Tag: reference-class forecasting

50000 jobs

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Plain Language Brief

Where do 50,000 jobs come from?

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

September 2026

50,000

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

~18,000

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

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

What Alto says

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

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

What the report actually says

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

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

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

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

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

How we checked it

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

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

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

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

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

Rebuilding the 50,000 — ten-year build at the top of Alto’s capital range
Layer	What it means	People
Owner and engineering	Alto’s own staff and the designers	700 – 2,000
Site and contractor	People building the railway	16,000 – 17,300
Supply chain	Staff at firms supplying the project	14,400
Induced	Jobs supported when those wages are spent	18,200
Total	Alto publishes 50,000	50,600

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

What the check found

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

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

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

The other way of reading it

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

The question the report leaves open

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

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

Two more things in the tables

Upper, not central

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

The comparison figures have no source

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

This has been released before

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

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

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

What we are asking Alto to publish

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

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

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

How to read the numbers on this page

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

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

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

Read the full paper

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

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

Sources and notes

1Alto, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, August 2026. Section 4.3.3 and Tables 7 and A4 (50,000 full-time equivalent jobs across direct, supply chain and induced effects, ten-year construction period, upper estimate; $86 billion value added; $23 billion tax revenue). Appendix A.2 methodology box (2019 Statistics Canada input-output model; static; excluded from the benefit-cost ratio; no account taken of labour shortages or capacity limits). Table A2 ($24.5 billion GDP, central estimate). Table 2 (44,000 construction jobs and $45 to $75 billion capital for high-frequency rail, unsourced). Section 4.3.3 sidebar (Canadian materials commitment).

2Prime Minister of Canada, news release, 19 February 2025 (over 51,000 jobs during construction; GDP gain of up to $35 billion annually).

3Transport Canada, news release, 12 December 2025, naming Ottawa–Montréal as the first segment (51,000 jobs during construction; up to $35 billion in GDP).

4HS2 Ltd, Annual Report and Accounts 2022–23 to 2025–26 (capital expenditure and workforce), and six-monthly reports to Parliament, December 2024, July 2025 and May 2026 (jobs supported, supply chain businesses, spend to date, cost range and schedule).

5CDPQ Infra, REM fact sheet and project pages; REM news releases of April 2018, November 2020 and June 2021 (34,000 jobs; over 30,000 direct and indirect jobs; more than 2,000 and then more than 3,000 workers on site).

6California High-Speed Rail Authority, economic impact analyses for FY2023–24 and FY2024–25, and the March 2024 release on construction jobs and daily dispatch.

7US Federal Highway Administration, Employment Impacts of Highway Infrastructure Investment (13,000 job-years per US$1 billion; 64/36 split between direct-and-indirect and induced).

8Exchange rates: Bank of Canada daily rates, 1 September 2026. 1 GBP = C$1.8795; 1 USD = C$1.3896. Per-kilometre cost comparison uses the Initiative’s own ECI/CFI cost model.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative Independent, non-partisan citizen research on the proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. This page is a plain-language summary of the research paper 50,000 Jobs?, September 2026. The full paper sets out the method, the tables and the complete source list. Nothing on this page is a statement about the motives or conduct of any person or organisation. It is an analysis of published figures and of what those published figures do and do not say.

September 5, 2026

Where the line goes

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

Where the line goes, and what it costs

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

Chapter 4 · The HPR Research Report

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

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

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Chapter 4: Route Alignment and Capital Cost (PDF)

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

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4.1 · The Window

Is the corridor still available?

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.2 · The Route

Take the speed the ground gives you

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

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

The reversal at the heart of the chapter

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

Where the ground is generous, the trains go fast

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

Where it isn’t, they go slower

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

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

4.3–4.6 · The Cost

What it would cost, and what we commit against

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

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

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

Why deferring electrification matters more than it sounds

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

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

Cold climate cuts the same way. Leda clay, karst and freeze–thaw are real hazards, and the international record shows what they can do: China’s Harbin–Dalian line ran about 25% over budget and carried a multi-year frost-heave speed restriction. But that is a 300 km/h record. At 200 km/h the tolerances are far more forgiving, and frost heave that would force a speed restriction on a high-speed line is a maintenance item on a slower one. The lower design speed buys a smaller penalty.

4.7 · The Comparison

Three and a half times the price per kilometre

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

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

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

4.8 · Journey Time

What the speed difference actually buys

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

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

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

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

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

4.9 · The Long View

What the corridor is in 2125

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

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

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

September 2, 2026

Procured and then

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Brief · September 2026

Procured, and Then?

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

Independent, non-partisan research · citizenresearch.ca

In Plain Language

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

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

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

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Procured, and Then? (PDF)

The full brief, with sources

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Related

HPR Research Report, Chapter 1

The forecasting framework this brief applies, set out in full

Read Chapter 1

01 · The Instrument

ALTO commissioned the outside view

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

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

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

02 · The Question

Buying the instrument is not the same as letting it bind

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

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

A test, not an accusation

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

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

03 · The Clock

The record will arrive after the decision has moved on

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

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

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

Why timing decides this

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

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

04 · The Benefit Case

Two studies, no cost side

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

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

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

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

Adverse mechanisms are identified but do not reach the total

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

The two studies disagree, and each resolves the disagreement upward

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

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

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

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

05 · The Ask

Publish the comparison

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

01
Release the comparison in full. ALTO should publish its reference-class should-cost and should-schedule outputs alongside its published capital cost and benefit-cost figures, unredacted. The outside view was commissioned to be seen, not filed.

02
Publish the benefit studies against a cost. A $24.4-billion annual benefit figure is not interpretable without the outlay required to obtain it. The two June 2026 studies should be accompanied by an appraisal that nets one against the other.

03
Apply the test before further commitment. The window in which an outside-view check can still change a decision is open now. It narrows with every disbursement.

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

How to read this brief

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

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

Sources

Documents relied on

1
Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.). Advance Contract Award Notice PAS240625-002-00 — project management and control expertise; pre-identified supplier Oxford Global Projects UK Limited. 2024.

2
Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.). Notice of extension, Access to Information request A-2026-0004. June 2026. On file with the Initiative.

3
Aviseo Consulting. An Overview of the Structural Economic Impacts of Alto: Computable General Equilibrium Modelling Approach to Assessing High-Speed Rail in the Toronto–Québec City Corridor. Prepared for Alto. June 2026.

4
CPCS, in association with HDR. Tourism in the Alto Corridor: Current Conditions and Potential Impacts. Prepared for Alto. June 2026.

5
National Audit Office. High Speed Two reset. Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, Session 2026-27, HC 52. London: National Audit Office, June 2026.

6
Flyvbjerg, Bent. “Quality Control and Due Diligence in Project Management: Getting Decisions Right by Taking the Outside View.” International Journal of Project Management 31, no. 5 (2013): 760–774.

7
Flyvbjerg, Bent. “Top-Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management: An Overview.” Project Management Journal 52, no. 6 (2021): 531–546.

Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · citizenresearch.ca · Brief · September 2026
Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor.

September 2, 2026

It left the rules behind

ALTO Used the Rulebook’s Numbers. It Left the Rules Behind.

ALTO’s new economic report takes two key figures from an Ontario appraisal manual and names that manual as its source. The manual attaches conditions to those figures. The report uses the figures and leaves the conditions out.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Economics Brief · Published August 2026 · Plain-language version of the research brief Two Parameters, None of the Conditions · Companion explainer: Hours Are Not Dollars

⚠ The Document Under Examination

In August 2026 ALTO published Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, an 83-page report setting out the economic case for the Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. Its central figure is $49.5 billion in benefits to travellers and society, set against a construction cost of $60 to $90 billion.

To turn sixty years of future benefits into one number in today’s dollars, the report needs two things: a rate at which to shrink future benefits back to present value, and a price for an hour of a traveller’s time. For both, it names one source — a public appraisal manual published by Metrolinx, the Government of Ontario’s transit agency for the Toronto and Hamilton region.

Critical Finding

The Metrolinx manual does not simply publish those two numbers. It publishes them as part of a package. For any project over $500 million, the same manual requires that the numbers be re-tested at different values, that results be reported as a range rather than a single figure, that early-stage construction costs be topped up to correct for known optimism, and that the project’s benefit-to-cost ratio be published. ALTO’s project is roughly a hundred times larger than that threshold.

None of those requirements appears in ALTO’s report. There is no test of the discount rate, no range around the $49.5 billion, no optimism adjustment to the cost, and no benefit-cost ratio. The two numbers were carried across. The conditions attached to them were not.

This brief does not argue that ALTO used the wrong discount rate. The rate it used is a mainstream, defensible choice. The finding is narrower and, we think, harder to answer: the report presents a set of choices as though they were simply facts, and a reader has no way of knowing that anything was chosen at all.

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Why this matters

Imagine a builder quotes you a price for an extension. Asked where the figures come from, they name the standard industry pricing guide. That guide does set those rates. It also says that on a job this size the quote must show a high and a low figure rather than a single number, must add a fixed percentage on top because early quotes are almost always too low, and must set the total against the value of what you are getting.

The builder uses the guide’s rates and does none of the rest. The quote may well be sound. You have no way of telling — and nothing on the page tells you that anything was left out.

That is the situation this brief describes. ALTO’s economic report takes two figures from a public appraisal manual and names that manual as its source. The same manual attaches a set of mandatory checks to those figures for projects of this size. The figures were used. The checks are absent, and their absence is not disclosed.

It matters because of what rests on the result. The $49.5 billion benefit figure is the number now appearing in news coverage and public statements as the reason to build a railway costing $60 to $90 billion of public money, ahead of a federal decision in 2029. Presented as a single figure with no range, it reads as something measured. The report’s own tables call it an upper estimate.

What the report gives you

One benefit figure, $49.5 billion, built on a rate and an hourly value of time presented without explanation of where they came from or what else was possible. No range. No benefit-to-cost ratio.

What its own cited source requires

The same figures re-tested at different values, results published as a range with a confidence level, a 64 per cent top-up on early-stage construction costs, and the benefit-to-cost ratio reported.

What that leaves a reader with

No way to judge how firm the headline number is — and no indication in the document that this is a question worth asking.

One thing this brief does not do: argue that the numbers ALTO chose are wrong, or that high-speed rail is a bad idea. The rate it used is a mainstream choice, and the one test the manual requires would, if anything, make the benefits look larger. The ask is simply that the tests be run and published, as the cited manual says they must be.

The Two Numbers

What the report borrowed, and from where

3.5%

the discount rate ALTO uses, taken from the Metrolinx manual

Appendix A, footnote 65

$22.32

the value of one hour of a traveller’s time, the same figure for every trip

justified as following Metrolinx method

64%

the top-up the same manual requires on construction costs at this stage of design

not applied in the report

The discount rate. A benefit that arrives in 2085 is not worth as much to us today as the same benefit next year. Economists handle this by shrinking future amounts back to a present-day value at a fixed annual percentage — the discount rate. ALTO uses 3.5 per cent a year, applied over a sixty-year period. The rate matters enormously: over sixty years, small changes to it move the headline benefit figure by billions.

The value of time. Most of the $49.5 billion is not cash. It is hours — time that travellers would otherwise have spent on the road or waiting at an airport. To put a dollar figure on those hours, you have to decide what an hour is worth. ALTO uses $22.32, and applies the same figure to every trip: business or holiday, commuter or tourist. The report tells us its own ridership model did separate business from non-business travel, and that this distinction was set aside in favour of one blended figure.

Where both come from. The footnote attached to the discount rate cites one document and one only: the Business Case Manual Volume 2: Guidance, published by Metrolinx in August 2021. The single blended value of time is defended on the grounds that it follows Metrolinx method. So a manual written for regional transit projects in the Toronto and Hamilton area is the published authority for how a national intercity railway has been appraised.

Metrolinx guidance is not binding on a federal Crown corporation, and nothing here suggests otherwise. But a citation carries the terms of the thing cited. If you name a manual as your authority, it is fair to look at what else that manual says on the same page.

The Manual’s Own Terms

The numbers come as a set, not a menu

The 3.5 per cent rate appears in a table of standard parameters. The text introducing that table is direct about their status: any departure from them has to be explicitly agreed during the work, with a clear justification recorded. It is a list of defaults you may leave, provided you say so. Below is how each of those defaults is treated in ALTO’s report.

What the Metrolinx manual specifies	What ALTO’s report does
Discount rate: 3.5 per cent. The rate at which future benefits are shrunk to present value.	3.5 per cent. Adopted exactly as specified, and correctly footnoted to the manual.
Status:Carried across
Value of time: one blended figure. A single hourly value across all modes and all trip purposes, rather than separate values for business and leisure travel.	One blended figure, $22.32. Adopted, and expressly justified by reference to the manual — in preference to the business and non-business split that ALTO’s own ridership model had already produced.
Status:Carried across
Growth cap: stop escalating benefits 30 years out. The manual caps growth in the inputs thirty years after the base year, expressly to reflect the fact that nobody can see that far ahead. User benefits are named as covered by the cap.	Applied to two small lines, not the big one. Accident rates are capped after twenty years, and vehicle emission factors run to 2050. No cap is stated on travel-time benefits — which are 78 per cent of the total.
Status:Applied selectively
One price year throughout. All values discounted and escalated to a single common year, fixed at the start of the study, so that every figure in the document is in the same money.	Two price years in one report. The appraisal and the capital cost are in 2024 dollars; the economy-wide GDP result is in 2019 dollars.
Status:Not consistent
Test the value of time at 0.75 per cent real growth. The manual’s base case assumes the value of an hour does not rise in real terms — but pairs that assumption with a required test of what happens if it does.	Zero growth assumed; no test run. The assumption was carried across. The test that the manual attaches to the assumption was not.
Status:Left behind

One footnote on the money. Adjusting the manual’s 2021 value of time for inflation to 2024 gives roughly $21.40 — within a few per cent of ALTO’s $22.32. We are not claiming ALTO derived its figure that way, and ALTO does not say how it did. The point is simply that the figure sits where you would expect a Metrolinx-derived figure to sit, which makes the omission of the accompanying test harder to explain as an oversight.

The Missing Tests

What a project this size is supposed to publish

The Metrolinx manual scales its requirements to the size of the project. Anything above $500 million is treated as large scale, and a specific list of tests and disclosures becomes mandatory. ALTO’s cost estimate is $60 to $90 billion — roughly a hundred times that threshold. Here is that list, and where each item stands in ALTO’s report.

Re-run the numbers at a different discount rate

The manual requires the calculation be repeated at 2.5 per cent so the reader can see how sensitive the answer is to the rate. Not done, and not mentioned. Note the direction here: the required test is at a lower rate, which would make the benefits look larger. Nothing in the manual supports an argument that ALTO’s rate is too generous. What it supports is the narrower point that the manual’s author expects the rate to be tested and the test to be shown.

Re-run the numbers with a rising value of time

Required at 0.75 per cent real growth per year. Not done.

Run the costs and assumptions through a range analysis

The manual requires costs and modelling assumptions be run thousands of times with the inputs varied, and the result reported as a range with a stated confidence level. Not done.

Report the odds that the project is worth doing

The manual asks specifically for the probability that benefits exceed costs. Not reported — the report publishes no benefit-cost ratio at all.

Publish the standard indicators

Net present value, benefit-cost ratio, capital utilisation, return on investment, internal rate of return. None published.

Model low, medium and high growth scenarios

Required, with the ridership growth rate stated for each. A ridership range is shown; the underlying growth scenarios are not stated.

This is not a theoretical requirement

The manual works the method through on a real example: an extension of the Yonge subway line in Toronto, at an early stage of design. A single cost estimate of $5.65 billion becomes a range of $6.16 to $6.84 billion, with the confidence level attached. The reader is shown a central figure, a spread, and how sure anyone is about it.

That project is roughly one per cent the size of ALTO. On uncertainty, the manual ALTO cites tells its reader more about a subway extension than ALTO’s report tells its reader about a national railway.

The Missing Lower Number

The report concedes a range it never publishes

The two tables carrying the entire $49.5 billion case are both headed with the words upper estimate. Every figure in the narrative is prefixed the same way: up to 24 million riders, up to 9.3 billion hours saved, up to 400 fatalities avoided, up to 39.1 million tonnes of emissions.

An upper estimate is one end of a range. The other end does not appear anywhere in the document.

The claim built on top of those figures goes further still. The report states that the benefits hold across a wide range of scenarios, and repeats the point in its conclusion. But demonstrating that a result holds across a range of scenarios is exactly what the missing sensitivity analysis does, and exactly what the cited manual requires be reported at this scale. The scenarios may well have been run. Their results are not shown.

And the report clearly knows how to show them. Elsewhere in the same document, the ridership forecast comes with multiple scenarios and a published band around it. The economy-wide GDP figure rests on nearly a hundred separate model runs with the assumptions varied. Between a tested input and a tested output sits the largest single number in the report, presented as a single column of point estimates.

The Optimism Adjustment

A top-up the manual requires, and the report does not mention

Early cost estimates for big infrastructure projects are, as a matter of record, too low. Not occasionally — routinely. The Metrolinx manual is explicit about the evidence behind this: in an international sample of 258 rail projects, ninety per cent were undercosted, by an average of forty-five per cent.

The manual’s response is a mandatory top-up applied to the construction cost when it is compared with benefits, over and above whatever contingency is already in the estimate. The size of the top-up depends on how far the design has progressed. At the earliest stage — nought to ten per cent designed — it is 64 per cent.

ALTO’s cost estimate is described in its own report as an AACE Class 5 estimate, which is the earliest and least developed class there is. Applied as the manual directs, a cost of $60 to $90 billion would enter the comparison at roughly $98 to $148 billion, before any comparison with benefits is attempted. That range is our own arithmetic on ALTO’s published estimate at the manual’s stated uplift; ALTO publishes no uplifted figure.

The report applies no such adjustment and does not mention the concept. It is worth noting where this reasoning comes from: the manual grounds the adjustment in the research on transport megaproject cost overruns that this Initiative has drawn on since its first publication. That reasoning is already embedded in the appraisal manual ALTO chose to cite.

The Central Inversion

Too early to divide, but not too early to multiply

The report declines to publish a benefit-cost ratio — benefits divided by costs, the single number a reader would most want. Its stated reason is that the cost estimate is too immature to support one.

Under the framework ALTO cites, that reasoning runs backwards. The manual sets out what is required at each stage of a project’s life. At the earliest stage, the very stage ALTO is at, the requirement is a single line: conduct sensitivity testing to understand the key drivers and the level of uncertainty in each option.

Early-stage uncertainty is not an exemption from testing. It is the reason testing is required. The report treats it the other way round: immaturity on the cost side is given as grounds for publishing nothing, while single-point figures are published on the benefit side of the same ledger. The same uncertainty is treated as decisive for one number and immaterial for the other.

And a business case for this corridor has already done it. In December 2021 the Joint Project Office — VIA Rail and the Canada Infrastructure Bank — published a benefit-cost ratio for High Frequency Rail, the cheaper predecessor to ALTO, at a comparable stage of development: about 0.13, or roughly 0.4 on an expanded basis counting fare revenue and agglomeration as benefits. It published a net present value of minus $21.1 billion and a thirty-year public subsidy of $37.1 to $42.2 billion alongside it. Its economic parameters were drawn from Metrolinx and Ministère des Transports du Québec guidance — the same two sources ALTO cites. Immaturity did not prevent a ratio then. The companion explainer Hours Are Not Dollars sets out those figures in full, including why 0.13 rather than 0.4 is the anchor.

A related point arises elsewhere in the report. In explaining why one set of results is excluded from the welfare account, it refers to those results as therefore not being included in the benefit-cost ratio — speaking of it as a thing with a settled boundary about what enters it. One page says a meaningful ratio cannot yet be produced. Another treats the ratio as already drawn up. The two are difficult to read together, and the report does not reconcile them.

Limits of This Analysis

What this brief does not say

Stated here rather than left for others to find.

On the analysis

The rate is not wrong3.5 per cent is a defensible choice, used by the United Kingdom Treasury and by Metrolinx, and well supported for long-horizon public investment. This brief does not argue that ALTO’s rate is too low or too high.

Metrolinx does not bind ALTOA provincial agency’s manual has no legal force over a federal Crown corporation. The argument is about the coherence of a citation, not about jurisdiction.

One choice runs in ALTO’s favourThe 3.5 per cent rate is applied flat across sixty years. The UK Treasury, whose Social Time Preference Rate this figure matches, steps its rate down to 3.0 per cent after year 30. Applying that schedule would have made ALTO’s benefit total larger, not smaller.

One cited source was not reviewedGuidance from the Ministère des Transports du Québec is cited separately for the value of time. The Initiative has not reviewed it and takes no position on what it requires.

On the report and its source

The report does apply conservatism in placesAccident reductions are capped after twenty years, and car emission factors are assumed to improve to 2050, which the report notes limits the emissions benefit. These are the two smallest monetised lines. No equivalent constraint is disclosed for travel time, which is 78 per cent of the total.

The manual itself is datedMetrolinx said in 2021 that a revised version with updated values would follow in 2022. Five years on, it has not. That is a limitation of the source document, not a fault of ALTO’s — but a reader assessing where a federal appraisal input came from is entitled to know it.

Which figures are whoseEvery figure attributed to ALTO, Metrolinx, the Joint Project Office, HM Treasury or Statistics Canada is quoted from the sources listed below and can be checked there. Three figures are our own arithmetic and are marked as such where they appear: the $98 to $148 billion uplifted capital range, the $21.40 inflation-escalated value of time, and the five per cent effect of the declining Green Book schedule. Where the report does not state something, we say so rather than inferring it, and we make no claim about why any requirement was or was not carried across.

This is a public report, not a formal submissionA business case submitted to Cabinet in 2029 may well contain material this document does not. The claims examined here are the claims ALTO has chosen to put in public.

What Would Settle It

Two questions ALTO can answer without releasing a model

Both are answerable from work ALTO has already done. Neither requires disclosure of a model, cooperation from staff, or agreement about what the correct discount rate for a national railway ought to be.

1. Was the calculation ever run at a rate other than 3.5 per cent?

And if so, what were the results? A negative answer is itself informative — it would mean the required test was never performed. An affirmative answer is the sensitivity table the report does not contain.

2. Which parts of the cited guidance were applied, and which were departed from?

The Metrolinx document requires that any variation from its parameters be agreed and clearly justified. The report records no variations at all — while, on the evidence above, departing from several.

Where Things Stand · August 2026

Summary ledger

Measured against the requirements of the manual ALTO names as its authority:

Carried across

The 3.5 per cent discount rate, correctly cited to the manual.

Carried across

The single blended value of time, expressly justified by reference to the manual.

Partial

The thirty-year cap on benefit growth: applied to accident and emissions lines, not stated for travel time, which is 78 per cent of the benefits.

Partial

A single price year throughout: the appraisal is in 2024 dollars, the GDP result in 2019 dollars.

Left behind

Discount rate sensitivity test at 2.5 per cent.

Left behind

Value of time sensitivity test at 0.75 per cent real growth.

Left behind

Range analysis of costs and assumptions, reported with a confidence level.

Left behind

The probability that benefits exceed costs, and the benefit-cost ratio itself.

Left behind

The standard set of performance indicators: net present value, benefit-cost ratio, capital utilisation, return on investment, internal rate of return.

Left behind

The optimism-bias top-up on construction costs, 64 per cent at this level of design — not applied and not mentioned.

Left behind

The lower end of the range, on figures the report itself labels an upper estimate.

ALTO names an appraisal manual twice — once for its discount rate, once to justify a single blended value of time — and leaves behind the testing, the ranges, the optimism adjustment and the benefit-cost reporting that the same manual attaches to those figures at this project’s scale. What remains is a column of numbers labelled an upper estimate whose lower estimate is never shown, resting on parameters presented as facts rather than as selections, in a report that declines to divide that column by the cost while describing the benefits as holding across a wide range of scenarios.

Every document relied on here is public. Nothing in this analysis requires access to ALTO’s models, cooperation from its staff, or a view on what the correct discount rate for a national railway ought to be.

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Two Parameters, None of the Conditions (PDF)

Full research brief with page references, parameter tables, worked figures and sources

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If the terms in this brief are unfamiliar — what a discount rate actually does, why a benefit figure is not money, and who ends up paying — the companion explainer Hours Are Not Dollars covers the same ground in plain language, and sets out the 2021 business case figures in full.

Sources

Primary documents

ALTO, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, August 2026, 83 pp. Discount rate, appraisal period and price base in the Appendix A methodology box, sourced at footnote 65 to the Metrolinx Business Case Manual Volume 2; value of time and the single-parameter justification in the same appendix, with Ministère des Transports du Québec guidance at footnote 66. Direct-effects tables headed “upper estimate, $2024 CAD”; benefit-cost ratio discussion at p. 62 and reference to the benefit-cost ratio at p. 80; capital cost and AACE Class 5 at pp. 5 and 65; scenario-robustness claims at pp. 3 and 69.

Metrolinx, Business Case Manual Volume 2: Guidance, August 2021, 222 pp. Economic parameters at Table 5.8; sensitivity requirements at Tables 5.1 to 5.3; optimism bias at Tables 5.4 to 5.6; worked range example at Table 5.7; Economic Case lifecycle requirements and key performance indicators; business case principles at pp. 11 and 13; guidance revision cycle at p. 4. metrolinx.com

Metrolinx, “Business Cases — Resources,” accessed 21 August 2026. The Business Case Guidance link resolves to the Volume 2 file under an asset version token corresponding to 15 September 2022; no Volume 2 revision has been issued.

B. Flyvbjerg, Procedures for Dealing with Optimism Bias in Transport Planning (UK Department for Transport, 2004), cited in the Metrolinx Guidance as the basis for the optimism-bias uplift.

Statistics Canada, Table 18-10-0004-01, consumer price index, used for the 2021 to 2024 escalation of the Metrolinx value of time. The comparison is arithmetic and is not an attribution of method.

August 21, 2026

Deconstructing the Megaproject Playbook

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

Deconstructing the Megaproject Playbook

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

Chapter 1 · The HPR Research Report

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

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Chapter 1: Deconstructing the Megaproject Playbook (PDF)

The full chapter, with footnotes and sourcing

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1.1 · The Track Record

The iron law of megaprojects

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

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

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

52%
Average budget overrun for high-speed rail specifically

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

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

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

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

1.2 · Two Reasons Forecasts Go Wrong

Honest mistakes and strategic misrepresentation

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

Optimism bias — the honest mistake

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

Strategic misrepresentation — telling people what they want to hear

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

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

The pattern, stated plainly

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

1.3 · Structural Profile

Where ALTO sits on the scale

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

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

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

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

To be clear

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

1.4 · The Uniqueness Trap

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

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

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

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

What the disagreement is really about

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

1.5 · Risk of Bad Surprises

Why standard contingency budgets fall short

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

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

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

1.6 · The Fix

Checking the numbers against the real-world record

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

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

What it costs

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

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

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

How many people would ride it

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

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

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

The standard this report holds itself to

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

1.7 · Why Now

Canada’s changed circumstances

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

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

The question this raises

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

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

What’s Next

What’s in the rest of this report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 4, 2026
Introduction: What is HPR

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

What is HPR?

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

Introduction · The HPR Research Report

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

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What is HPR? — Introduction (PDF)

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

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The Framework

Three parts, one corridor strategy

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

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

HPR — High Performance Rail · the framework

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

HPPR — High Performance Passenger Rail · the spine

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

HPFR — High Performance Freight Rail · the freight dimension

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

The 10 Guiding Principles of HPR

What HPR is built on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How HPR Differs

A North American solution

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

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

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

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

Travel Time, Not Speed

The clock, not the speedometer

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

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

The measure that matters

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

The Price Lever

Pricing for a car-centric market

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

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

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

What HPR Is Not

Neither political, nor all at once

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

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

The Pitch

A case built to be checked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 17, 2026

One missing number

Many Benefits, One Missing Number

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

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

⚠ What the page does not say

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

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

Critical Finding

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

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

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

The Frame

Benefits gross, cost absent

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

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

Comparison

The page’s claims against the corridor’s numbers

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

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

Three Inversions

Where the page’s strongest claims turn over

The sustainability claim inverts under lifecycle accounting

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

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

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

Construction jobs are counted on the wrong side of the ledger

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

Three Numbers

What restoring the denominator shows

2.6×

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

Initiative ridership modelling

+15 Mt

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

Initiative lifecycle carbon analysis

0.06–0.1

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

Initiative cost & benefit model

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

Where things stand · July 2026

Summary ledger

Against the benefit claims as the page presents them:

Overstated

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

Contradicted

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

Omitted

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

Omitted

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

Miscounted

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

Overstated

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

Omitted

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

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

Sources

Documents and analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 9, 2026

Undressing the addressable market

Technical Brief · Corridor Demand

Undressing the Addressable Market

Alto’s demand case, read against the corridor’s roadside counts, its current population path, and the international reference class.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Corridor Demand Brief · Published July 2026 · Independent, non-partisan research

⚠ New Finding · The 95-million figure has no published source

Alto’s April 2026 commentary states that “ninety-five million intercity trips take place each year between the cities Alto will serve,” rising to 140 million by 2049. The figure has been repeated across government communications and press coverage since. It does not appear in Alto’s own explanatory document Fast Forward (March 2025), the Corporate Plan Summary 2024-25 to 2028-29, or the June 2026 What We Heard consultation report. No independent analyst — C.D. Howe, the Munk School, McGill TRAM — has adopted it. The denominator that anchors Alto’s modest-quarter framing is stated in a commentary without any published derivation.

Key Finding

95 M → ~25 M. Alto’s 95-million-intercity-trips figure counts every trip, by every mode, over every distance, across the whole corridor. The market a high-speed line can realistically serve — the longer, station-to-station journeys where rail competes with air and car — is roughly a quarter of it, about 25 million a year; the rest is short, regional, and off-corridor travel no train could carry.

Central independent ridership sits at 8–9 million a year, rising toward 10 at maturity — less than half of Alto’s 24-million target. The three markets a fast service actually converts (car, air, and existing rail) sum to about that level. The reference-class floor from comparable car-dependent corridors is 4–5 million. Alto’s 24-million target stands alone above every published independent forecast.

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Undressing the Addressable Market — Full Brief (PDF)

Technical brief with methodology, tables, figures, and full source citations

Download PDF

The Claim

Alto’s demand case, in its own words

In an April 17, 2026 opinion piece published in the Toronto Star and La Presse and reproduced on altotrain.ca, Alto’s chief executive set out the demand case for the Toronto–Québec City high-speed line. Its central figures are a headline market of ninety-five million intercity trips a year across the corridor, rising to one hundred and forty million by 2049; a population of eighteen million reaching twenty-two million within fifteen years; and a target of twenty-four million annual passengers by 2055, presented as consistent with international outcomes. The piece is framed to reassure — its very title insists that high-speed rail is no leap of faith.

This brief tests the claim on its own terms. It does not dispute that the corridor is large, that it is growing, or that its intercity system is under strain — all three are true. It disputes the inference the commentary draws from them: that a twenty-four-million forecast is therefore measured, modest, and safe.

Read against three independent bodies of evidence — the corridor’s roadside traffic counts, the population path Statistics Canada now projects, and the international record of what comparable high-speed lines actually carry — the demand case rests on optimistic framing rather than measurement. Where the commentary offers large round numbers and a single favourable analogue, the evidence points to central ridership near a third of the headline, and to a growth story built on a population Canada has already walked back.

What the Evidence Shows

Six findings

The findings rest on four independent methods, each built to be reproducible from public data: a reference class of comparable corridors, a modal-shift ridership model, a market-by-market demand build-up, and a re-basing on Statistics Canada’s current population. A fifth lens — the standard appraisal treatment of optimism bias — governs how all four are read.

Central independent ridership is 8–9 million a year, not 24

Rising toward 10 at maturity. The risk-adjusted floor from comparable car-dependent corridors is 4–5 million. Alto’s 24-million target sits above every published independent forecast of the corridor.

The demand builds from three real sources, not a 95-million abstraction

The market a fast service actually converts is measurable: the cars crossing the corridor, the air travellers on the competitive pairs, and the existing VIA riders it retains. Added together — roughly 2.8–3.5 million from car, 1.7–2.0 million from air, and about 3.3 million retained rail (VIA’s directly reported 2025 Corridor East ridership) — they come to about 8 to 9 million. The 95-million figure is an all-modes, all-pairs total that no service captures.

The 95-million figure itself is unsourced

Stated in the commentary without citation, and absent from Fast Forward (March 2025), the Corporate Plan Summary 2024-25 to 2028-29, and the June 2026 What We Heard consultation report. No independent analyst has adopted it. The denominator that anchors the modest-quarter framing is not just broad but unpublished.

The demand-growth story reverses the per-capita trend

Ninety-five to one hundred and forty million over 2026–2049 is about 1.7 per cent a year, faster than the corridor’s own population growth. The gap implies rising travel per resident — against the grain of hybrid work and videoconferencing.

The population base is the pre-cap one

Twenty-two million in fifteen years extrapolates the 2015–2025 immigration surge. Statistics Canada’s January 2026 projection is lower; on the current path the corridor is about 6.3 million people smaller by 2055 than the counterfactual Alto’s numbers assume.

The one comparator offered is a best case

Madrid–Barcelona is among the strongest high-speed successes on record. The honest reference class — the full distribution of high-speed outcomes, many of which undershot their forecasts — brackets the answer far below 24 million.

Method 1 · Reference Class

What comparable corridors actually carry

Rather than model the corridor from assumptions, the reference-class method asks what corridors with similar car dependence, density, and trip lengths actually achieve once fast rail opens. Each candidate corridor is scored on a Car Dependency Index (CDI) — a composite of car mode share, population density, and transit provision at the endpoints. The Toronto–Québec City corridor’s high car dependence places it with reference cases that, rescaled to this line, carry the equivalent of roughly 4 to 5 million corridor trips a year at maturity. This is the risk-adjusted floor: what the evidence says the corridor is most likely to do before any speed, fare, or density assumption is layered on.

Figure 1 — The reference class: ridership against car dependency. Comparable intercity-rail corridors scored by their Car Dependency Index. The Toronto–Québec City corridor’s high car dependence places it with reference cases that, rescaled to this line, carry the equivalent of roughly 4 to 5 million corridor trips a year — the risk-adjusted floor.

Methods 2 & 3 · The Three Markets

Demand, counted not modelled

A fast service on this corridor draws from three distinct current populations: the car market, the air market on the competitive city pairs, and the existing rail riders. Each is measurable from public data. Because they are distinct populations, they add without double-counting.

The car market is read at the Highway 401 screenline where it crosses into Québec, after Ottawa-bound traffic has left via Highway 416 and Cornwall-local traffic has loaded, stripped of the 30 to 35 per cent commercial-truck share and short regional trips: roughly 8.8 to 11.0 million end-to-end car person-trips a year across the triangle at an occupancy of 2.0. Applying the road-market capture rates converts these into the rail ridership the car market alone would yield.

Table 1 — Rail ridership drawn from the car market. Capture rates are road-market shares from the modal-shift analysis at a moderate-fare regime; they express rail’s share of the combined car-and-rail market. Only Toronto–Montréal is confirmed by roadside counts; the Ottawa legs are demand-sized.

The car market is only one of three. A fast corridor service also draws from the air travellers on the same city pairs, and it retains the passengers already riding the train. The corridor air market on the competitive pairs — Toronto–Montréal, Toronto–Ottawa, and the smaller Ottawa–Montréal — is on the order of 2.5 to 3.0 million point-to-point passengers a year, of which a fast train on these distances captures about two-thirds.

Existing conventional rail is now reported directly in VIA’s 2025 annual results: 3.34 million passengers a year on the Corridor East service group (Québec City–Montréal–Ottawa–Toronto), within a Québec City–Windsor corridor total of 4.18 million. Essentially all of the triangle share is retained by a faster, more reliable service. VIA’s audited subsidy figures also fix the shape of the trip-length distribution: 48.51 dollars per passenger over 0.22 dollars per passenger-mile is an average trip of about 355 kilometres — roughly a third of the end-to-end corridor distance. Even the passengers already choosing rail are, on average, taking journeys well short of the full corridor.

Table 2 — Where the corridor’s rail ridership comes from (central). Car, air, and existing-rail travellers are distinct current populations, so the three sources add without double-counting. The rail line uses VIA’s Corridor East service group directly, rather than deriving a triangle share of the wider Québec City–Windsor total. The total is the central case around 2055; it rises toward 10 million at maturity as the ramp completes, and remains far below 24 million.

Method 4 · The Population Basis

The 6.3-million deficit

Every ridership figure scales with the population beneath it, so the choice of population path is decisive. The brief uses Statistics Canada’s January 2026 projection (catalogue 17-20-0003), which incorporates the 2024–25 federal Immigration Levels Plan.

Against the pre-2024 growth path that older corridor forecasts — and the commentary’s twenty-two-million figure — assume, this is materially lower: the corridor reaches about 19.8 million by 2055 on the current path, versus 26.1 million on the counterfactual, a deficit of 6.3 million. Because ridership scales with population, a forecast on the old path is inflated by roughly the same proportion the population has been cut — before any question of mode share or capture even arises.

Figure 2 — Corridor population: the 6.3-million deficit. The pre-2024 counterfactual (~1.8%/yr) reaches 26.1 million by 2055; Statistics Canada’s post-cap January 2026 projection (~1.0%/yr) reaches 19.8 million — a 6.3-million gap that every ridership figure scales with. The open diamond marks Alto’s own forecast of 22 million within fifteen years; its implied ~1.35%/yr growth runs above the current path.

Triangulation

Where Alto’s target sits against every independent forecast

The three methods converge. The demand-side build-up sums to about 8 to 9 million a year; the bottom-up modal-shift model lands in the same place; the reference class puts a floor near 4 to 5 million. Set beside the full band of independent corridor estimates, Alto’s 24-million target stands alone above every one.

Figure 3 — Independent corridor ridership estimates against Alto’s target. Annual corridor ridership around 2055. Alto’s 24-million target stands alone above every independent forecast — the Munk School, C.D. Howe, the Joint Project Office, and McGill — and above the Initiative’s own central case (filled markers). The open markers plot the Initiative’s method on the pre-2024 population Alto’s numbers assume; even then it stays within the published band, so the distance is population basis, not method.

The Claim, Audited

Where the 95-million figure appears — and where it doesn’t

A demand denominator on which a $60–90 billion capital commitment rests should be reproducible from published sources. Alto’s is not. The ninety-five-million and one-hundred-and-forty-million figures are stated in the April 2026 commentary without citation and are absent from every canonical planning document the corporation has published.

PresentImbleau, M., “High-speed rail is not a leap of faith: why it matters for Canada’s growth” — Op-ed, Toronto Star and La Presse, April 17, 2026; reproduced on altotrain.ca. The single document in which the 95-million and 140-million figures appear. Stated without citation, methodology, or reference to any underlying study.

AbsentFast Forward: Shaping Canada’s Future with a High-Speed Rail Network (March 2025) — Alto’s own public-facing explanatory document. Discusses ridership growth from ~3 million (2024) to 24 million (2055) and 43 million (2084), but does not reference the 95-million intercity-trip figure or provide any market-total denominator on that scale.

AbsentVIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc., Corporate Plan Summary 2024-25 to 2028-29 (November 2024) — the corporation’s tabled planning document referenced by the Library of Parliament backgrounder on the project. Contains ridership targets (“17 million by 2059” for HFR, before the HSR rebrand) but no 95-million total-market figure.

AbsentJune 2026 What We Heard Report on the corridor study area — Alto’s own summary of the January–April 2026 consultation, running to more than 130 pages. Does not reference a 95-million figure.

AbsentQuarterly Financial Reports through Q3 2025-26 — Alto’s mandatory reporting to Parliament. Does not reference a 95-million figure.

AbsentIndependent published analyses of the corridor — the C.D. Howe Institute’s All Aboard study (March 2026), the Munk School Global Economic Policy Lab’s HSR analysis, Transportation Research at McGill’s corridor demand modelling, and Michael Schabas’s Senate submission on Bill C-15 (January 2026, 65 pp.). None uses the 95-million figure.

The finding does not, on its own, resolve whether the 95-million figure is defensible. It resolves whether the figure is auditable. On the public record as it stands, it is not: no derivation has been published, no methodology has been described, and no independent source has adopted it.

Recommendation

Three things follow

The demand case that anchors a 1,000-kilometre corridor, a $60–90 billion capital commitment, and a multi-decade delivery programme cannot responsibly rest on figures that have not been made auditable. Three steps would meet the standard.

Release the demand model for independent audit

A forecast that anchors an alignment and a multi-decade capital commitment cannot responsibly remain unpublished. In particular, the derivation of the ninety-five-million and one-hundred-and-forty-million intercity-trip figures cited in the April 2026 commentary should be published alongside the underlying model.

Adjust toward the reference class and current population

Standard megaproject appraisal requires promoter forecasts to be adjusted toward the reference class rather than accepted at face value. Alto’s should also be re-based on Statistics Canada’s January 2026 population projection, rather than the pre-2024 path the current forecast assumes.

Size the corridor decision to the audited demand

Not to a ninety-five-million headline or a twenty-four-million target that no independent method reaches. High-speed rail need not be a leap of faith. But the demand case as currently stated is closer to one than the corridor’s own numbers allow.

Download Full Brief

Undressing the Addressable Market (PDF)

Full methodology, tables, figures, basis and limitations, and complete source citations

Download PDF

Sources

Primary documents and data

Every figure in this analysis is drawn from the public sources or companion analyses set out below and is reproducible from them. Sources are grouped by the claim or quantity they support.

1.The claim examined. Imbleau, M., President and Chief Executive Officer of Alto. “High-speed rail is not a leap of faith: why it matters for Canada’s growth.” Commentary, altotrain.ca, April 17, 2026. altotrain.ca. The source, stated without further citation, of the ninety-five-million and one-hundred-and-forty-million intercity-trip figures, the eighteen-to-twenty-two-million population claim, and the twenty-four-million passenger target for 2055.

2.Alto planning documents in which the 95-million figure does not appear. Alto, Fast Forward: Shaping Canada’s Future with a High-Speed Rail Network (March 2025). VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc., Corporate Plan Summary 2024-25 – 2028-29. Alto, June 2026 What We Heard Report on the corridor study area public consultation. All at altotrain.ca.

3.Companion research, Citizen Research Initiative. Intercity Car Trips Between Toronto, Ottawa and Montréal (2026) — road-side measurement of end-to-end car travel at the Highway 401 Québec-boundary screenline, the per-leg car person-trips of Table 1, and the road-market capture rates of Table 2. HPR Research Report — Ridership (2026) — the demand reference class and Car Dependency Index (Figure 1); the modal-shift model, R = P × μ × s × φ(t); the population basis (Figure 2) and the 6.3-million deficit; and the triangulation against independent forecasts (Figure 3). All at citizenresearch.ca.

4.Traffic and travel-demand data. Ministry of Transportation of Ontario, Provincial Highways Traffic Volumes — annual average daily traffic on Highway 401, sections between the Highway 416 interchange and the Québec boundary. VIA Rail Canada, 2025 Annual Report (Montréal, March 2026): 4.40 million passengers system-wide and 986 million passenger-miles; 4.18 million on the Québec City–Windsor corridor and 3.34 million on the Corridor East service group; audited service-group subsidy figures implying an average Corridor East trip of about 355 kilometres. Statistics Canada, Air passenger traffic at Canadian airports (table 23-10-0253), together with airport-authority passenger statistics for Toronto Pearson, Montréal–Trudeau, and Ottawa Macdonald–Cartier. Transport Canada, Transportation in Canada annual report.

5.Population. Statistics Canada, Population Projections for Canada, Provinces and Territories, January 2026 vintage (catalogue 17-20-0003), which incorporates the 2024–25 federal Immigration Levels Plan; and Census of Population, 2021, for the corridor’s census-metropolitan-area populations. These underpin the 19.8-million (post-cap) and 26.1-million (pre-2024 counterfactual) 2055 corridor figures and the 6.3-million deficit.

6.Comparator corridor forecasts. Transport Canada and the EcoTrain consortium, Updated Feasibility Study of a High-Speed Rail Service in the Québec City–Windsor Corridor (2011). Federal Joint Project Office and the VIA High Frequency Rail baseline (2021). Transportation Research at McGill (TRAM), corridor demand modelling. C.D. Howe Institute (2026), high-speed-rail scenario. Munk School Global Economic Policy Lab, corridor demand. Schabas, M., Alto High-Speed Rail: Conceptual Design and Business Case, Senate submission on Bill C-15 (January 2026). These supply the independent ridership band of Figure 3.

7.Forecasting method and optimism bias. B. Flyvbjerg, “Survival of the Unfittest: Why the Worst Infrastructure Gets Built — and What We Can Do About It” (Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2009), and related work establishing reference-class forecasting; B. Flyvbjerg and D. Gardner, How Big Things Get Done (2023). HM Treasury (United Kingdom), The Green Book and its supplementary guidance on optimism bias. Oxford Global Projects, reference-class forecasting datasets and practice. UK National Audit Office, successive reports on High Speed 2 (HS2) documenting systematic optimism in demand forecasts and cost escalation.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · citizenresearch.ca · Corridor Demand Brief · July 2026
Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor.

July 7, 2026

The more you look

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

The More You Look, the Worse It Gets

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

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

⚠ The bottom line, up front

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

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

In one minute

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

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

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

Read the full report

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

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

Download PDF

How we know

Thirty studies. Same questions. Fifty-six years.

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

major studies of this railway, read into one matrix

1970–2026

questions asked of every single study

so the answers compare

years of studies, all priced in today’s dollars

a level playing field

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

What we found

Nine things every reader should know

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

1The answer depends on who paid for the study

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

2It has never paid for itself. Not once.

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

3The closer you look, the more it costs

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

4The ridership numbers don’t hold up

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

5The freight idea is good — with one catch

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

6Going faster barely helps

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

7We’ve seen this financing risk before

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

8The climate math only counts the good half

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

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

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

The gap, side by side

What the promoters say vs. what independent studies find

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

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

Ridership

Same railway. Forecasts from 6 million to 56 million.

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

~10M

independent, survey-based forecast for 2050

McGill, 2026

24–43M

the proponent’s own forecast

ALTO prospectus, 2025

42–56M

the highest numbers ever produced for this line

2026 advocacy paper

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

Study (year)

Who produced it

Yearly riders

Basis

Air Canada / CP (1993)

Airline / railway

5.8 M

the low end of the record

Task Force (1991)

Governments

7.8 M

full corridor

Tri-government (1995)

Governments

10–12 M

full corridor

EcoTrain (2011)

Governments

10–11 M

full corridor

Lynx (1998)

Private consortium

11.1 M

Québec City–Toronto

SNCF (2010)

Equipment maker

up to 22.5 M

best-case scenario

ALTO prospectus (2025)

Proponent

24–43 M

full network

Advocacy paper (2026)

Paid advocacy

42–56 M

the highest ever

McGill (2026)

Independent

~10 M

survey-based, 2050

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

What it means

Five takeaways

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

What the record points to

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

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

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

What to insist on

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

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

The evidence

All thirty studies, at a glance

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

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

Year

Study — who did it

Independent of the builder?

Verdict

1970

Intercity Passenger Transport Study — CTC

Federal

Upgrade

1984

High-Speed Passenger Rail in Canada — VIA

Crown corp

Mixed

1990

Review of Previous Studies — TRANSURB

Consultant

Wait

1990

A Pragmatic Approach (SPRINTOR) — ABB

Equipment maker

Upgrade

1990

The Canadian TGV Project — Bombardier / GEC Alsthom

Equipment maker

Build new

1991

Rapid Train Task Force — Ontario / Québec

Governments

Wait

1991

Competition in Rail Carriage — Berkowitz

Academic

Build new

1992

FAST TRACKS — VIA (advocacy)

Crown corp

Build new

1993

HST Market Assessment — Air Canada / CP

Airline / railway

Upgrade

1994

Demand-model re-estimate — Gaudry & Le Leyzour

Academic

No verdict

1995

Industrial Strategy (Vol II) — Simpson-Guerin

Consultant

No verdict

1995

Routing & Costing Study — SNC-Lavalin / Delcan

Consultant

No verdict

1995

Québec–Ontario HSR, Final Report — tri-gov

Governments

Wait

1998

The Lynx Proposal — Lynx consortium

Private consortium

Build new

2002

VIAFast — VIA Rail

Crown corp

Upgrade

2003

VIAFast validation — IBI for Transport Canada

Gov’t reviewer

No verdict

2009

Infrastructure and the Economy — Martin Prosperity Inst.

Academic

Build new

2010

Socio-Economic Study of HSR — SNCF

Equipment maker

Build new

2011

Updated Feasibility (EcoTrain) — tri-government

Governments

Wait

2014

Toronto–Kitchener–London HSR — Schabas

Consultant

Build new

2015

Future of Passenger Rail — Library of Parliament

Parliament / indep.

Upgrade

2016

Preliminary Business Case — SDG (Steer)

Consultant

Build new

2016

High Speed Rail in Ontario — Special Advisor

Provincial

Build new

2021

Toronto–Montreal Analysis — Munk School

Academic

Build new

2022

Speed and Frequency — Alstom

Equipment maker

Build new

2025

All Aboard — C.D. Howe Institute

Advocacy

Build new

2025

Fast Forward — ALTO (the proponent)

Proponent

Build new

2026

Conceptual Design & Business Case — Schabas

Advocacy

Build new

2026

Corridorwide Survey & Financial Analysis — McGill

Academic

No verdict

2026

Eastern Ontario Route (Hwy 401) — Schabas & Antinucci

Advocacy

Build new

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

The independent studies to trust

Where the sober numbers come from

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 6, 2026

A straighter line

A Straighter Line

Three ways to connect the same cities — and what the government’s own yardstick says about each.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Research Brief · June 2026

⚠ Companion to “Sixth in North America”

The 2020 ministerial briefing released under A-2022-005 contains two yardsticks the federal government chose for itself: slide 2.5, a checklist of where high-speed rail works best, and slide 2.6, a benchmark table of selected HSR systems. This brief runs ALTO’s eight proposed stations through both — then tests two other ways of connecting the same anchor cities. Read the companion brief →

The finding in brief

On the government’s own benchmark, ALTO as planned is the longest corridor and the least demand-dense of any system in the briefing — about 14,600 people per kilometre of new track, below every benchmarked line that reports a population.

Straightening the Toronto–Montreal spine helps only a little. The real lever is dropping the two stations that sit on no existing line, and reaching Ottawa and Quebec City on upgraded track rather than new build. Do that and the new build falls to a 540 km High Performance Passenger Rail (HPPR) spine — about 40 per cent less new track than ALTO — while demand density on new build climbs by roughly two-thirds, to mid-pack above Spain, without losing a single anchor city.

The Yardsticks

Two tests, chosen by the government

Slide 2.5 lists what makes high-speed rail work: large metropolitan populations, strong local transit, an optimal corridor length between economic centres, and dense city pairs.

Ministerial briefing slide 2.5, Success Factors: Where HSR Works Best, listing strong transit connections, optimal corridor length, and city-pair criteria including metropolitan population, GDP, density and collaborating economic sectors

Slide 2.5, “Success Factors: Where HSR Works Best.” Page 154 of the Canada Infrastructure Bank release, A-2022-005 (disclosed in part; marked DRAFT) — the federal checklist of where high-speed rail succeeds.

Slide 2.6 then benchmarks selected systems on capital cost, length, and the combined population they serve. Together the two let us score any route on the government’s own criteria — not ours.

Ministerial briefing slide 2.6, Selected HSR Systems: Key Metrics, a table of capital cost, cost per track-kilometre, population served, GDP and total length for seven HSR systems including France, Spain, the UK, Japan, Taiwan, California and Texas

Slide 2.6, “Selected HSR Systems: Key Metrics,” from the same release (A-2022-005, disclosed in part; marked DRAFT) — the benchmark systems against which the corridor is measured below.

Run ALTO’s eight stations through slide 2.5 and they sort cleanly into three tiers:

Anchors — pass outright

Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec City: large metros with real or near-real rapid transit, at HSR-friendly distances. These are the cities the corridor exists to connect.

Good intermediate — earns its place

Kingston: small, but it sits on the direct Toronto–Montreal path, so it adds riders without adding distance. The methodology rewards exactly this.

Weak — cost without a base

Peterborough and Trois-Rivières are small and sit on no existing passenger line; reaching either means building all-new track. Laval is redundant — it is inside the Montréal CMA.

The Ladder

Three ways to connect the same anchors

Hold the four anchor cities constant and change only how they are linked. Option ① is ALTO as planned. Options ② and ③ are the High Performance Rail (HPR) alternative: a new-build HPPR spine — the High Performance Passenger Rail line — on the direct Toronto–Montreal lakeshore, plus upgraded existing track for the secondary connections. ② keeps all eight stations, reaching Ottawa on the existing line and the small cities by new spur; ③ keeps Kingston on the spine, reaches Ottawa and Quebec City on upgraded existing lines, and drops the two off-corridor cities.

Metric	① ALTO as planned	② Direct HPPR spine + spurs (keep all 8)	③ Direct HPPR spine + Ottawa link (drop 2)
Stations	8	8	6
Toronto–Montreal routing	~650 km (detour via Peterborough/Ottawa)	~540 km direct lakeshore (HPPR spine)	~540 km direct lakeshore (HPPR spine)
Ottawa connection	on the new mainline	upgraded existing (Smiths Falls–Brockville)	upgraded existing (Smiths Falls–Brockville)
Montreal–Quebec City leg	new build (north shore, via Trois-Rivières)	new build (north shore, via Trois-Rivières)	upgraded existing (south-shore VIA line)
New-build track	~910 km	~850 km	~540 km
Upgraded existing track	—	~80 km	~350 km
People served	~13.3 M	~13.3 M	~13.0 M
Demand density, new-build track	~14,600 / km	~15,600 / km	~24,100 / km
Position on the slide 2.6 benchmark	last	below Spain	mid-pack (above Spain)
Off-corridor cities needing new track	Peterborough, Trois-Rivières	Peterborough, Trois-Rivières	none

The Montreal–Quebec City leg is the pivot between ② and ③: ② builds it as new north-shore track to keep Trois-Rivières on the line, while ③ drops Trois-Rivières and serves Quebec City on the existing south-shore line, upgraded — about 260 km of the gap in new build between the two. In both ② and ③ the Ottawa connection is upgraded existing track (VIA’s Smiths Falls–Brockville line), not new build. Distances are approximate planning-level estimates; full workings with live formulas are in the reference-class workbook.

What the Numbers Say

Reading the ladder

① ALTO is the longest, least-dense option

At roughly 14,600 people per kilometre of new track, ALTO sits below every system on slide 2.6 that reports a population — the most track for the least demand per kilometre.

② Straightening the spine helps only a little

Keep all eight cities but run Toronto–Montreal direct on the HPPR spine and reach Ottawa on the existing line: new build falls to ~850 km (from ALTO’s ~910) and density edges up to ~15,600 per kilometre. Better — but still near the bottom of the benchmark, because it keeps building new track for Peterborough and the north-shore line to Trois-Rivières. The off-corridor cities, not the spine, are what hold it down.

③ Dropping the two off-corridor cities is the lever

Removing Peterborough and Trois-Rivières — and reaching Ottawa and Quebec City on upgraded existing track — cuts new build to just the 540 km HPPR spine, about 40 per cent less than ALTO, while losing fewer than 0.3 million people. Most of the saving is the Quebec leg: with Trois-Rivières gone, Montreal–Quebec reverts from ~260 km of new north-shore track to the existing south-shore line, upgraded. Demand density on new build climbs from ~14,600 to ~24,100 per kilometre — from worst on the benchmark to mid-pack, above Spain. The route gets stronger by building less, because the dropped legs were costing more length than they were adding demand.

The Kingston Test

Same city, opposite effect

Kingston is the cleanest illustration, because every option serves it. On the direct line it sits on the shortest Toronto–Montreal path, so it adds riders at almost no added distance — density goes up. On ALTO, reaching the same city means a southern dogleg off the northern route — the same population bought with extra kilometres, so density goes down. One stop, two outcomes, set entirely by the alignment rather than the city. Keeping Kingston while dropping Peterborough is precisely the discrimination the federal criteria imply: reward the intermediate that sits on the path, decline the one that pulls the line off it.

In plain language

The problem was never which cities to serve. It is the line drawn to reach them. Run the strong Toronto–Montreal market on the direct lakeshore route, branch to Ottawa, serve Quebec City on the line that already exists, and keep Kingston where it naturally sits — and the corridor moves from worst on the government’s own benchmark to the middle of the pack, on far less new track.

The two stations that drag it down, Peterborough and Trois-Rivières, are the two that sit on no existing line and would each need new track built to reach them. Serving them may be a worthy regional goal — but it should be argued and costed as that, openly, not folded into a national corridor whose headline case rests on Toronto–Montreal.

Method

How this was scored

“People served” is the combined metropolitan population of the named cities — a scale proxy, not modelled ridership, and the same crude basis slide 2.6 uses. Demand density is people per kilometre of new-build track. The alternative configurations are High Performance Rail (HPR): a new-build HPPR spine on the direct Toronto–Montreal lakeshore, plus upgraded existing lines for the Ottawa connection (VIA’s Smiths Falls–Brockville route) and, in ③, the Montreal–Quebec leg. ALTO and both alternatives are high-performance (≤200 km/h), not the 300 km/h HSR of the slide 2.6 benchmark systems, so the density comparison is conservative. Distances are approximate planning-level estimates and should be checked against ALTO’s published alignment before any figure is cited. Populations are 2021 StatCan census-metropolitan-area figures; slide 2.6 is on a 2016 basis. Trois-Rivières has had no passenger rail since 1990 and is not on VIA’s south-shore Montréal–Québec line, so serving it requires all-new track. Full workings, with live formulas, are in the reference-class workbook.

June 26, 2026

Tag: reference-class forecasting

Where do 50,000 jobs come from?

What Alto says

What the report actually says

How we checked it

What the check found

The question the report leaves open

Two more things in the tables

Upper, not central

The comparison figures have no source

This has been released before

What we are asking Alto to publish

How to read the numbers on this page

Sources and notes

Where the line goes, and what it costs

Is the corridor still available?

Take the speed the ground gives you

The reversal at the heart of the chapter

Where the ground is generous, the trains go fast

Where it isn’t, they go slower

What it would cost, and what we commit against

Three and a half times the price per kilometre

What the speed difference actually buys

What the corridor is in 2125

Procured, and Then?

ALTO commissioned the outside view

Buying the instrument is not the same as letting it bind

The record will arrive after the decision has moved on

Two studies, no cost side

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

Adverse mechanisms are identified but do not reach the total

The two studies disagree, and each resolves the disagreement upward

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

Publish the comparison

Documents relied on

ALTO Used the Rulebook’s Numbers. It Left the Rules Behind.

Why this matters

What the report gives you

What its own cited source requires

What that leaves a reader with

What the report borrowed, and from where

The numbers come as a set, not a menu

What a project this size is supposed to publish

Re-run the numbers at a different discount rate

Re-run the numbers with a rising value of time

Run the costs and assumptions through a range analysis

Report the odds that the project is worth doing

Publish the standard indicators

Model low, medium and high growth scenarios

This is not a theoretical requirement

The report concedes a range it never publishes

A top-up the manual requires, and the report does not mention

Too early to divide, but not too early to multiply

What this brief does not say

On the analysis

On the report and its source

Two questions ALTO can answer without releasing a model

1. Was the calculation ever run at a rate other than 3.5 per cent?

2. Which parts of the cited guidance were applied, and which were departed from?

Summary ledger

Primary documents

Deconstructing the Megaproject Playbook

The iron law of megaprojects

Honest mistakes and strategic misrepresentation

Optimism bias — the honest mistake

Strategic misrepresentation — telling people what they want to hear

Where ALTO sits on the scale

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

Why standard contingency budgets fall short

Checking the numbers against the real-world record

What it costs

How many people would ride it

Canada’s changed circumstances

What’s in the rest of this report

What is HPR?

Three parts, one corridor strategy

HPR — High Performance Rail · the framework

HPPR — High Performance Passenger Rail · the spine

HPFR — High Performance Freight Rail · the freight dimension

What HPR is built on