Vol II) — Simpson-Guerin	Consultant	No verdict
1995	Routing & Costing Study — SNC-Lavalin / Delcan	Consultant	No verdict
1995	Québec–Ontario HSR, Final Report — tri-gov	Governments	Wait
1998	The Lynx Proposal — Lynx consortium	Private consortium	Build new
2002	VIAFast — VIA Rail	Crown corp	Upgrade
2003	VIAFast validation — IBI for Transport Canada	Gov’t reviewer	No verdict
2009	Infrastructure and the Economy — Martin Prosperity Inst.	Academic	Build new
2010	Socio-Economic Study of HSR — SNCF	Equipment maker	Build new
2011	Updated Feasibility (EcoTrain) — tri-government	Governments	Wait
2014	Toronto–Kitchener–London HSR — Schabas	Consultant	Build new
2015	Future of Passenger Rail — Library of Parliament	Parliament / indep.	Upgrade
2016	Preliminary Business Case — SDG (Steer)	Consultant	Build new
2016	High Speed Rail in Ontario — Special Advisor	Provincial	Build new
2021	Toronto–Montreal Analysis — Munk School	Academic	Build new
2022	Speed and Frequency — Alstom	Equipment maker	Build new
2025	All Aboard — C.D. Howe Institute	Advocacy	Build new
2025	Fast Forward — ALTO (the proponent)	Proponent	Build new
2026	Conceptual Design & Business Case — Schabas	Advocacy	Build new
2026	Corridorwide Survey & Financial Analysis — McGill	Academic	No verdict
2026	Eastern Ontario Route (Hwy 401) — Schabas & Antinucci	Advocacy	Build new

Year

Study — who did it

Independent of the builder?

Verdict

1970

Intercity Passenger Transport Study — CTC

Federal

Upgrade

1984

High-Speed Passenger Rail in Canada — VIA

Crown corp

Mixed

1990

Review of Previous Studies — TRANSURB

Consultant

Wait

1990

A Pragmatic Approach (SPRINTOR) — ABB

Equipment maker

Upgrade

1990

The Canadian TGV Project — Bombardier / GEC Alsthom

Equipment maker

Build new

1991

Rapid Train Task Force — Ontario / Québec

Governments

Wait

1991

Competition in Rail Carriage — Berkowitz

Academic

Build new

1992

FAST TRACKS — VIA (advocacy)

Crown corp

Build new

1993

HST Market Assessment — Air Canada / CP

Airline / railway

Upgrade

1994

Demand-model re-estimate — Gaudry & Le Leyzour

Academic

No verdict

1995

Industrial Strategy (Vol II) — Simpson-Guerin

Consultant

No verdict

1995

Routing & Costing Study — SNC-Lavalin / Delcan

Consultant

No verdict

1995

Québec–Ontario HSR, Final Report — tri-gov

Governments

Wait

1998

The Lynx Proposal — Lynx consortium

Private consortium

Build new

2002

VIAFast — VIA Rail

Crown corp

Upgrade

2003

VIAFast validation — IBI for Transport Canada

Gov’t reviewer

No verdict

2009

Infrastructure and the Economy — Martin Prosperity Inst.

Academic

Build new

2010

Socio-Economic Study of HSR — SNCF

Equipment maker

Build new

2011

Updated Feasibility (EcoTrain) — tri-government

Governments

Wait

2014

Toronto–Kitchener–London HSR — Schabas

Consultant

Build new

2015

Future of Passenger Rail — Library of Parliament

Parliament / indep.

Upgrade

2016

Preliminary Business Case — SDG (Steer)

Consultant

Build new

2016

High Speed Rail in Ontario — Special Advisor

Provincial

Build new

2021

Toronto–Montreal Analysis — Munk School

Academic

Build new

2022

Speed and Frequency — Alstom

Equipment maker

Build new

2025

All Aboard — C.D. Howe Institute

Advocacy

Build new

2025

Fast Forward — ALTO (the proponent)

Proponent

Build new

2026

Conceptual Design & Business Case — Schabas

Advocacy

Build new

2026

Corridorwide Survey & Financial Analysis — McGill

Academic

No verdict

2026

Eastern Ontario Route (Hwy 401) — Schabas & Antinucci

Advocacy

Build new

“Advocacy” means a document written to argue a case — a sales prospectus, a think-tank brief, or paid expert advocacy. “No verdict” means the study analysed the question but didn’t take a build/don’t-build position.

The independent studies to trust

Where the sober numbers come from

The full list is above. If you read just a few, read the independent ones — the counterweight to the sales pitch.

Québec–Ontario High Speed Rail Project, Final Report — three governments together, 1995. Concluded the public would cover 70–75% of the cost, and a private-only version couldn’t be financed.

VIAFast validation — IBI Group for Transport Canada, 2003. The government’s own reviewers, who flagged “optimistic and aggressive” ridership assumptions.

Updated Feasibility Study (EcoTrain) — three governments, 2011. The most recent independent-government study; it said wait.

Future of Passenger Rail in Canada — Library of Parliament, 2015. Recommended upgrading service rather than building new.

Corridorwide Survey & Financial Analysis — Transportation Research at McGill, 2026. The independent study behind the $53-billion subsidy figure and the ~10-million ridership forecast.

July 6, 2026

Tag: High Performance Rail

Where you put a railway decides almost everything else

1. Carbon: the two routes have opposite signs

2. Habitat: a new barrier in the wrong place

The Frontenac Arch

The Napanee Limestone Plain

3. Construction: where the trucks go

4. Communities: friction is priced into the cost

One thing that cuts the other way

5. What the corridor could give back

How to read the numbers on this page

Sources and notes

Where the line goes, and what it costs

Is the corridor still available?

Take the speed the ground gives you

The reversal at the heart of the chapter

Where the ground is generous, the trains go fast

Where it isn’t, they go slower

What it would cost, and what we commit against

Three and a half times the price per kilometre

What the speed difference actually buys

What the corridor is in 2125

Two incompatible traffic types share one corridor

North America and Europe run railways in opposite ways

CN is constrained, and its problem is capacity—not speed

What about CP? It runs on its own track

Entanglement: two traffic types, one track

Freight trains

Passenger trains

Separation: give each traffic type its own path

Build one, make one free: the dual-asset structure

The freight dividend: how the freed capacity translates to real benefits

The host railway (CN)

Shippers and supply chain

The public

Why ALTO cannot capture the freight dividend

The concept in eight parts

3.1 — North America runs the opposite railway

3.2 — CN is the incumbent, and it is constrained

3.3 — CP is not a party to the conflict

3.4 — Entanglement is the root cause

3.5 — Separation is the design principle

3.6 — Build one, make one free

3.7 — HPFR lands on a motivated beneficiary

3.8 — ALTO cannot capture it

Deconstructing the Megaproject Playbook

The iron law of megaprojects

Honest mistakes and strategic misrepresentation

Optimism bias — the honest mistake

Strategic misrepresentation — telling people what they want to hear

Where ALTO sits on the scale

Why “it’s different this time” doesn’t hold up

Why standard contingency budgets fall short

Checking the numbers against the real-world record

What it costs

How many people would ride it

Canada’s changed circumstances

What’s in the rest of this report

Would an ALTO Stop Help Kingston?

Six versions of Kingston’s railway

Why Kingston already rides the train

It gets two sets of trains, not one

The station serves a region, not a city

The population is unusually inclined to take the train

But that ridership is hard to charge a premium for

Two things worth being clear about

How the numbers were worked out

Two possible futures for today’s trains

Replacement

Both together

What is assumed rather than known

Where the speed gain goes

More trains cannot fix it on its own

The fare premium matters more than the timetable

How many trains would it actually take?

What if you just made today’s trains faster?

The comparison that matters

Speed gives diminishing returns

A conservative figure, and a warning

A stop is not the same as service