Tag: High Performance Rail

  • High cost, low benefit claim

    High Cost, Low Benefit — For Whom?

    An ALTO Vice-President says the rail alternative would cost about as much as high-speed rail without the benefits. The government’s own record — and ALTO’s own document — say otherwise.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Analysis · June 2026
    In short

    In a recent public video, an ALTO Vice-President argues that high-frequency rail would still need dedicated track, would therefore cost about as much as high-speed rail, and would deliver less — a “high cost, low benefit” option. The claim runs against the public record. The government’s own reports costed a dedicated-track high-frequency railway far below high-speed rail, and judged it buildable in a fraction of the time. What shifted that cost to “similar” has never been made public.

    On the benefit side, ALTO’s case rests on ridership the international reference class does not support. Tested against ALTO’s own document and the Initiative’s financial analysis, the high-cost option turns out to be the one being built.

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    High Cost, Low Benefit — For Whom?
    The full research brief, with sources (PDF)
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    The Argument

    What the video claims

    The argument is a single chain. High-frequency rail, the video says, is often presented as the cheaper alternative — but it would still require new dedicated track, so its cost would rise to roughly that of high-speed rail, while delivering lower travel-time, ridership, and economic benefits. The conclusion offered to viewers is that high-frequency rail is a “high cost, low benefit” option, while high-speed rail delivers both speed and frequency.

    It is a clean story. Two problems sit beneath it before any single figure is examined.

    It claims a cost convergence the record contradicts

    The video is right that high-frequency rail needs dedicated track — it does not claim trains would share track with freight. Its claim is that building that dedicated track pushes the cost up to roughly high-speed rail’s. The government’s own reports say otherwise, on both cost and time. A dedicated-track, electrified high-frequency railway was costed at $27.7 billion in the December 2021 Business Case — and roughly $4–6 billion in its original 2016 form — and judged buildable in about four years. High-speed rail is now costed at $60–90 billion, on a build horizon stretching into the 2040s. What evidence moved high-frequency rail’s cost and schedule up to “similar” has never been explained, and no side-by-side comparison has been made public.

    It never engages the alternative the Initiative proposes

    The video treats high-frequency rail as the only alternative to high-speed rail. The Initiative’s proposal is different again: High Performance Rail (HPR) builds dedicated passenger track along existing transportation corridors — such as the CN right-of-way and the Highway 401 — and frees the Kingston Subdivision for freight. It is neither the government’s old high-frequency plan nor ALTO’s high-speed one, and ALTO has never assessed it.

    Tested Against the Record

    Three claims, three answers

    $27.7B
    what a dedicated-track high-frequency railway was costed at — against $60–90B for high-speed rail
    2021 JPO Business Case
    5×
    the cost-per-kilometre gap between ALTO and High Performance Rail in the Initiative’s model
    $142M vs $28M per km
    0.11
    ALTO’s central benefit-cost ratio — well below the 1.0 that marks a project that pays its way
    Initiative methodology paper

    The video makes three factual claims — on cost, on speed, and on benefit. Each can be checked against ALTO’s own published document and the Initiative’s analysis.

    The claim in the videoWhat the record shows
    “It would cost on a similar scale to high-speed rail.” Contradicted by the public record. The government’s own 2021 Business Case put a dedicated-track high-frequency railway at $27.7 billion, against ALTO’s $60–90 billion. Even ALTO’s own Annex B places its “conventional rail” comparator 20–30% below high-speed rail. The Initiative’s reference-class model — a regression across more than forty international projects — puts ALTO at $142M/km and HPR at $28M/km, a five-fold gap. “Similar scale” holds on none of these.
    “Without significantly faster travel times.” Conventional speed already captures most of the benefit. A 177 km/h dedicated-track service was set to cut Toronto–Ottawa from over four hours to about two hours fifty. By ALTO’s own travel-time table, going to 300 km/h saves only a further 17 minutes on Toronto–Ottawa, 19 on Ottawa–Montréal, and 25 on Montréal–Québec. Most of the time saving comes from leaving freight-priority track — not from the extra speed.
    “Lower ridership and reduced economic benefits.” The benefit case rests on ridership the reference class does not support. ALTO’s 24-million-trip target sits outside the achievable modal-shift frontier of 5–12 million annual riders. No operating posture is subsidy-free; each requires roughly $1–3.5 billion per year. The central benefit-cost ratio is about 0.11. The “high benefit” half of the slogan is the half that does not survive checking.
    A Note on the Travel Times

    Estimated, not simulated

    There is a further problem with the speed claim, separate from how small the gain is. The faster journey times were never modelled for this corridor at all. A government record released under the Access to Information Act (file A-2025-00333) shows that the project office produced a detailed RailSys simulation only for the 177 km/h base case. Every faster journey time was a spreadsheet estimate, benchmarked to average speeds on intercity railways in other countries — described in the project’s own memorandum as “for information and comparison purposes” and left to be refined later.

    In other words, the under-three-hour trips that make high-speed rail attractive have no corridor-specific engineering behind them in the released record. The one number anyone actually drove through a model of the real line is the slow one.

    Read the full record

    The Initiative examines this in detail — the two methods, the journey-time tables, and how the speed ceiling was set as a policy target — in a companion research note, Estimated, Not Simulated, based on the same Access to Information release.

    The Carbon Case

    A carbon debt, not a carbon saving

    The video folds environmental benefit into ALTO’s column, on the assumption that faster, higher-ridership rail is the greener choice. The Initiative’s 50-year lifecycle analysis finds the opposite once construction and a decarbonising vehicle fleet are counted. ALTO’s build is a large one-time carbon debt before a single passenger boards — about 14.7 Mt CO₂e in the central construction estimate — and with fifty years of operations the lifecycle total lands at roughly 24 to 27 Mt CO₂e on Ontario’s current grid, and as much as 34 Mt if the grid leans more on gas.

    That debt only counts as a saving if the trips it captures would otherwise have been higher-carbon — and the payback math is unforgiving. At the ridership the corridor is most likely to see in its early years, around 4 million passengers a year, no scenario repays the construction debt within a credible horizon. Even at mature ridership, payback runs from a few decades to more than five hundred years, depending on how clean the grid is.

    The comparison only worsens with time. By the 2040s, when ALTO might open, much of the car fleet will be electric — and an electric car carrying 1.2 people already emits about 10 g CO₂e per passenger-kilometre, below ALTO’s all-in emissions at every ridership level on today’s grid. Diverting existing VIA Rail passengers, at roughly 25 g/pkm, saves nothing at all. ALTO’s carbon case rests on displacing gasoline cars and short-haul flights — not the fleet that will actually be on the road when it opens.

    Most of that debt is greenfield construction. An approach that runs on existing corridors — as High Performance Rail does — avoids the bulk of it, and the single largest carbon lever, shifting freight off congested track, is available whatever the trains’ speed or traction.

    Why the Gap Is Real

    The cost difference is structural, not arithmetic

    The five-fold difference in the Initiative’s model is not an accounting artefact. A 300 km/h design forces a new dedicated greenfield alignment — grade separation, gentle curves, continuous fencing, and large-scale land acquisition — through terrain that scores high on both engineering complexity and community friction. Both the government’s high-frequency plan and the Initiative’s HPR instead run on or alongside existing corridors, which is why each comes in well below the high-speed option. In the Initiative’s model, the gap between high-speed rail and HPR splits roughly evenly between physical engineering and community friction — the cost of the land, the disruption, and the opposition that a new high-speed right-of-way creates.

    The Bottom Line

    High cost, low benefit — for whom?

    The video’s thesis — that high-frequency rail is high cost and low benefit while high-speed rail delivers both — is contradicted by the government’s own record. High-frequency rail was a fully studied, dedicated-track plan, priced at $27.7 billion in 2021 and a fraction of that in its original form, and due to be carrying passengers now. The decision to replace it with a 300 km/h, $60–90-billion project was taken without a published comparison; the video supplies the missing conclusion after the fact.

    On the evidence available, the high-cost option is the one that was chosen. The lower-cost alternatives — the government’s own, and the Initiative’s — were set aside without being weighed in public. That is the question the slogan invites, turned back on itself: high cost, low benefit, for whom?

    Sources

    Primary documents

    1.
    ALTO, Fast Forward: Shaping Canada’s Future with a High-Speed Rail Network (March 2025) — cost ranges, travel times, and ridership targets, main text and Annex B. altotrain.ca
    2.
    Joint Project Office High Frequency Rail Project, Business Case Update, V.002 (December 10, 2021) — dedicated-track design, $27.7 billion costing, and four-year construction estimate.
    3.
    The Globe and Mail, “Transport Canada reviewing studies on Via Rail expansion” (July 2017) — the original 2016 high-frequency concept at roughly $4–6 billion. theglobeandmail.com
    4.
    “VIA HFR-TGF Journey Times” memorandum and accompanying email chain (August–September 2023), released under the Access to Information Act as file A-2025-00333 — simulated base case versus estimated higher-speed times.
    5.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, ALTO Financial Analysis (methodology paper and supporting research notes) — cost-per-kilometre model, ridership frontier, subsidy spectrum, benefit-cost ratio, and lifecycle carbon. ALTO-Financial-Analysis.pdf
    6.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, 50-Year Lifecycle CO₂ Budget — Parametric Analysis (March 2026) — construction, operational, payback, and modal-comparison figures, drawing on HS2, UIC, and international HSR lifecycle studies.
    7.
    Statements examined: public video by an ALTO Vice-President (June 2026).
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Analysis  ·  June 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • Modal shift synthesis

    ALTO Ridership Against the Modal-Shift Evidence

    What the published 24-million target implies for how many travellers must abandon air and car for the train — and what the modal-shift evidence, the demographic baseline, and the operating-subsidy frontier say is actually reachable on the corridor.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Modal Shift & Ridership Brief · Published May 2026
    ⚠ What This Brief Synthesises

    This brief draws together four CRI research notes — on rail–air substitution (Note 1), rail–car substitution (Note 2), the ALTO ridership envelope (Note 3), and the operating-subsidy frontier (Note 4) — into a single test of one number: ALTO’s published target of 24 million annual passengers by 2055.

    Each note is built from the same starting point as the proponent’s own forecasts, but corrected for two things older studies omit: the North-American calibration of modal-shift behaviour, and the 2024 federal cap on non-permanent residents that broke the corridor’s demographic trajectory.

    Headline Finding

    ALTO’s published target of 24 million annual passengers by 2055 sits 2.6× above the CRI central case of 9.2 million, and is incompatible with every other independent forecast for the corridor.

    The gap is not a matter of optimism versus pessimism. Reaching 24M requires a modal share above the ceiling the modal-shift curves allow in a North-American setting; it assumes a population trajectory the federal government’s own immigration policy has already foreclosed; and pushing ridership toward the target through deeply discounted fares drives operating subsidy past $5 billion a year. The target fails three independent feasibility tests at once.

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    ALTO Ridership Against the Modal-Shift Evidence — Full Slide Deck (PDF)
    Seven slides synthesising the modal-shift S-curves, the price families, the 2055 ridership envelope, and the three-test verdict on the 24-million target
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    The Four Underlying Notes
    The Question

    How many people would actually have to switch?

    A ridership target is, underneath, a claim about behaviour. To carry 24 million passengers a year, the corridor must persuade a very large share of the people now flying or driving between Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City to take the train instead. That share — the modal shift — is the quantity every forecast turns on, and it is the quantity this brief examines first.

    Modal shift is not a free parameter. Decades of evidence from operating high-speed lines show it follows a predictable shape: rail captures most of the market on short, fast journeys and loses it on long ones, with a sharp transition in between. The question for ALTO is not whether modal shift happens — it plainly does — but how high the curve can realistically reach on this corridor, in this country, at the fares the project would have to charge.

    Three forces set that ceiling: the journey-time geometry against air, the harder competition against the car in a North-American setting, and the price the traveller actually faces. The notes treat each in turn before combining them into a ridership envelope and testing the 24-million figure against it.

    Note 1 · Rail vs Air

    Modal shift versus air follows a logistic S-curve

    Against air, rail’s market share is governed almost entirely by station-to-station journey time. The relationship is a logistic S-curve: below about two hours rail dominates, between two and four hours the two modes compete and infrastructure quality is decisive, and beyond about five hours rail share collapses to only the price-sensitive or rail-loyal traveller. The inflection point — where rail and air split the market evenly — sits at roughly 3.5 hours.

    < 2 h
    Rail dominates — near-full capture of the rail+air market
    2–4 h
    Competitive zone — 60–80% rail share, infrastructure decisive
    > 5 h
    Rail share collapses — only price-sensitive or rail-loyal travellers

    This is not theory. The world’s operating high-speed lines trace the same curve, and they are the empirical anchors the note is calibrated against:

    • Paris–Lyon (TGV): rail share rose from 40% to 72% after high-speed service opened.
    • Madrid–Barcelona (AVE): roughly 75% rail share at a 2 h 30 min journey time.
    • Madrid–Seville: rail share rose from 16% to 52%.
    • Beijing–Shanghai: 1,318 km covered in 4 h 18 min, rail-dominant despite the distance.

    For ALTO, the implication is straightforward: the air-substitution share the corridor can win is bounded by where each city-pair sits on this curve. Pairs that fall inside the two-to-four-hour competitive zone can deliver strong rail capture; pairs that fall outside it cannot, regardless of how the target is set.

    Note 2 · Rail vs Car

    Modal shift versus the car is harder in North America

    The car is the larger and more stubborn competitor, and here the North-American context shifts the whole curve against rail. The note re-calibrates the rail-vs-car S-curve on VIA Rail’s observed performance — a rail share of roughly 13% against road — and finds the inflection point moves sharply left: from τ = 0.65 in the European setting to τ = 0.46 in the North-American one, a 19-point shift.

    Why North America shifts the curve

    Toll-free highways run the 401/A20 corridor end to end. Fuel taxes are roughly one-third of European levels. There is no congestion charging anywhere in Canada. And family-car economics are decisive: per-person car cost divides among the occupants, while rail charges per ticket.

    What this does to predicted share

    The same corridor that would capture a healthy rail share in Europe captures materially less here. The gap between the European and North-American readings is the single largest correction separating the CRI work from the older forecasts.

    Carried through to the ALTO city-pairs, the North-American calibration produces predicted rail shares of the rail+car market that sit well below the European equivalents:

    • ALTO Toronto–Ottawa (τ ≈ 0.44): about 51% North-American versus 67% European.
    • ALTO Toronto–Montreal (τ ≈ 0.56): about 41% North-American versus 58% European.
    • HPR on both pairs (τ ≈ 0.65–0.67): about 33% North-American versus 50% European.

    The lesson is that a forecast borrowed from European experience — as the older studies effectively are — systematically overstates how much of the road market the corridor can win. The car does not behave here the way it behaves there.

    Notes 1 & 2 · Price

    Price shifts the whole modal-shift curve

    Journey time fixes the shape of the S-curve; price selects which curve in the family the corridor actually sits on. The relevant variable is the fare-to-comparator price ratio (r) — rail’s price relative to the air fare or the per-person car cost it competes with. A lower ratio lifts the entire curve; a higher ratio depresses it.

    Elasticity differs by mode

    Road–rail substitution is more price-sensitive than air–rail (γ = 1.5 versus 1.0). Travellers deciding between train and car respond more sharply to fare changes than those choosing between train and plane.

    Group travel hurts rail

    Per-person car cost divides among the occupants; rail charges per ticket. A family of four therefore faces an effective price ratio roughly four times higher than a solo traveller — pushing them down the curve toward the car.

    The note maps three fare regimes onto the curve family. Regime A (r ≈ 0.55) is deeply discounted, lifting share but requiring heavy subsidy. Regime B (r ≈ 1.0) sets fares at parity with air. Regime C (r ≈ 1.4) prices above the comparator. Each selects a different curve — and, as Note 4 shows, a different point on the subsidy frontier. The crucial consequence is that the high-share outcomes the 24-million target needs are only available at the discounted end, where the fares no longer cover the cost of carrying the passenger.

    Note 3 · The Ridership Envelope

    The 2055 envelope is 3.7 to 17.2 million

    Combining the modal-shift ceiling with the corridor’s demographics produces a ridership envelope, not a single number. The framework is deliberately transparent: ridership = population × per-capita trips × modal share × ramp-up. Each input is drawn from published data and stated openly.

    9.2M
    CRI central case at 2055, Regime B (fares at parity with air)
    3.7–17.2M
    Full 2055 ridership envelope across regimes and demographic paths
    24M
    ALTO’s published target — 2.6× the central case

    The demographic inputs are post-2024 and this is where the CRI analysis departs most sharply from the others. The corridor population is 14.9 million (2025), residents make about 1.68 intercity trips each, and StatCan’s low / medium / high growth scenarios run at 0.5% / 1.0% / 1.6% per year. Critically, these trajectories reflect the 2024 federal cap on non-permanent residents — a structural break the older forecasts predate.

    Under Regime B, the central reading is 9.2 million in 2055, rising to a central 12.5 million by 2080 within an 8.9–18.3 million envelope. ALTO’s 24-million target sits above the top of the 2055 envelope entirely — not at its optimistic edge, but beyond it.

    Ridership envelope chart for the ALTO corridor, 2030 to 2080, showing upper, central and lower demographic trajectories under Regime B against ALTO's 24-million target
    Regime B ridership envelope, 2030–2080. The central demographic path reaches 9.2M in 2055 and 12.5M in 2080; the ALTO target of 24M (2055) sits above the upper bound of the envelope. Figure from Note 3 — Ridership envelope for the ALTO corridor.
    Note 3 · The Comparison

    The 24M target is the outlier

    Set against the independent literature, the pattern is unambiguous: every other forecast clusters near the CRI central case, and the 24-million target stands alone above all of them. The reason the CRI figure sits lower than the academic studies is not methodological pessimism — it is one correction the others have not made.

    The immigration inflection

    The 2024–25 federal cap on non-permanent residents broke the corridor’s demographic trajectory, lowering the central forecast relative to pre-2024 expectations. Only the CRI analysis incorporates the NPR cap.

    Pre-cap demographics elsewhere

    All the independent forecasts — including the 2025 McGill and C.D. Howe studies — rest on pre-2024 population assumptions. They model a population surge that federal policy has since foreclosed.

    Structural travel decline

    Hybrid work and AI-mediated meetings structurally reduce corridor business travel below the pre-2020 baseline — a head-wind absent from the older forecasts entirely.

    In other words, the daylight between ALTO’s target and the independent consensus is not a disagreement about how good high-speed rail is. It is the difference between forecasts built on a demographic future that is no longer the official plan and a forecast built on the one that is.

    The Verdict

    The 24-million target fails three independent feasibility tests

    Each note tests the target from a different direction. The target does not fail one of them narrowly — it fails all three, and each failure is sufficient on its own.

    1

    Modal-shift framework

    Reaching 24M requires a modal share above the 40 per cent ceiling implied by the North-American-calibrated S-curves in Notes 1 and 2. Even ALTO’s heaviest-subsidy regime, with deeply discounted fares, plateaus near 11–12 million annual riders at the modal-shift ceiling.

    2

    Demographic baseline

    The 2024 federal Immigration Levels Plan capped non-permanent residents, producing a structural break in corridor population growth. Pre-2024 forecasts assumed continued surge; post-2024 trajectories are materially lower. 15–25 per cent of the gap to ALTO is demographic alone.

    3

    Subsidy frontier

    Pushing past Regime A toward 24M requires operating subsidy above $5 billion per year, with full federal cost approaching $7 billion per year under the proponent’s own $75B capex base case — outside any defensible operating-regime choice on the corridor.

    Side by Side

    Three tests, one number

    Read together, the three tests converge from independent premises on the same conclusion. They are not three versions of one argument; they are three different constraints, each of which the target violates.

    Modal-shift ceiling

    Limit:~40% share ceiling (NA-calibrated)

    Reaches:~11–12M even at heaviest subsidy

    vs 24M?Falls short by half

    Demographic baseline

    Limit:Post-2024 NPR cap; 0.5–1.6%/yr growth

    Reaches:9.2M central; 3.7–17.2M envelope

    vs 24M?Above the upper bound

    Subsidy frontier

    Limit:Defensible operating regimes (A–C)

    Reaches:24M needs >$5B/yr operating subsidy

    vs 24M?Outside any defensible regime

    The convergence is the point. A target that merely sat at the optimistic edge of one analysis could be defended as ambition. A target that exceeds the modal-shift ceiling, sits above the demographic envelope, and requires an indefensible operating subsidy is not ambitious — it is, on the evidence of all four notes, 2.6× above what the corridor can carry.

    For the next federal statement

    Three questions to ask

    Where the next federal or proponent statement on ALTO ridership is concerned — whether in a business case, a consultation report, or a public communication — three questions follow directly from the notes.

    1. On modal share: What rail share of the rail+air and rail+car markets does the 24-million target assume on each city-pair, and is that share calibrated on North-American or European travel behaviour?
    2. On demographics: Does the ridership forecast incorporate the 2024 federal cap on non-permanent residents, or does it rest on pre-2024 population assumptions that the cap has since superseded?
    3. On subsidy: At the fare level required to reach the target, what is the projected annual operating subsidy — and how does it compare with the $5 billion-plus the subsidy frontier implies under the proponent’s own capex base case?

    None of these questions presupposes opposition to passenger rail, which is a widely shared public good. Each asks only that the project reconcile its headline number with the same evidence base — modal-shift behaviour, the demographic baseline, and the operating economics — that every other forecast for the corridor is built on.

    Download Full Deck
    ALTO Ridership Against the Modal-Shift Evidence (PDF)
    Reference deck for federal decision-makers, parliamentarians, journalists, and residents along the corridor
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    Where Things Stand

    Two numbers, one of them public

    As of May 2026, ALTO’s public ridership figure is 24 million annual passengers by 2055. The independent evidence base — modal-shift behaviour calibrated to North America, a demographic baseline corrected for the 2024 immigration cap, and an operating-subsidy frontier built from the proponent’s own cost figures — places the corridor’s central case at 9.2 million. The two numbers are not a matter of optimism versus caution. The lower one incorporates evidence the higher one omits, and only the higher one has been put to the public.

    Sources

    Underlying notes and references

    1.
    Note 1 — Modal shift between high-speed rail and air on the ALTO corridor. ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative. Source of the logistic rail–air S-curve, the 3.5-hour inflection, the short-haul / competitive-zone / long-haul thresholds, and the Paris–Lyon, Madrid–Barcelona, Madrid–Seville and Beijing–Shanghai empirical anchors.
    2.
    Note 2 — Modal shift between rail and car on the ALTO corridor. ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative. Source of the North-American-calibrated rail–car S-curve anchored on VIA Rail’s ~13% road share, the inflection shift from τ = 0.65 (EU) to τ = 0.46 (NA), and the predicted rail shares for the Toronto–Ottawa, Toronto–Montreal and HPR city-pairs.
    3.
    Note 3 — Ridership envelope for the ALTO corridor, 2035–2080. ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative. Source of the ridership framework (population × per-capita trips × modal share × ramp-up), the post-2024 demographic inputs reflecting the federal NPR cap, the 9.2M central case, and the 3.7–17.2M envelope.
    4.
    Note 4 — Operating-subsidy frontier for the ALTO corridor. ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative. Source of the Regime A/B/C fare mapping, the subsidy frontier corrected to be operating-cost-consistent, and the >$5B/yr operating subsidy (~$7B/yr full federal cost) implied by pushing ridership toward 24M under the $75B capex base case.
    5.
    El-Geneidy, A., et al. Transportation Research at McGill (TRAM), McGill University (2025). Independent corridor ridership forecast built on pre-2024 population assumptions. tram.mcgill.ca
    6.
    C.D. Howe Institute (2025). Independent assessment of the high-speed rail corridor, using pre-2024 demographic inputs. cdhowe.org
    7.
    Statistics Canada — population projections (low-growth / medium / high-growth scenarios) and the corridor population base; and the 2024 Immigration Levels Plan establishing the cap on non-permanent residents. statcan.gc.ca
    8.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative companion briefs: Reading the Answer (cost, ridership and subsidy claims) and The Report That Vanished. This brief is intended to be read alongside them.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Modal Shift & Ridership Brief  ·  May 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • Modal shift HSR car

    Citizen Research Initiative · Modal Shift Analysis · Note 2

    Modal Shift Between Rail and Car on the ALTO Corridor

    The car competes with rail at every distance, costs are weighed on fuel rather than full economics, and a full car of four tilts the comparison decisively toward driving. Why North American road–rail substitution is structurally harder — and how much of it ALTO’s speed actually buys.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Modal Shift Note 2 · Published May 2026
    ⚠ What This Note Examines

    This note applies the evidence on rail–car substitution to the two principal corridor pairs — Toronto–Ottawa and Toronto–Montréal — in the North American context, comparing current VIA Rail, a High Performance Rail (HPR) alternative at 200 km/h, and ALTO at 300+ km/h.

    The road–rail comparison differs structurally from the rail–air analysis in Note 1: the car carries no fixed access penalty, perceived driving cost is dominated by fuel rather than full lifecycle cost, group travel decisively favours the car, and modal choice is more responsive to price than to time.

    Summary

    The right competitive variable is not absolute rail time but the ratio τ of rail time to car drive time: τ = 0.5 means rail takes half as long as driving, τ = 1.0 means equal time. Because car drive time scales with distance, the same τ implies the same competitive geometry on any route length.

    The corridor’s road-substitutable demand is far larger than its air-substitutable demand — highway flow on the 401 between Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa and Montréal is several times the corridor’s annual air person-trips. Three structural features make North-American competition harder than European comparators: the 401/A20 is toll-free end-to-end, there is no congestion charging anywhere in Canada, and per-person car cost divides among occupants while rail charges per ticket. A family of four faces a per-person rail-to-car price ratio four times higher than a solo traveller.

    Under canonical conditions — solo traveller, current Canadian gas prices, near-parity pricing — on a North-American–calibrated curve anchored on VIA’s ~13% rail share, the model predicts ALTO captures about 51% of the rail+car market on Toronto–Ottawa and 41% on Toronto–Montréal; HPR captures about 33% on both. European-equivalent upper bounds — readings that would apply only if North American transport policy shifted toward European fuel taxes, tolls and station-area land use — are 67% and 58% for ALTO and around 50% for HPR.

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    Modal Shift Note 2 — Road–Rail Research Note (PDF)
    The full 26-page note with all eleven figures, the European and North-American calibrations, the group-size and gas-price levers, the reliability analysis, and the methodology and sources
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    1 · Travel Time

    The competitive zone for road

    The literature on rail–car substitution differs sharply from the rail–air literature. The car carries no fixed time penalty equivalent to airport access, security and downtown-airport transit; parked at origin and arriving at destination, it has near-zero access cost on both ends, and its line-haul time degrades only slightly across the 100–1,000 km range. The result is that car competes against rail at every distance — including short-haul corridors where rail would dominate the air comparison.

    The right measure is therefore not absolute rail journey time but the ratio of rail time to car time. Defining τ = (rail time) ÷ (car drive time at 100 km/h) gives a distance-invariant measure of rail’s advantage: τ = 0.5 means rail takes half as long as driving; τ = 1.0 means equal time; τ > 1.0 means rail is slower. A 3-hour rail journey on a 540 km route (τ = 0.56) is competitively equivalent to a 1.5-hour journey on a 270 km route. This is the key structural difference from the rail-vs-air analysis, where rail’s fixed advantage at the access stage means absolute time is what matters.

    Road-rail modal-shift S-curve plotting rail share of the rail+car market against the time ratio tau, European calibration
    Figure 1. Modal-shift S-curve for rail–car substitution, plotting rail’s predicted share of the combined rail+car market against the time ratio τ = (rail journey time) ÷ (car drive time at 100 km/h). Logistic curve fitted with inflection at τ = 0.65 (rail captures 50% at price parity when ~35% faster than driving). Three zones: rail decisively faster (τ < 0.5); the competitive zone (0.5 < τ < 1.0); and rail slower than driving (τ > 1.0). Calibrated against the TGV Paris–Lyon pre/post comparison.

    The European calibration in Figure 1 represents what rail can achieve under conditions that favour modal shift — high fuel taxes, congestion charging, dense feeder transit, central stations, and a cultural baseline of rail use. North American conditions are systematically less favourable, and the same τ produces lower rail shares.

    North-American-calibrated S-curve anchored on current VIA Rail's 13% rail share, with the European curve shown for comparison
    Figure 1b. North-American–calibrated S-curve, anchored on current VIA Rail service (~13% rail share of the rail+car market at τ ≈ 1.0). The faded grey dashed curve is the European calibration from Figure 1. Inflection shifts left from τ = 0.65 to τ = 0.46: under North American conditions, rail must be ~54% faster than driving — rather than 35% — to capture half the market at parity. Equivalent to a constant utility penalty α ≈ 0.67 reflecting toll-free highways, low fuel taxes, free parking, dispersed land use, weak feeder transit, and a cultural autonomy preference.

    Read together, Figures 1 and 1b bracket the realistic range. The European curve represents what is achievable in principle if rail-favourable conditions were created; the NA curve gives what is achievable under prevailing structural conditions. The remainder of this note uses the NA calibration, with European-equivalent figures quoted alongside where the comparison is informative. The gap between them is policy-relevant: roughly 10 to 15 percentage points of modal share depend not on which infrastructure is built but on whether the broader transport-policy environment supports modal shift.

    Empirical anchors and the North American context

    The Paris–Lyon TGV cut journey time from ~4 hours to under 2 and lifted rail’s share against road from ~30% to ~67% — a 37-point shift. Madrid–Barcelona AVE and Tokyo–Osaka Shinkansen deliver comparable shares against parallel highways. But all operate under conditions the corridor does not share. North America carries none of these reinforcements: the 401/A20 is toll-free end-to-end, Canadian fuel taxes are roughly one-third of European levels, there is no congestion charging in any Canadian city, and land use at both ends is car-oriented. The cross-elasticity literature confirms rail and car barely substitute — a 10% rise in fuel prices produces only a 1 to 4% rise in transit ridership.

    Rail’s competitive position against the car turns on the time ratio τ, not absolute journey time. The North American absence of tolls, congestion charges, and high fuel taxes means realised modal share will likely sit substantially below the European-anchored model’s predictions.
    2 · Price

    Elasticity, group size, and perceived cost

    The road–rail price comparison differs from rail–air in three ways: the elasticity of substitution is higher, the per-person ratio depends decisively on group size, and the cost of driving travellers actually weigh is the perceived cost (mostly fuel), not the full economic cost. The same logit form applies, but with a larger price coefficient (γ = 1.5 against 1.0 for rail–air), reflecting own-price elasticities of −1.0 to −1.6 for leisure demand against −0.4 to −0.7 for business.

    European price family

    Figure 2a shows the curve family at six price ratios under the European calibration. The wide range (0.5 to 8.0) reflects that group travel can drive the per-person ratio well above 5 even at parity-pricing intentions, since car cost divides among occupants while rail fare does not.

    North American price family

    Figure 2b applies the same six ratios under the NA calibration (τ₀ = 0.46). Each curve sits 15 to 20 points below its European counterpart at every τ. This family drives the corridor predictions in the rest of the note.

    Family of road-rail S-curves at six rail-to-car price ratios, European calibration
    Figure 2a. Family of road–rail S-curves at six rail-to-car-per-person price ratios (r = rail fare ÷ car cost per person), European calibration. The middle navy curve at r = 1.0 is price parity. The family spans 0.5 to 8.0, reflecting that group travel can push the per-person ratio well above 5.
    Family of road-rail S-curves at six price ratios, North American calibration
    Figure 2b. The same six ratios under the North American calibration (τ₀ = 0.46). Each curve sits 15 to 20 points below its European counterpart. This family is used throughout the rest of the note.

    Perceived versus full cost of driving

    Drivers compare rail fare against the perceived cost of driving, not the full economic cost. On Toronto–Montréal, one-way fuel for a typical car (9.4 L/100 km at ~$1.65/L) is about $84; the full economic cost — depreciation, insurance, maintenance — is more than three times that, around $300. But fixed costs are not perceived at the moment of choice; the car is owned regardless. A VIA Economy fare of ~$80 against perceived car cost of $84 produces a price ratio near 1.0 for a solo traveller. Against full cost the same fare would imply a ratio of 0.27 — and would predict a far larger rail share than the corridor actually carries, the empirical tell that perceived cost is the right input.

    The group-size effect

    Cars carry one to four passengers at a single fuel cost; rail charges per ticket. The per-person rail-to-car ratio is therefore ~1.0 for a solo traveller, 1.9 for a couple, 2.9 for three, and 3.8 for a full car of four. Family travel and any leisure trip with two or more travellers structurally favours the car — a multiplier with no analogue in the rail–air comparison. At parity pricing, ALTO’s Toronto–Ottawa share drops from ~51% solo to ~12% for a family of four; on Toronto–Montréal from 41% to 8%.

    Gas price as a modal-shift lever

    Because perceived car cost is dominated by fuel, the price ratio is sensitive to gas prices in a way the air comparison is not. A swing from $1.30 to $2.00/L — well within historic range — moves the solo Toronto–Montréal ratio from 1.21 to 0.79. Carbon pricing and fuel-tax policy are levers on rail modal share that operate as strongly as line-haul speed, at much lower capital cost.

    Group-size effects can suppress predicted rail share by 75 to 90 per cent; gas-price swings can move it by 10 to 20 percentage points. These dimensions matter as much as infrastructure choice.
    3 · Travel Time on the Corridor

    Where the corridor sits on the curve

    The same two principal pairs carry the bulk of rail-substitutable demand, but the absolute road flow is very large. The 401 between Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa and Montréal carries tens of millions of person-trips a year — several times the corridor’s air person-trips. Even a small percentage shift represents a meaningful absolute volume.

    Table 1. Approximate annual person-trip volumes (both directions) by mode on each principal pair, and resulting current modal shares. Order-of-magnitude estimates (±25% air/rail, ±30% car). Bus volumes excluded for clarity.
    City pairAirRail (VIA)CarRail share of rail+airRail share of rail+car
    Toronto–Montréal~1.9 M~800 K~6 M~30%~13%
    Toronto–Ottawa~0.9 M~800 K~4.5 M~47%~14%
    Ottawa–Montréal~0.45 M~525 K~4 M~54%~12%

    Three observations follow. The road-substitutable market dwarfs the air-substitutable market on every pair — car volumes are three to ten times rail+air combined. Current rail-vs-air shares are already meaningful (~30% on Toronto–Montréal, ~half on the shorter pairs), but rail-vs-car shares sit in the 12 to 14% range across all three. And the structural similarity of road–rail shares despite very different distances confirms the τ-normalisation: current VIA service produces τ values close to 1.0 on every pair.

    Table 2. Approximate segment-level travel times for car (driving on 401/A20, no congestion) alongside rail under three scenarios. *Toronto–Montréal under current VIA runs 5 h 13 min on the 538 km direct routing; the parallel car drive is ~5 h 30 min.
    City pairDistanceCar (401)VIA currentHPR (200 km/h)ALTO (300+ km/h)
    Toronto–Ottawa~450 km~4 h 30 min~4 h 30 min~2 h 55 min~2 h
    Toronto–Montréal~540 km~5 h 30 min5 h 13 min*~3 h 38 min~3 h
    Ottawa–Montréal~190 km~2 h~1 h 55 min~1 h 30 min~1 h
    Modal-shift progression for Toronto-Montreal under VIA, HPR and ALTO at solo, near-parity pricing on the NA-calibrated curve
    Figure 3. Modal-shift progression for Toronto–Montréal under the three rail scenarios, plotted on the North-American–calibrated S-curve at solo traveller and near-parity pricing. Predicted rail share of the rail+car market rises from ~15% under VIA, to 32% under HPR, to 41% under ALTO — a total gain of ~27 points, of which 17 points (about two-thirds) are captured by the HPR step alone.
    Table 3. Predicted rail share of the combined rail+car market on each principal pair under each scenario (NA calibration, near-parity, solo, current gas, current VIA-equivalent fares). The VIA shares match the Table 1 anchors, validating the calibration. HPR/ALTO values are order-of-magnitude estimates.
    City pairVIA currentHPR (200 km/h)ALTO (300+ km/h)
    Toronto–Ottawa~13%~34%~51%
    Toronto–Montréal~15%~32%~41%

    These are the time-only readings under the most favourable price configuration. Real corridor traffic is a mix of solo, couple and family travel, with fares that may rise above current VIA levels if HPR or ALTO recover more capital from passengers. Section 4 produces a more realistic envelope.

    4 · Price and Group Size on the Corridor

    Where the corridor sits on the price axis

    Figure 3 plotted the scenarios at price parity — the most favourable assumption for rail. But HPR and ALTO carry higher capital and operating costs than VIA’s shared-track service, and any realistic operating model recovers part of that from passengers. International HSR and the Brightline comparator place premium fares 30 to 80% above conventional rail. This analysis takes a moderate set: HPR at ~20% premium (r = 1.2), ALTO at ~50% premium (r = 1.5).

    Modal-shift progression for Toronto-Montreal with realistic fare premiums applied: VIA r=1.0, HPR r=1.2, ALTO r=1.5
    Figure 4. Toronto–Montréal under realistic scenario-specific fare premiums — VIA at r = 1.0, HPR at ~20% premium (r = 1.2), ALTO at ~50% premium (r = 1.5). Predicted shares: VIA 15%, HPR 26%, ALTO 28%. The total VIA → ALTO gain collapses from +27 points at parity to +13 points, with the HPR step doing essentially all the work (+12 pts) and the ALTO step adding only +1 to +2.

    Three observations follow. First, ALTO’s modal-share advantage over HPR — already modest at parity (+9 points on Toronto–Montréal) — essentially disappears once realistic fare premiums are applied, the two converging to within a point of each other. Second, this is robust: sensitivity at ALTO premiums between 30 and 80% produces ALTO shares between 30 and 24%, all within a few points of the HPR 26% reading. Third, the HPR step from current VIA to a dedicated 200 km/h corridor at VIA-equivalent fares captures essentially all of the realistically achievable road–rail modal shift; ALTO’s 300+ km/h capability is real but largely cancelled by the fare premium needed to fund it.

    Modal share as a function of per-person rail-to-car price ratio for each scenario on both Toronto pairs
    Figure 5. Modal share as a function of per-person rail-to-car price ratio, travel time held fixed. Reference operating points combine the solo/current-gas baseline with the realistic premiums: VIA at r = 2.4, HPR at r = 2.8, ALTO at r = 3.6. Predicted shares: VIA ~4% on both pairs; HPR ~10% (Toronto–Ottawa) and ~9% (Toronto–Montréal); ALTO ~13% and ~9%. Share falls steeply as the ratio rises, reflecting the higher price coefficient.
    Modal share as a function of group size from 1 to 4 passengers per car for each scenario
    Figure 6. Modal share against group size (1 to 4 passengers per car), each scenario scaling linearly from its base ratio. Toronto–Ottawa solo shares of 4% (VIA), 10% (HPR), 13% (ALTO) fall to ~1% across all three for a family of four; Toronto–Montréal similarly. The HPR and ALTO lines converge rapidly — a couple essentially eliminates the ALTO advantage.

    The rail-substitutable portion of corridor road traffic is concentrated on solo travellers paying single-person fares against per-person fuel costs. A second passenger halves rail share again; a car of three or four cannot be captured at any travel time or defensible fare. This narrows the realistic market to a small fraction of total road flow — predominantly business, single-traveller leisure, and downtown-to-downtown trips.

    Modal share as a function of gas price from $1.00 to $2.50 per litre for each scenario
    Figure 7. Modal share against gas price ($/L) at solo travel, anchored at the current ~$1.65/L (VIA r = 2.4, HPR r = 2.8, ALTO r = 3.6). A swing from $1.00 to $2.50 roughly triples rail share for each scenario, but absolute levels remain modest. HPR and ALTO converge almost exactly on Toronto–Montréal at all gas prices — fare premiums largely cancel ALTO’s speed advantage.

    Two policy implications follow. The corridor’s modal-shift outcomes are not solely a function of which infrastructure is chosen — they also depend on fuel pricing, carbon pricing and the broader transport-policy environment. And the comparative performance of HPR and ALTO is roughly stable across the gas-price range, so the scenario comparison is robust to fuel-price assumptions even if the absolute levels are not.

    5 · Reliability

    On-time performance and reliability

    Reliability operates as an effective time penalty whenever on-time performance (OTP) drops below a threshold travellers can rely on. Unreliable service makes travellers take an earlier departure than schedule alone requires, inflating their effective journey time by the buffer they carry. The model adds a utility term δ·(OTP_ref − OTP), with δ = 2.0 (the Wardman midpoint) and OTP_ref = 0.85 (VIA’s 2023 reported figure).

    Rail share of the rail+car market as on-time performance varies from 95% down to 50% for both Toronto pairs
    Figure 8. Rail share of the rail+car market for VIA Toronto–Ottawa and Toronto–Montréal as OTP varies from a 95% dedicated-track target down to a 50% stress-test floor. Reference points: dedicated-track target (95%), current VIA (85%), VIA’s 2021 figure (~67%, during heavy freight conflict), and a 50% stress test. As OTP erodes from 95 to 50%, Toronto–Ottawa share roughly halves (15.4% to 6.9%); Toronto–Montréal falls 17.2% to 7.8%.

    Three points follow. OTP is a meaningful but not dominant lever — its dynamic range across the observed band is about ±5 points, comparable to a $0.50/L fuel swing or a solo-to-couple shift. OTP and price are partial substitutes: a 10-point OTP improvement is worth roughly a 14% fare cut, which is why Brightline advertises 92% OTP precisely to support a fare premium. And crucially, the OTP gain inheres in the dedicated-track step, not the speed step — both HPR and ALTO eliminate the freight-train conflicts on shared CN track that cause VIA’s reliability problems, so OTP is not a differentiator between them.

    OTP erosion from 95 to 50 per cent halves VIA’s predicted rail share. The reliability gap between shared-track service and a dedicated alternative is real, but it is captured equally by HPR and ALTO — the speed step adds nothing to reliability.
    6 · Where the Returns Sit

    Where the modal-shift returns sit on the curve

    Because the curve is logistic, the value of additional time savings depends on where a route starts. On Toronto–Ottawa under the NA calibration, moving from VIA (τ = 1.00, ~13%) to HPR (τ = 0.65, ~34%) approaches the inflection and delivers the largest single increment; the move to ALTO (τ = 0.44, ~51%) adds another as the curve crosses its inflection. On Toronto–Montréal, the moves go from VIA at ~15% to HPR at ~32% to ALTO at ~41%.

    Decomposition of road-rail modal-shift gain by investment step: VIA to HPR versus HPR to ALTO on each pair
    Figure 9. Decomposition of road–rail modal-shift gain by investment step (solo, near-parity, NA calibration). Gold bars show the gain from VIA to HPR; terracotta bars the additional gain from HPR to ALTO. The HPR step adds 21 points on Toronto–Ottawa and 17 on Toronto–Montréal; the ALTO step adds 17 and 9. Under the European calibration the comparable figures would be 27/23 (HPR) and 17/10 (ALTO).
    17–21
    Percentage points captured by the VIA → HPR step (NA, near-parity)
    9–17
    Additional points from HPR → ALTO — shrinking under realistic premiums
    $2.5–8B
    Incremental capital cost per percentage point of ALTO-only road–rail shift

    The cost-effectiveness comparison is more challenging for ALTO than for HPR. ALTO’s $60–90 billion envelope is an incremental investment of $40–70 billion above the HPR option. Spread across the additional 9 to 17 points ALTO captures over HPR at canonical NA conditions, that works out to roughly $2.5 billion to $8 billion per percentage point — with the important caveat that road–rail shift, in absolute trip volumes, represents a much larger total person-trip diversion than the air–rail equivalent.

    The corridor’s road traffic is several times its air traffic, and even an NA-realistic 30 to 50 per cent rail share of rail+car represents a larger absolute volume than full capture of the rail+air market.
    7 · Implications

    What this means for the corridor decision

    Six conclusions follow from putting the road–rail evidence alongside the air–rail analysis.

    Structurally different from rail-vs-air

    The car competes at all distances; the competitive zone is narrower (1.5 to 3 hours); perceived cost is dominated by fuel; group travel tilts decisively toward driving; cross-elasticities are remarkably low; and structural North American conditions all suppress rail’s position relative to European comparators.

    The road prize is bigger

    Despite the headwinds, road-substitutable demand is far larger in absolute terms than air-substitutable demand. Even modest rail shares translate to large absolute diversions — between 1.4 and 3 million additional rail trips a year on the principal pairs. The road prize is bigger; it is just structurally harder to capture.

    Policy levers rival infrastructure

    Group size and fuel pricing are levers as substantial as the HPR/ALTO choice. Family travel suppresses rail share by ~75%; sustained higher fuel prices lift it by 15 to 30 points. Carbon pricing, fuel tax, congestion charging and parking pricing operate at much lower capital cost.

    Reliability is a dedicated-track gain

    OTP is substantial but bounded, and the gap between shared-track and dedicated service is captured by the move from VIA to either HPR or ALTO. The OTP step is inherent in the dedicated-track decision, not the speed decision.

    Sixth, this is the regime in which the High Performance Rail framework is most defensible on modal-shift grounds. The HPR step from VIA’s shared-track service to a dedicated, electrified 200 km/h corridor at VIA-style fares captures the majority of the road–rail opportunity on both pairs — adding 21 points on Toronto–Ottawa and 17 on Toronto–Montréal. ALTO’s additional speed adds 9 to 17 points at solo, near-parity conditions, but those points cost $40–70 billion above HPR, and under realistic group-mix and price assumptions the incremental advantage shrinks further.

    Taken together with the parallel rail–air analysis, the corridor decision turns on whether the right framework is being used. Modal-shift performance is multi-dimensional — time, price, group size, fuel cost, traveller type, structural context — and the headline time-only advantage that motivates ALTO’s case shrinks substantially once these dimensions are admitted. The High Performance Rail framework delivers the bulk of the corridor’s achievable modal-shift outcomes — on both the air market and the road market — at roughly a quarter of ALTO’s capital cost.

    Download Full Note
    Modal Shift Note 2 — Road–Rail Research Note (PDF)
    Reference document with the full methodology, both calibrations, sensitivity analysis, and the complete source list
    Download PDF
    Methodology

    Modelling approach

    The S-curve is a standard logistic of the form S(τ) = 1 / (1 + exp(K·(τ − τ₀))), where S(τ) is rail’s share of the combined rail+car market as a function of the time ratio τ = (rail time) ÷ (car drive time at 100 km/h). The τ-normalisation is a meaningful departure from the absolute-time framing of the rail–air analysis: because the car comparator scales with distance, τ gives a distance-invariant measure of rail’s competitive position. Parameters are K = 3.5 and τ₀ = 0.65 (European). The price family adds a utility term: S(τ, r) = 1 / (1 + exp(K·(τ − τ₀) + γ·ln r)), with γ = 1.5 — larger than the rail–air γ = 1.0, reflecting higher own-price elasticities for car-vs-rail substitution. For group travel, r_effective = r_solo × n.

    Two calibrations are presented. The European calibration (τ₀ = 0.65) is fitted to the TGV Paris–Lyon pre/post comparison. The North American calibration (τ₀ = 0.46) is anchored on current VIA’s ~13% rail share at τ ≈ 1.0; the two differ only in τ₀, the shift equivalent to a constant penalty α ≈ 0.67. The parameters are illustrative rather than predictive; sensitivity at K between 2.5 and 4.5, τ₀ between 0.40 and 0.75, and γ between 1.2 and 1.8 produces the same qualitative conclusions. An important caveat: the binary-logit model captures time-and-price geometry but not the structural North American factors — free parking, dispersed land use, weak feeder transit, family-travel norms, cultural autonomy preference — that suppress rail share. Model predictions should be read as upper bounds; realised share is likely 30 to 50% below them. Brightline Miami–Orlando, the closest North American analogue, is in extended ramp-up with bond ratings downgraded to CCC+, indirect confirmation that achievable shares emerge slowly here.

    Sources

    Principal sources

    1.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative (2026). HPR Strategy, Chapter 4 — High Performance Passenger Rail (Express journey times). citizenresearch.ca
    2.
    VIA Rail Canada Annual Report 2023; published timetables, station-pair travel times and Economy fare ranges; ridership via Statista (2024) — Montréal–Ottawa–Toronto triangle at 2.1 million passengers.
    3.
    Cirium aviation analytics (2025), via Simple Flying — Toronto Pearson top destinations by capacity; ~930,000 one-way Toronto–Montréal seats on YYZ–YUL alone.
    4.
    Quebec City–Windsor Corridor reference data — ~108 flights per workday within the Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal triangle.
    5.
    Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (2019, 2024). Highway 401 Annual Average Daily Traffic counts; Toronto-area AADT exceeds 450,000 vehicles/day.
    6.
    Statistics Canada Tables 23-10-0253-01 (Air passenger traffic) and 51-204-X (Air Passenger Origin and Destination, Domestic).
    7.
    Currie, G. & Phung, J. (2007). Transit Ridership, Auto Gas Prices, and World Events. Transportation Research Record, 1992. — and Lago, A.M., Mayworm, P.D. & McEnroe, J.M. (1992). Ridership Response to Changes in Transit Services. Transportation Research Record, 818.
    8.
    Wardman, M. (2014). Price Elasticities of Surface Travel Demand: A Meta-analysis of UK Evidence. Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, 48.
    9.
    Mineta Transportation Institute (2017). Modal Shift and High-Speed Rail. P. Haas. — and Moeckel, R. et al. (2013). Mode Choice Modeling for Long-Distance Travel (nested logit, TSRC).
    10.
    Federal Highway Administration (2015). Analysis of Automobile Travel Demand Elasticities With Respect To Travel Cost. — and Litman, T. (VTPI). Transportation Elasticities. vtpi.org
    11.
    International Transport Forum (2019). Roundtable 176: What is the Value of Saving Travel Time? OECD/ITF.
    12.
    Brightline Florida (2024–2026). Monthly Revenue and Ridership Reports; KBRA bond rating actions. — and Geotab (2025). Travel Time vs. Toll Costs: Toronto’s 407 and 401.
    13.
    Ben-Akiva, M. & Lerman, S. (1985). Discrete Choice Analysis. MIT Press. — and Train, K. (2009). Discrete Choice Methods with Simulation, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.
    14.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative companion notes: Note 1 — Modal shift between high-speed rail and air, and the Modal Shift & Ridership synthesis brief that sets this note alongside Notes 1, 3 and 4.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Modal Shift Note 2  ·  May 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • Modal shift HSR air

    Citizen Research Initiative · Modal Shift Analysis · Note 1

    Modal Shift Between High-Speed Rail and Air on the ALTO Corridor

    When does rail substitute for air — and how much of that substitution does ALTO’s 300+ km/h capability actually buy, once the price of the ticket is admitted into the analysis?

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Modal Shift Note 1 · Published May 2026
    ⚠ What This Note Examines

    This note applies the international evidence on rail–air substitution to the two corridor pairs that account for the bulk of air-substitutable demand — Toronto–Ottawa and Toronto–Montréal — and compares three scenarios on both travel time and price: current VIA Rail service, a High Performance Rail (HPR) alternative at 200 km/h, and ALTO at 300+ km/h.

    The headline question is not whether modal shift happens — the evidence is clear that it does — but where the modal-shift returns sit on the curve, and whether ALTO’s incremental speed is a cost-effective way to capture them.

    Summary

    The international literature converges on a logistic S-curve: rail captures the majority of the combined rail+air market on city pairs with station-to-station times of two to four hours, and rail’s share collapses rapidly above five hours. Both principal Toronto pairs fall inside that competitive zone under any modern dedicated-track scenario.

    The majority of the achievable modal shift on each pair is captured by moving from VIA’s current shared-track service to a dedicated, electrified HPR corridor at conventional 200 km/h speeds. ALTO’s additional 300+ km/h capability captures a further 19 to 20 percentage points at price parity — a real but residual gain.

    Once price enters the analysis, the picture shifts. Under canonical price assumptions — VIA at r ≈ 0.5, HPR at r ≈ 0.7, ALTO at r ≈ 1.0 — ALTO’s apparent 19–20-point time-only advantage shrinks to 11–13 points on the principal Toronto pairs. The cost-per-point of that incremental modal shift is several billion dollars; the cost-per-point of the larger HPR step that precedes it is much lower.

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    Modal Shift Note 1 — Air–Rail Research Note (PDF)
    The full 16-page note with all seven figures, the segment-level travel-time and price analysis, and the methodology and sources
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    1 · Travel Time

    The competitive zone

    The empirical literature on rail–air substitution converges on a consistent set of travel-time thresholds. Studies in Europe, China and Japan identify a competitive break-even of roughly 400 to 600 km (about 2 to 3 hours door-to-door) for short-haul routes, beyond which aviation begins to regain a time advantage. Medium-distance corridors of 600 to 1,100 km show the greatest demand elasticity. Long-haul segments above 1,400 km show minimal substitution — typically below 10 per cent.

    The mechanism is the door-to-door time calculation. Below roughly 700 km, the overhead of reaching the airport, checking in, clearing security, boarding, taxiing and reaching the destination city centre adds enough that total air journey time matches or exceeds high-speed rail. Above this distance, air’s faster line-haul speed begins to dominate, and rail’s share falls steeply once journeys exceed about 4.5 hours.

    This relationship is conventionally modelled as a logistic S-curve. The shape is characteristic: under two hours rail captures essentially the entire air market; between three and four hours rail typically captures 60 to 80 per cent; between four and five hours rail’s share collapses; above five hours rail captures only a residual share. Frequency, station centrality, fare structure and reliability shift the curve up or down by several points but do not change its overall shape.

    Modal-shift S-curve: rail share of the combined rail+air market against station-to-station rail journey time, with short-haul, competitive and long-haul zones marked
    Figure 1. Modal-shift S-curve showing rail’s share of the combined rail+air market as a function of station-to-station rail journey time. Logistic curve fitted with inflection at 3.5 hours and steepness parameter k = 1.3. A short-haul band below 2 hours where rail dominates; a competitive zone between 2 and 4 hours where infrastructure investment can decisively shift modal share; and a long-haul band above 4 hours where rail’s share collapses. All major HSR services in the competitive zone achieve rail shares of 70 to 85 per cent on the rail-vs-air pair.

    Empirical anchors

    Three European routes anchor the baseline. On Paris–Lyon, the TGV cut travel time from almost four hours to about two; rail’s share of the rail+air market rose from 40 to 72 per cent, while air collapsed from 31 to 7 per cent. On Madrid–Seville (471 km, completed 1992), rail share rose from 16 to 52 per cent of all modes. The Madrid–Barcelona AVE — at 621 km and 2 h 30 min the cleanest modern parallel to ALTO’s longer pairs — now carries roughly 75 per cent of travellers on the rail-vs-air pair.

    Asian comparators reach further. The 2019 World Bank review found Chinese 350 km/h services remain competitive with air up to about 1,200 km. Beijing–Shanghai (1,318 km, 4 h 18 min) is the canonical case where high frequency and operating speed maintain rail dominance at distances that would normally favour air; Tokyo–Osaka (552 km, 2 h 22 min) is another textbook 80+ per cent rail-dominant pair.

    Rail wins decisively under three hours, competes strongly at three to four hours, and degrades rapidly after that — with high frequency and central-station access being decisive variables alongside line-haul time.
    2 · Price

    The elasticity factor

    The S-curve in Figure 1 holds prices implicitly at parity. Real modal choice is two-dimensional: passengers weigh both time and price, and the relative price of rail to air shifts the entire curve up or down. A logit choice model with a price-utility term captures this directly — each doubling of the rail-to-air price ratio shifts the curve’s inflection point earlier by an amount that depends on the price coefficient.

    Family of modal-shift S-curves at six rail-to-air price ratios from r=0.4 to r=2.0
    Figure 2. Family of modal-shift S-curves at six rail-to-air price ratios (r = rail price ÷ air price). The middle navy curve is the r = 1.0 parity case from Figure 1. Curves above it show rail priced below air — the whole curve lifts; curves below show rail priced above air, and a corresponding loss of share. The shift is symmetric in log-price.

    How to read the chart

    The simplest use of Figure 2 is as a lookup. Pick a travel time, pick the curve matching the route’s price ratio, and read off the predicted share. A 3-hour journey at parity (r = 1.0) sits at roughly 60 per cent; the same journey at half the air fare (r = 0.5) sits closer to 75 per cent; at 1.5× the air fare (r = 1.5) it drops to around 45 per cent. A faster service at a higher price can deliver lower share than a slower service at a lower price — the family shows how the two effects combine.

    Price sensitivity differs by traveller

    Business travellers show much lower price sensitivity than leisure travellers — elasticities of roughly −0.4 to −0.7 for business against −1.0 to −1.6 for leisure. Each curve is really a weighted average of a flatter business curve and a steeper leisure one.

    Air’s connecting-flight advantage

    Air retains a structural edge the simple model misses: the connecting-flight network. Travellers continuing to long-haul destinations face mode-switching friction at the hub. The modal-share envelope should be read as a ceiling for the rail-substitutable portion of the market, not the air market as a whole.

    On the empirical side, the high-share international routes combine competitive times with rail fares well below air: Madrid–Barcelona AVE Básico fares of €40–70 against air fares of €100–200 put the price ratio in the 0.4–0.6 band. Tokyo–Osaka is the contrasting case — prices roughly comparable (0.7–0.9), but central-station access and reliability sustain rail dominance without a price advantage.

    Modal share depends on time, price, traveller type, and itinerary structure. The family of S-curves captures the first two; the third and fourth shift the realistic envelope further.
    3 · Travel Time on the Corridor

    Where the corridor sits on the curve

    The corridor is not a single market. It is a sequence of overlapping city pairs whose distances place each segment in a different position on the curve. The bulk of air-substitutable demand is concentrated in two pairs: Toronto–Ottawa and Toronto–Montréal. The Toronto–Montréal air market alone runs 900,000+ annual seats. ALTO’s published target times — about 2 hours Toronto–Ottawa and just over 3 hours Toronto–Montréal — both fall inside the zone where international comparators capture 70 to 90 per cent of the rail+air market.

    VIA’s existing Corridor service sits well outside that zone. Toronto–Montréal averages 5 h 13 min over 538 km; Toronto–Ottawa runs 4 to 4.5 hours. Trains are limited to 160 km/h on track shared with CN freight — the principal cause of both slow line-haul speed and poor reliability (on-time performance around 67 per cent as of 2021). Yet the Corridor is VIA’s commercial backbone, contributing 81 per cent of revenue and 95 per cent of ridership.

    Table 1. Indicative travel times for the principal corridor city pairs under each scenario. HPR values are Express journey times published in the CRI HPR Strategy (a dedicated, electrified 401-corridor mainline at 200 km/h); ALTO values are the published targets for the 300+ km/h network. *Toronto–Montréal under current VIA service runs 5 h 13 min on the 538 km direct routing.
    City pairDistanceVIA currentHPR (200 km/h)ALTO (300+ km/h)
    Toronto–Ottawa~450 km~4 h 30 min~2 h 55 min~2 h
    Toronto–Montréal~540 km5 h 13 min*~3 h 38 min~3 h
    Ottawa–Montréal~190 km~1 h 55 min~1 h 30 min~1 h

    Plotted onto the S-curve, these times produce three pictures. Each panel highlights the two principal Toronto pairs under one scenario; the contrast between panels traces the modal-shift trajectory at price parity as corridor infrastructure improves.

    Current VIA Rail service plotted on the S-curve: Toronto-Ottawa at 21% and Toronto-Montreal at 10%
    Figure 3a. Current VIA Rail service. Both principal Toronto pairs sit well below the inflection point: Toronto–Ottawa at ~4 h 30 min captures around 21% of the rail+air market, and Toronto–Montréal at 5 h 13 min around 10%. The corridor’s air-substitutable demand is structurally outside the competitive zone.
    High Performance Rail at 200 km/h on the S-curve: Toronto-Ottawa at 68% and Toronto-Montreal at 46%
    Figure 3b. High Performance Rail at 200 km/h on a dedicated, electrified 401-corridor mainline (CRI HPR Strategy Express times). Toronto–Ottawa moves to ~68% rail share at price parity; Toronto–Montréal to ~46% — across the inflection but still in the steeper portion of the curve.
    ALTO at 300+ km/h on the S-curve: Toronto-Ottawa at 88% and Toronto-Montreal at 66%
    Figure 3c. ALTO at 300+ km/h on a dedicated 1,000 km HSR network (published targets). Toronto–Ottawa moves onto the upper plateau at ~88% rail share at price parity; Toronto–Montréal to ~66% — still on the steeper portion, where additional time savings continue to produce meaningful gains.
    Table 2. Predicted rail share of the combined rail+air market on each principal pair under each scenario, derived from the logistic curve in Figure 1 with prices held at parity. Order-of-magnitude estimates; actual shares would also depend on fare structure, frequency, reliability, station accessibility, and traveller mix.
    City pairVIA currentHPR (200 km/h)ALTO (300+ km/h)
    Toronto–Ottawa~21%~68%~88%
    Toronto–Montréal~10%~46%~66%

    These are the time-only readings — what each scenario would deliver if its fares matched air. In practice, fares depend on capital structure, and the three scenarios sit at quite different points on the price axis.

    4 · Price on the Corridor

    Where the corridor sits on the price axis

    Current VIA Toronto–Montréal Economy fares of $80–120 against Air Canada fares of $200–400 put VIA at a price ratio of roughly 0.5 — the same band as Madrid–Barcelona. The structural fare advantage is already in place; the binding constraint on current rail share is travel time, not price.

    Whether each new-build scenario preserves a fare advantage depends on capital-cost recovery. The CRI HPR Strategy estimates corridor capital in the order of $19 million/km — roughly $19–25 billion for the full Windsor–Montréal programme — producing annual debt service of $1.0–1.3 billion. Under the standard public-infrastructure subsidy model, HPR fares could plausibly sit at a modest premium over current VIA, placing HPR at r ≈ 0.7. ALTO’s $60–90 billion envelope produces debt service three to four times higher; under a fare cap holding the ratio at parity, ALTO settles at r ≈ 1.0, with subsidy absorbing the capital-cost gap.

    For the corridor’s three scenarios, plausible operating price ratios are: VIA at r ≈ 0.5 (current subsidised rail), HPR at r ≈ 0.7 (modest premium, partial capital recovery), ALTO at r ≈ 1.0 (parity with air, subsidy absorbing the larger debt-service gap).
    Modal share as a function of rail-to-air price ratio for each scenario on Toronto-Ottawa and Toronto-Montreal
    Figure 4. Modal share as a function of rail-to-air price ratio, with each scenario’s travel time held fixed at its published value. Markers indicate the canonical operating ratio: VIA at r = 0.5, HPR at r = 0.7, ALTO at r = 1.0. The vertical separation between lines shows how much share is driven by infrastructure; the slope of each line shows how price-sensitive that scenario is at its operating point.

    At their canonical ratios, the Toronto–Montréal scenarios deliver 18 per cent (VIA), 55 per cent (HPR) and 66 per cent (ALTO). ALTO retains an 11-point advantage over HPR — markedly smaller than the 20-point gap the price-parity readings imply, because ALTO’s higher capital cost drags its price ratio up the curve while HPR keeps a price advantage. On Toronto–Ottawa, both new-build scenarios sit high on the curve where price effects are smaller: ALTO ~88%, HPR ~75% — a 13-point gap. If HPR were held at the current VIA ratio (r ≈ 0.5), the gaps would close to 3 and 7 points respectively.

    The HPR pricing lever, with ALTO held at parity

    Fixing ALTO at parity and varying HPR’s fare relative to it puts the pricing decision directly in front of the reader.

    HPR and ALTO modal share as a function of the HPR-to-ALTO fare ratio, ALTO held at parity
    Figure 5. HPR and ALTO modal share as a function of the HPR-to-ALTO fare ratio, ALTO fixed at parity (r = 1.0). ALTO’s share appears as a flat reference; HPR’s varies along the gold curve. Markers show the canonical HPR/ALTO = 0.7 operating point.
    ALTO minus HPR modal-share differential as a function of the HPR-to-ALTO fare ratio
    Figure 6. ALTO − HPR modal-share differential. The gap rises from ~7 points (Toronto–Ottawa) and 3 points (Toronto–Montréal) at HPR/ALTO = 0.5, to 19–20 points at parity. The diamond marks the canonical 0.7 point: 12 points on Toronto–Ottawa, 11 on Toronto–Montréal.

    The two figures make explicit what the canonical readings imply: ALTO’s modal-shift advantage is highly contingent on HPR’s pricing model. Hold HPR fares near current VIA levels and the gap is 3 to 7 points; let them drift to 70 per cent of ALTO’s and the gap is 11 to 13; let them converge entirely and the full 19–20-point time-only advantage returns. The corridor decision is as much a question about HPR’s intended subsidy structure as about the choice of infrastructure — a question in the operator’s hands, not the engineer’s.

    5 · Where the Returns Sit

    Where the modal-shift returns sit on the curve

    Because the curve is logistic — flat at the top, steep in the middle, flat at the bottom — the value of additional time savings depends critically on where a route starts. On Toronto–Montréal, moving from VIA’s 5 h 13 min to HPR’s 3 h 38 min crosses much of the steep middle and delivers a large gain; the further move to ALTO’s 3-hour service stays in the steeper portion and adds a meaningful increment. On Toronto–Ottawa, HPR’s 2 h 55 min already places the route high on the curve, so ALTO’s 2-hour service produces smaller share gains.

    Decomposition of modal-shift gain by investment step: VIA to HPR versus HPR to ALTO on each principal pair
    Figure 7. Decomposition of modal-shift gain by investment step. Gold bars show the percentage-point gain from VIA to HPR; terracotta bars show the additional gain from HPR to ALTO. At price parity, the HPR step delivers 36–47 points across the two pairs; the additional ALTO step delivers 19–20 points.

    On Toronto–Ottawa, the VIA-to-HPR move captures an estimated 47 points of modal shift; the further HPR-to-ALTO move adds 19. On Toronto–Montréal, HPR captures 36 and ALTO adds 20. The HPR step delivers the majority of the achievable shift on both pairs (roughly 65 to 70 per cent of the total), but the residual ALTO increment is real at price parity.

    36–47
    Percentage points captured by the VIA → HPR step (at parity)
    19–20
    Additional points from HPR → ALTO at parity — 11–13 once priced
    $3–6B
    Incremental capital cost per percentage point of ALTO-only modal shift
    HPR delivers the majority of the achievable modal shift on both Toronto pairs at price parity. ALTO’s additional speed adds 19 to 20 percentage points — a residual that shrinks to 11 to 13 once the canonical price assumptions are applied.

    The cost-effectiveness comparison sharpens this. ALTO’s $60–90 billion envelope is an incremental investment of $40–70 billion above the HPR option. Spread across the 11 to 13 incremental points ALTO captures over HPR under realistic pricing, that works out to roughly $3 billion to $6 billion per percentage point — several times worse than the HPR step that precedes it.

    6 · Implications

    What this means for the corridor decision

    Four conclusions follow from putting the international literature, segment-level travel times, and the price dimension alongside one another.

    The opportunity is real and concentrated

    The corridor’s modal-shift potential is well-supported by international evidence and concentrated in two pairs — Toronto–Ottawa and Toronto–Montréal. Modelling the corridor as a single 1,000 km market obscures this. The real question is segment-level time and price, not headline line-haul speed.

    HPR does the larger part of the work

    On time alone, HPR’s Express times place both principal pairs into the upper portion of the curve. ALTO captures a real 19–20-point incremental gain — but residual relative to the larger HPR step, and several times more expensive per point of shift purchased.

    Price reduces ALTO’s advantage

    Under canonical ratios, ALTO’s advantage narrows from 20 points at parity to 11 points on Toronto–Montréal and 13 on Toronto–Ottawa. If HPR ran at the current VIA ratio, the gap would close further still — to 3 and 7 points.

    This is the HPR regime

    This is precisely where the literature finds frequency, reliability, station-centrality and price to matter more than headline speed. Capturing the bulk of the opportunity does not require operating at the global frontier of high-speed technology.

    The corridor is a textbook case of why high-speed-rail claims need to be unbundled. The modal-shift opportunity is genuine. The majority of it is captured by conventional high-performance speeds on a dedicated, electrified, reliable corridor priced competitively against air. ALTO’s additional 300+ km/h capability buys a real but reduced gain once realistic pricing is admitted — between 11 and 13 percentage points on the principal Toronto pairs, at an incremental capital cost of $40–70 billion. Whether the corridor decision turns on the right framework — segment-level, two-dimensional analysis of time and price — is what determines whether the public investment achieves the modal-shift outcome it is intended to produce.

    Download Full Note
    Modal Shift Note 1 — Air–Rail Research Note (PDF)
    Reference document with the full methodology, sensitivity analysis, and the complete source list
    Download PDF
    Methodology

    Modelling approach

    The S-curve is a standard logistic of the form S(t) = 1 / (1 + exp(k·(t − t₀))), where S(t) is rail’s share of the combined rail+air market as a function of station-to-station journey time t. The parameters are k = 1.3 and t₀ = 3.5 hours, calibrated by visual fit to the international comparator data. The family of curves adds a price-utility term: S(t, r) = 1 / (1 + exp(k·(t − t₀) + γ·ln r)), where r is the rail-to-air price ratio and γ = 1.0 the price coefficient.

    This binary-logit specification is the simplest defensible form of the time–price modal-choice model used routinely in transport demand work. More elaborate discrete-choice models add regressors for frequency, station access, reliability and demographics, but tend to confirm the same S-shaped relationship and the same direction of the price effect. The parameters here should be treated as illustrative rather than predictive; sensitivity analysis at k between 1.0 and 1.6, t₀ between 3.0 and 4.0 hours, and γ between 0.6 and 1.4 produces the same qualitative conclusions about HPR’s performance and ALTO’s price-driven degradation of the time advantage.

    Sources

    Principal sources

    1.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative (2026). HPR Strategy, Chapter 4 — High Performance Passenger Rail (Express journey times). citizenresearch.ca
    2.
    International Council on Clean Transportation (2022). The bullet train to lower-carbon travel.
    3.
    Mineta Transportation Institute (2017). Modal Shift and High-Speed Rail: A Review of the Current Literature. P. Haas.
    4.
    World Bank Group (2019). China’s High-Speed Rail Development.
    5.
    Bergantino, A. & Madio, L. (2020). Intermodal competition and substitution: HSR versus air transport. Research in Transportation Economics, 79.
    6.
    AECOM (2011). High-Speed Rail Overseas Experience Report. C. Nash.
    7.
    Sun, X. et al. (2024). A review on research regarding HSR interactions with air transport. Transport Policy, 157.
    8.
    Wardman, M. (2014). Price Elasticities of Surface Travel Demand: A Meta-analysis of UK Evidence. Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, 48.
    9.
    Ben-Akiva, M. & Lerman, S. (1985). Discrete Choice Analysis: Theory and Application to Travel Demand. MIT Press. — and Train, K. (2009). Discrete Choice Methods with Simulation, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.
    10.
    Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (CNMC), annual rail market reports for Spain; VIA Rail Canada Annual Report 2023 and published timetables, travel times and Economy fare ranges; Alto Inc. published travel-time targets and corridor descriptions (February 2025 announcement).
    11.
    Energies (2025). Emission Reductions in the Aviation Sector: A Systematic Review of the Sustainability Impacts of Modal Shifts.
    12.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative companion material: the Modal Shift & Ridership synthesis brief, which sets this note alongside Notes 2–4 (rail–car substitution, the ridership envelope, and the operating-subsidy frontier).
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Modal Shift Note 1  ·  May 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • Transport Action Canada

    The Voice ALTO Has Already Heard From

    Transport Action Canada and Transport Action Ontario — the country’s principal pro-rail civil-society voice — have made detailed substantive recommendations about ALTO. What they asked for. What the record shows ALTO has so far addressed. What their voice contributes that nothing else in the public record does.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Stakeholder Brief · Published May 2026
    ⚠ Documents Under Analysis

    On March 16, 2026, Transport Action Canada and Transport Action Ontario submitted an 18-recommendation written response to ALTO at the close of the January–March 2026 consultation period. The organizations also published an open letter setting out what they believe the substantive questions about the project are, and what credible alternatives have been studied previously.

    They are explicitly pro-rail. They are not opposed to high-speed rail in principle. Their concerns are technical, financial, and service-continuity concerns, and they are asking for the same documents and analyses that Parliament’s own Transport Committee asked for in September 2024 — and that have not been produced.

    Critical Finding

    The questions about ALTO’s cost, ridership, document release, and VIA-service impact are not coming only from project-affected landowners, from anti-rail critics, or from research initiatives. They are coming from the country’s principal pro-rail civil-society voice, in March 2026, on the public record, having formally engaged with ALTO through ALTO’s own consultation process.

    The brief sets out what Transport Action asked for, what the record shows ALTO has addressed, and what credible alternatives they have publicly identified.

    Download
    The Voice ALTO Has Already Heard From — Full Brief (PDF)
    What Transport Action Canada and Transport Action Ontario asked of ALTO, what ALTO has addressed, and what their voice contributes to the public record
    Download PDF
    The Witness

    Who Transport Action is

    Transport Action Canada describes itself as “Canada’s citizen advocacy organization for public transportation,” with members who have “discussed and debated the subject over the past five decades, including of course High Speed Rail and possible alternatives.” It and its provincial affiliates — including Transport Action Ontario, jointly authoring the consultation letter analysed here — are the principal national civil-society voice on Canadian intercity rail policy.

    Their position on ALTO is unambiguous. The open letter opens by welcoming “serious discussion of all options to improve passenger rail.” The consultation letter opens by describing the organizations as “a knowledgeable, passenger-focussed NGO that is very supportive of intercity passenger rail.” They explicitly recognize the underlying problem ALTO is intended to address — that VIA Rail’s constrained access to CN’s Kingston Subdivision “has long been recognized as untenable, which prompted the development and launch of VIA’s High Frequency Rail proposal in 2015.”

    They acknowledge the limits of incremental improvement: “just improving the CN route in isolation while continuing to operate alongside freight would not come close to the quintupling of capacity and slashing of travel times possible with some kind of dedicated track.” They are, in plain terms, an organization that wants more passenger rail in Canada and is substantively critical of how this particular HSR project is being delivered.

    What They Asked For

    The March 2026 consultation response

    Transport Action’s March 16, 2026 letter to ALTO’s Government and Stakeholder Relations office contains eighteen specific recommendations across seven sections. The four recommendations that most directly overlap with the existing CRI evidence base are set out below.

    Recommendation 1
    On the business case and cost
    What Transport Action asked

    “There is considerable skepticism from the public and stakeholders about the business case for HSR… It is urgent that a detailed Business Case be completed as soon as possible, including preferred corridor, capital cost, detailed ridership, fares, revenue and methods of calculation.”

    Mapped onto the parliamentary record

    This is, in substance, the same request as Recommendation 4 of TRAN Report 18 (September 2024), which asked the Minister to require an HFR-versus-HSR cost analysis within six months. As CRI’s brief The Report That Vanished documents, that analysis was never produced. Transport Action is asking, eighteen months later, for the same kind of cost-and-business-case work.

    Recommendation 2
    On ridership transparency
    What Transport Action asked

    “No details are provided on the ridership model, population assumptions, network assumptions, demand per segment, fares, cost of gasoline etc. Although the ridership assumption may be reasonable when lifted from European ridership, there is skepticism that this would be replicated in central Canada, due to lower fuel prices, absence of road tolls etc.”

    Mapped onto the parliamentary record

    This maps directly onto Claim 3 in Reading the Answer — the government’s 43-million-by-2084 ridership figure in Q-923. Transport Action specifically raises the central-Canadian fuel-price and road-toll conditions that distinguish the corridor from the European benchmarks, and quantifies the Ontario provincial subsidy to personal car use at $2.5 billion per year as a “politically tilted playing field” that any credible ridership model must account for.

    Recommendation 3
    On document release
    What Transport Action asked

    “We urge you to release a full unredacted version of the JPO report, plus any other reports that were in the ‘data room’ made available to the three bidders. At this time, with the tender process completed, there should be nothing in these reports that is business-confidential.”

    Mapped onto the parliamentary record

    This is — almost word for word — the same request as Recommendation 6 of TRAN Report 18. Transport Action makes an additional point that the procurement-completion rationale for non-disclosure no longer applies: with the bidder data-room phase concluded, there is no remaining commercial confidentiality argument. The reports have still not been released.

    Recommendation 6
    On the future of VIA service
    What Transport Action asked

    “Recent media reports from Kingston regarding possible diminution of current VIA Rail services when ALTO is operational must be heeded… It is important that ALTO and VIA Rail jointly issue a statement promptly about plans for services at these cities. Otherwise, local elected officials and residents will continue to impede ALTO’s progress.”

    Mapped onto the parliamentary record

    This maps directly onto Recommendations 8 and 10 of TRAN Report 18 — the VIA-impact analysis and the no-service-reduction commitment, both unanswered since September 2024. The Senate TRCM raised the same concern in February 2026. The question has now been asked across two parliamentary chambers and one substantial stakeholder consultation submission; it has not been substantively answered.

    Transport Action’s remaining fourteen recommendations cover downtown and shoulder station design, affordable fares, intercommunity bus access for towns currently outside the rail network, emergency-management cooperation with rural fire and EMS, wildlife crossings, sufficient road and trail bridges, recognition of Ontario’s 1834 Drainage Act, First Nations contingency planning for archaeological discovery, sensitive-agricultural-use mapping (sugar bushes, vineyards, certified organic land), and compensation frameworks for intensive agricultural operations that would need to be relocated. Several bear directly on issues documented in CRI’s Five Hundred Farms brief.

    Three Alternatives They Identified

    What pro-rail technical analysis says is possible

    A question CRI has not previously had answered by a technically literate pro-rail body: were credible alternatives to ALTO actually studied, and what did the studies show? Transport Action’s open letter identifies three.

    01

    Targeted CN-route improvements

    “Further investments to improve passenger and freight fluidity, like the third track between Belleville and Napanee and station improvements… would make a big difference to reliability at modest cost.”

    Transport Action concedes this alone is insufficient to deliver the “quintupling of capacity and slashing of travel times” possible with a dedicated track — but lays out a complementary package of known modest cost.

    02

    The freight grand bargain

    “Moves most CN freight over to the CPKC route through Perth… The existing CN route could then be upgraded to support more passenger services at up to 170 km/h, with travel times of around 4 hours between Toronto and Montreal or Ottawa.”

    This is the High Performance Rail framework substantially as CRI has documented it, here independently advocated by Transport Action as a technically credible option.

    03

    HFR on the original Havelock alignment

    “A dedicated track that takes a more direct route between Toronto and Ottawa, with the advantage of reconnecting Peterborough to the railway network, was VIA Rail’s preferred option, while also preserving service on the existing route through Kingston.”

    This is the project the Joint Project Office was funded in 2017 to study, the project the Transport Committee studied in 2023–24, and the project the federal government redesignated in late 2024.

    Why earlier HSR-along-the-lakeshore studies did not proceed

    Of independent technical interest is Transport Action’s observation about why HSR following the Lake Ontario lakeshore has been studied multiple times without proceeding:

    “

    High Speed Rail following a lakeshore from Toronto through Kingston has also been studied before, more than once, by both the federal and provincial governments, without proceeding. For safety reasons, and to achieve 7 km+ minimum radii for higher speeds, such a dedicated track could not be placed too close to the existing alignment nor right alongside Highway 401. It would thus require significant expropriation, and the number of homes and businesses close to CN’s tracks and the 401 has only grown since the last such study in 2011. The chances are that communities like Port Hope and Trenton would be bypassed entirely, and route from Kingston to Ottawa would also then also go through the same sensitive Frontenac Arch region and many of the communities expressing most concern about Alto’s southern study corridor.

    Transport Action Canada, open letter on ALTO HSR route options in eastern Ontario. read the letter

    This is the route-geometry argument set out by a pro-rail body with the technical standing to make it — the same observation about HSR’s 7-km curve-radius requirement that CRI’s engineering research has documented, here presented as a published critique by an established advocacy organization.

    What Their Voice Contributes

    A fifth source category, otherwise absent

    The Citizen Research Initiative’s briefs to date have drawn on four categories of source. Each has its own evidentiary weight; each has its own limitations. Transport Action contributes a fifth that has been substantively absent until now.

    Parliamentary record

    Order Paper questions, Transport Committee reports, Senate committee testimony, the High-Speed Rail Network Act. Authoritative but procedurally bounded.

    Academic studies

    The McGill Transportation Research and Munk School Global Economic Policy Lab analyses. Methodologically rigorous but bounded by funding and study scope.

    Journalism

    The Canadian Press and Globe and Mail reporting; CBC News; Globe coverage of the NFU response. Documentary but episodic.

    Affected stakeholders

    OFA, UPA, CFA, BFO, NFU. Authentic to affected communities but advocating for their members’ specific interests.

    Pro-rail advocacy

    Transport Action Canada and Transport Action Ontario. A credible, technically literate, pro-rail civil-society voice with no opposition to the project in principle, no economic interest in its outcome, and a fifty-year record of engagement with Canadian intercity passenger rail policy.

    This matters in two specific ways. First, it forecloses the response that the questions about ALTO’s cost, ridership, document release, and VIA-service impact are coming only from project-affected landowners or from anti-rail critics. They are coming from the country’s principal pro-rail civil-society voice, on the public record, having formally engaged with ALTO through ALTO’s own consultation process. Second, it puts the alternatives that have been considered — including the HPR framework the Initiative has been documenting — into the technical vocabulary of an organization that has the standing to describe them.

    Recommendations That Remain Live

    What still has not been produced

    As of May 2026, the public record shows that:

    The cost analysis Transport Action’s March 2026 letter asked for — and that TRAN Report 18 Recommendation 4 had asked for in September 2024 — has not been produced. The $60–90 billion AACE Class 5 figure in Q-923 stands without it.
    The Joint Project Office report Transport Action’s March 2026 letter asked to be released — and that TRAN Report 18 Recommendation 6 had asked to be released in September 2024 — has not been released. Transport Action’s additional point that the procurement-completion rationale for non-disclosure no longer applies has not been addressed.
    The VIA-impact analysis Transport Action’s March 2026 letter asked for, that the Senate TRCM raised concerns about in February 2026, and that TRAN Report 18 Recommendations 8 and 10 had asked for in September 2024, has not been produced. ALTO’s published material continues to refer to “optimization” of existing VIA services without a binding commitment.
    The ridership-model assumptions Transport Action’s March 2026 letter asked be made public have not been published. The government’s 43-million-by-2084 figure in Q-923 stands without disclosed methodology behind it.

    None of these are partisan demands. None of them is hostile to the project. All of them are recommendations from an established pro-rail advocacy organization, made through ALTO’s own consultation process, asking the same things that Parliament’s own committee was asking. Their continued non-fulfilment is procedural, not substantive — and procedurally, as The Report That Vanished sets out in detail, the questions remain available to be revived by parliamentary or stakeholder action.

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    The Voice ALTO Has Already Heard From (PDF)
    Reference document for federal decision-makers, parliamentarians, journalists, and constituents tracking the file
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    Sources

    Primary documents and references

    1.
    Transport Action Canada and Transport Action Ontario, Comments arising from ALTO HSR Stakeholder Roundtable and Public Consultation Sessions (letter to Peter Paz, Government and Stakeholder Relations, ALTO), March 16, 2026. Signed by Terry Johnson (President, Transport Action Canada) and Peter Miasek (President, Transport Action Ontario). ontario.transportaction.ca
    2.
    Transport Action Canada, Why did the government chose Alto? (open letter on ALTO HSR route options in eastern Ontario), 2026. ontario.transportaction.ca
    3.
    House of Commons Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities, Issues and Opportunities: High Frequency Rail in the Toronto to Quebec City Corridor. 18th Report, 44th Parliament, 1st Session. Tabled September 2024. ourcommons.ca
    4.
    Order Paper Question Q-923, 45th Parliament, 1st session. Asked by Philip Lawrence (MP for Northumberland–Clarke), March 5, 2026; answered April 22, 2026.
    5.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative companion briefs: Reading the Answer (May 2026); Reading the Footnote (May 2026); The Report That Vanished (May 2026); What We Know About ALTO’s Reporting and Accountability (May 2026); Five Hundred Farms (May 2026).
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Stakeholder Brief  ·  May 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.