Tag: Toronto–Quebec City corridor

30 Pieces

Community Advocacy

The Thirty Pieces Problem

Why communities must not accept ALTO’s conditional concessions.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Community Advocacy · Published April 2026 · Updated June 2026

How to read this page

This is a direct address to communities in the ALTO corridor. Everything cited here is on the public record — drawn from ALTO’s own published Community Partnerships Policy (altotrain.ca), from verified council meeting transcripts, from public sponsorship listings, and from stakeholder reports. Read the documents. Then decide what you think is being offered — and why.

A Current Example · June 2026

It begins with a logo at a festival

The clearest illustration of what this page is about appeared in June 2026 — not in a council chamber in the southern corridor, and not as a trail or a conservation grant, but as a sponsorship logo at a celebration of Franco-Ontarian culture.

ALTO is listed as an Official Sponsor of the 2026 Festival Franco-Ontarien, the flagship annual celebration of Franco-Ontarian culture held in Ottawa. The festival serves precisely the francophone communities along the Ottawa–Montreal segment of the corridor — among the communities most directly affected by that section of the proposed route. The sponsorship places ALTO’s name, logo, and presence at the centre of a major cultural gathering in the very community the project would run through.

Verified — Festival Franco-Ontarien partners page (ffo.ca), June 2026

Visibility and “activation,” made visible

ALTO’s logo appears among the festival’s Official Sponsors, alongside major institutional and corporate backers. To announce the partnership, the festival published a message welcoming ALTO’s support and describing a shared ambition to bring communities closer together and to make it easier to gather and share francophone culture, traditions, and pride. ffo.ca/partenaires

That welcome message was met with public criticism from members of the affected corridor community, who objected that a francophone institution was lending its name and credibility to a project they regard as a threat to the very communities it represents. The festival subsequently removed the post. ALTO, however, remained listed as an Official Sponsor on the festival’s website — the visible partnership intact, the public celebration of it quietly withdrawn.

As the rest of this page documents, ALTO’s own community-funding policy explicitly lists “visibility for the Corporation” and “the opportunity to engage directly with the community” among the things it values in the projects it supports. The festival sponsorship is that aim realized: favourable association with a trusted community institution, in a community the project would directly affect. The vehicle is a sponsorship rather than a grant, but the function is identical.

None of this implies wrongdoing by the festival. Cultural organizations depend on sponsorship, and accepting it is neither unusual nor improper. But the public is entitled to see who funds the institutions that anchor francophone cultural life — particularly when the funder has a direct and material stake in a project that runs through the communities those institutions represent. The reaction the announcement drew, and the quiet removal of the post that followed, are exactly the kind of signal this page asks communities to notice and name rather than smooth over.

The festival is not an exception. It is the most public, most recent instance of a pattern that has a name, a budget, and a published policy behind it. The rest of this page sets out how that pattern works — and why every community and institution in this corridor should understand it.

The Pattern

A familiar playbook

Major infrastructure projects have long known that the most effective way to manage dissent is not to silence it, but to purchase it — selectively, quietly, and just expensively enough to matter.

The mechanism is well-understood in the literature on large infrastructure governance. Targeted concessions are offered to communities or organizations most likely to generate organized opposition. The concessions need not be large; they need only be large enough to fracture solidarity, create a sense of obligation, and introduce ambiguity where principled opposition once stood clear.

This is not a hidden strategy. It is documented in the histories of pipeline negotiations, highway expansions, and stadium developments across North America. In those cases, communities that accepted small concessions found, after approval, that the concessions evaporated while the harms did not. What distinguishes the ALTO case is that the mechanism has been formalized, named, given a budget, and posted on ALTO’s own website. It is called the Community Partnerships Policy. You can read it yourself — and you should.

ALTO’s Published Programme

The Community Partnerships Policy: what it actually says

ALTO’s Community Partnerships Policy is a formal, six-page document governing how the Corporation will distribute grants to organizations along the Quebec City–Toronto corridor. It covers eligible organizations, project types, assessment criteria, budget ranges, and reporting requirements. It was published on ALTO’s website and is presented as a transparency measure.

Read on its own terms, the document is unremarkable. Community investment programmes are standard features of large infrastructure projects. But several provisions, taken together, reveal the strategic logic underlying the programme — and communities should understand that logic before they apply.

Source Document

ALTO Community Partnerships Policy (Published)

The policy covers registered charities, non-profit organizations, schools, municipal services, First Nations organizations, and community associations. Grants range from under $10,000 to a maximum of $50,000 per project, with no multi-year commitments. Applications are assessed by an internal committee and approved by ALTO’s Chief Officers Committee.

ALTO has also published a companion page on Indigenous partnerships and a separate Indigenous Peoples Participation Funding programme.

Community Partnerships Policy Indigenous Partnerships Vision Indigenous Peoples Participation Funding

The policy’s stated objectives are economic vitality, environmental vitality, and social vitality — language familiar from any corporate social responsibility framework. What deserves closer attention are the assessment criteria by which applications are evaluated, because ALTO included two criteria that are, for a programme operating in actively contested communities, remarkable.

ALTO’s published assessment criteria — Step 2A	What it means in practice
① Adherence to one or more areas in section 4.1	Standard eligibility check.
② Benefits for the communities targeted by the project	Standard community benefit criterion.
③ Alignment with the Corporation’s values	Organizations whose work or public positions conflict with ALTO’s objectives are less likely to score well here. The criterion is undefined, unappealable, and determined internally by ALTO.
④–⑥ Eligible territory; geographic scope; quality of planning	Administrative criteria.
⑦ Visibility for the Corporation	ALTO’s own language. Applications that generate positive public exposure for ALTO score better. Applications from organizations known for opposing the project do not.
⑧ Opportunity to engage directly with the community (activation)	Again, ALTO’s own language. The programme explicitly values the opportunity to place ALTO representatives in direct community contact — in precisely the communities where the project is contested.
⑨–⑩ DE&I principles; alignment with sustainable development	Standard programme criteria.

Criteria ③, ⑦, and ⑧ are not neutral administrative measures. Read together, they describe a funding programme designed to reward community alignment with ALTO, generate favourable public visibility for the Corporation, and create structured opportunities for ALTO staff to establish presence in affected communities. This is not a community benefits programme. It is a community relations programme with a grant attached.

“A concession that does not address the harm is not a remedy. It is a price tag attached to your silence.”

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative

Section 4.3 of the Policy

The prohibition on advocacy

The Community Partnerships Policy contains one further provision that deserves to be read by every organization considering an application. Under section 4.3, the following project types are explicitly listed as ineligible:

Ineligible — ALTO policy text

Lobbying campaigns

Defined as ineligible in ALTO’s own policy text. Grants may not be used for advocacy activities — including, it must be inferred, advocacy concerning ALTO itself.

Ineligible — ALTO policy text

Projects of a controversial nature… or raising issues of social acceptability

A corridor community’s opposition to ALTO could plausibly be described as raising “issues of social acceptability.” This criterion is defined by ALTO’s internal committee, not by an independent standard.

The implication is direct: an organization that accepts ALTO funding cannot use that funding for advocacy, including advocacy about the project that is funding it. In practice, this creates a chilling effect that extends beyond the funded project itself. An organization that has accepted ALTO money — for a community festival, a wetland restoration project, an education programme — will reasonably hesitate before publicly opposing the project that funded it. The transaction does not require silence. It tends to produce it anyway.

This is not speculation about ALTO’s intentions. It is a predictable consequence of any funder-recipient relationship in a context of active controversy. It is why transparent conflict-of-interest disclosure by funded organizations — including in any public position they take on the project — is essential.

The Offers

What has been reported in the corridor

Beyond the formal programme, the same logic can play out through informal channels — some of it already visible in municipal proceedings, some of it foreseeable but, by design, leaving little or no record. None of these carry legal weight or any accountability mechanism. When the project receives approval — if it does — none of them are enforceable. They will simply be forgotten, differently, by everyone who heard them.

Documented — Napanee Town Council, April 14, 2026 (transcript verified)

A trail alongside the tracks

The Mayor of Greater Napanee referenced correspondence headed to County Council suggesting “some form of a trail associated to it on the outside of the fence.” His own framing: “if we’re not gonna have a whole lot of choice on this then we’re gonna get out of it.” The trail was not offered by ALTO — it arose from community correspondence. That makes it a more significant example, not less: the rationalization was entirely spontaneous.

Foreseeable — likely a formal mitigation measure

Other avenues: conservation land and offsets

Cash grants are not the only currency available to a project of this scale. A railway acquires and controls large amounts of land, and some of it is likely to be transferred to conservation organizations as part of ALTO’s environmental mitigation and offsetting. Such transfers would be formal, documented, and binding — but that does not make them neutral. A transfer that benefits a conservation organization can still soften the scrutiny of a body that might otherwise be among the project’s most credible critics, and a parcel of offset habitat does not replace a fragmented biosphere. The thing to watch is whether mitigation land is presented as a community benefit rather than as what it is: compensation for harm the project concedes it will cause.

Formal programme — ALTO website

Community partnership grants

ALTO’s published Community Partnerships Policy makes grants of up to $50,000 available to eligible corridor organizations for environmental, economic, and social projects. Selection criteria explicitly include “Visibility for the Corporation” and “Opportunity to engage directly with the community.” No multi-year funding is available.

Public statement — ALTO Chief Executive

The future Kingston station

ALTO’s Chief Executive indicated that Kingston might receive a station “in the future.” This is a commitment unbacked by any timeline, funding envelope, or legal obligation — and offered during a period of active public opposition from the Kingston region.

Verified — ffo.ca partners page, June 2026

A festival sponsorship in the francophone corridor

ALTO is listed as an Official Sponsor of the 2026 Festival Franco-Ontarien — Ottawa’s flagship francophone cultural celebration, serving the communities along the Ottawa–Montreal segment of the corridor. A festival post welcoming ALTO’s support was later removed following public criticism; the sponsorship listing on the festival’s website remained in place.

Taken together — the documented trail, the public statement about a future station, the formal grants programme, the festival sponsorship, and the conservation-land transfers a landholding project can always reach for — these describe a coherent strategy that works on more than one level at once: formal, procedurally legitimate measures (grants, sponsorships, and mitigation transfers) that generate visibility, goodwill, and community presence, and a layer of informal undertakings made in meetings and remembered differently by different parties.

Documented Evidence — Greater Napanee Council, April 14, 2026

The rationalization on the record

The April 14, 2026 ordinary session of Greater Napanee Town Council provides the clearest documented example of the dynamic this page describes — and it came not from ALTO, but from within the community itself.

The Mayor referenced correspondence heading to Lennox & Addington County Council that suggested a trail might be built alongside the rail corridor. His precise words: “if this rail line is going to be produced or built one way or the other, there’s a suggestion that there’d be an option to put some form of a trail associated to it on the outside of the fence… if we’re not gonna have a whole lot of choice on this then we’re gonna get out of it that will benefit the municipalities.”

The trail did not come from ALTO. It came from a community member’s correspondence. ALTO had not offered it. What the meeting recorded — in public, on transcript — was the moment a community forum began, unprompted, to shift from “should this happen” to “what can we get.” The same meeting heard its CAO report that ALTO’s process was explicitly framed as asking “how, not if” — confirming that ALTO itself had no mandate to decide whether to build, only how. That framing, delivered to a credible civic officer in a formal stakeholder meeting, is precisely what creates the psychological conditions in which trails begin to seem worth discussing.

Notably, that same council session saw near-unanimous opposition from every councillor present, including one who explicitly said he would sign a joint letter opposing ALTO in its entirety. Opposition and rationalization were occurring simultaneously, in the same room. That is the dynamic communities need to understand and name.

The Psychology

The rationalization trap

There is a moment — and it happens in every community that faces a project like this — when people who know something is wrong begin to construct reasons why accepting it is, in fact, reasonable. The harm is real, but perhaps unavoidable. The payment is small, but it is something. And if it is happening regardless, shouldn’t we at least secure what we can?

You may have already heard this reasoning in your own council chamber, at your kitchen table, or in a conversation after a community meeting. It is not dishonest. It is genuinely human. But it is also exactly what it feels like when a community begins to accept the unacceptable — not with enthusiasm, but through the slow substitution of negotiated scraps for principled resistance.

The insight at the heart of the Judas archetype — explored with uncomfortable precision in the dramatic tradition — is that the act of rationalizing a betrayal does not change what the betrayal is. Reframing a transaction as something other than what it is does not alter its moral weight. A community that accepts a trail, a land access agreement, and a conservation grant while staying quiet about road severance, watershed contamination, karst subsidence risk, and permanent agricultural land loss has made a transaction. The only question is whether it understood the exchange rate going in.

The Exchange

The asymmetry of the exchange

The offers being made to corridor communities deserve to be evaluated against what is actually at stake. The following comparison is necessarily incomplete — the full scope of ALTO’s impacts remains undisclosed — but even a partial accounting reveals the starkness of the exchange being proposed.

What is being offered	What is at stake
A recreational trail adjacent to the corridor (informal, unreported)	Severance of road access to farms, properties, and communities; permanent fragmentation of the rural landscape
Conservation land or habitat offsets transferred to environmental organizations as project mitigation	Permanent loss of agricultural land; destruction and fragmentation of the Frontenac Arch Biosphere Reserve; elimination of habitat for SARA-listed species
Community partnership grants up to $50,000 — one year only, no renewal	Contamination risk to rural water infrastructure; karst and aquifer vulnerability; de-icing chemical runoff into the Napanee and Salmon River watersheds; 2,196 km of OFSC snowmobile trails at risk of severance
A future Kingston station — perhaps, eventually	A benefit-cost ratio of approximately 0.4 against an HM Treasury minimum of 1.5; a project that cannot be financially self-sustaining and will require perpetual public subsidy across generations
ALTO’s “corporate engagement” and “activation” in corridor communities	Expropriation powers under Bill C-15 that override normal property rights protections; an engagement process that was run to a prescribed deadline regardless of the objections it recorded

The Stakes

Why tacit acceptance is dangerous — for everyone

To be clear: this is not an accusation. If your organization has engaged with ALTO thoughtfully, or if your council has tried to extract whatever benefit it can from a project it cannot stop, that is not bad faith. That is people doing their jobs under difficult circumstances.

But there is a real and important difference between fighting the project while negotiating its impacts and going quiet because of a small offer. One protects your community. The other protects ALTO. And ALTO’s own policy documents make clear that producing exactly that outcome — your silence in exchange for its “activation” in your community — is precisely what the programme is designed to achieve.

Five things that happen when communities accept small offers

It fractures community solidarity. When some organizations receive funding and others do not — a consequence built into ALTO’s own competitive assessment process — communities are divided. Those who have accepted something feel awkward opposing a project that has “done something” for them. Those who have not feel isolated. Opposition becomes fragmented and less effective.

It manufactures consent that was never given. ALTO will report publicly that it engaged with communities. Organizations that received grants or attended “activation” events will appear in that record as participants. Whether they actually supported the project, were paid to show up, or simply had no good alternative will not appear. Your community’s name becomes evidence of buy-in that does not exist.

It creates obligations that don’t legally exist. Informal undertakings — a trail alongside the tracks, a future station, a promise made across a meeting table — have no enforceable legal status. Even the formal partnership grants specify no multi-year commitment. Once a project achieves regulatory approval, the inducements offered during the engagement phase carry no binding force. They are not conditions of approval. They are not contractual commitments to corridor communities. They are remembered differently by different parties — and ALTO holds all the institutional memory.

It normalizes the project in public discourse. When community organizations — councils, conservation groups, sporting and cultural associations — are seen to be engaged in “partnership” and “benefit discussions” rather than opposition, the public perception shifts. The project begins to seem inevitable. Resistance that was once principled begins to look like haggling.

The published policy itself creates ongoing leverage. ALTO retains “the discretion to award less than the requested sum” and reserves the right to distribute funds in multiple installments. An organization that has accepted partial funding and is dependent on the remainder is not in a neutral position relative to the project it has benefited from.

What To Do

What communities can do

Engagement is not the problem — silence is. There are principled, effective ways to participate in this process without letting a grant or a promise shift where you stand.

01Oppose the project and engage with the process — both at once

Participating in the process does not mean accepting the project. Your community can engage fully — attending meetings, asking hard questions, making demands — while making it absolutely clear, in public and on the record, that engagement is not consent. Say it out loud. Say it in writing. Say it every time.

02If you have accepted ALTO funding, say so publicly

There is no shame in having applied for or received a community grant. But your neighbours, your council, and the public deserve to know about it when you speak about this project. Transparency is the only thing that preserves your credibility — and it is the one thing ALTO’s programme is not designed to encourage.

03Get every promise in writing — or treat it as no promise at all

Trails. Land access. Future stations. If ALTO or its representatives cannot commit to it in a signed, dated document with a delivery timeline and an accountability mechanism, it does not exist. Verbal assurances made in stakeholder meetings have no legal force after project approval. None. Treat them accordingly.

04Do the full accounting before you assess any offer

A $30,000 conservation grant looks different alongside a benefit-cost ratio of 0.4, $60–90 billion in projected public costs, permanent agricultural land loss, and aquifer risk that no impact assessment has yet resolved. You are entitled to that full picture. Demand it. Do not evaluate small offers in isolation from large harms.

05Know that there is a better option

The choice is not between ALTO and nothing. High Performance Rail on the existing CN Kingston Subdivision — combined with a new freight displacement corridor along Highway 401 — delivers comparable journey times at a fraction of the cost, with dramatically lower community and environmental disruption. That alternative deserves a real assessment. Demand one.

06Stand with other corridor communities

The inducement strategy only works if communities act alone. Your grant, your trail, your land access promise — each one is calibrated to make your situation feel unique and your interests separable from your neighbours’. They are not. A divided corridor is ALTO’s best asset. A united one is its biggest problem.

The Ask

What we are asking you to do

If your organization has been offered ALTO community partnership funding, land access, trail commitments, or any other concession — formal or informal — document it. Write down the date, the name of the person who made the offer, and exactly what was said. Then tell people about it.

Not because you did anything wrong. Because the public deserves to know what ALTO is offering corridor communities, and why, and when. Because the difference between a project that received genuine community support and one that managed dissent with targeted grants should be visible — to your neighbours, to your elected representatives, and to anyone who asks whether eastern Ontario communities were truly consulted or simply handled.

A trail alongside the tracks is not evidence that ALTO has taken your community seriously. A one-year grant awarded partly for “corporate visibility” is not evidence of environmental commitment. The only thing that cannot be managed, bought, or quietly withdrawn after approval is a community that spoke clearly, stayed together, and refused to let small offers substitute for large answers.

In Closing

What lasts is the record

The festival sponsorship is a reminder of how quickly a partnership can be celebrated in public and then, when it draws scrutiny, quietly removed from view. What endures is not the announcement or its deletion — it is the documented record of what was offered, by whom, and when. That record is the most durable contribution any community can make.

The ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative maintains a full suite of research briefs, technical analyses, and community resources at citizenresearch.ca. If your organization or institution has been offered ALTO support — a grant, a sponsorship, land access, a future station — the most useful thing you can do is document it and make it visible: to your neighbours, your council, and the public.

June 9, 2026

High cost, low benefit claim

High Cost, Low Benefit — For Whom?

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

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Analysis · June 2026

In short

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

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

Download

High Cost, Low Benefit — For Whom?

The full research brief, with sources (PDF)

Download PDF

The Argument

What the video claims

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

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

It claims a cost convergence the record contradicts

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

It never engages the alternative the Initiative proposes

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

Tested Against the Record

Three claims, three answers

$27.7B

what a dedicated-track high-frequency railway was costed at — against $60–90B for high-speed rail

2021 JPO Business Case

5×

the cost-per-kilometre gap between ALTO and High Performance Rail in the Initiative’s model

$142M vs $28M per km

0.11

ALTO’s central benefit-cost ratio — well below the 1.0 that marks a project that pays its way

Initiative methodology paper

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

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

A Note on the Travel Times

Estimated, not simulated

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

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

Read the full record

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

The Carbon Case

A carbon debt, not a carbon saving

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

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

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

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

Why the Gap Is Real

The cost difference is structural, not arithmetic

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

The Bottom Line

High cost, low benefit — for whom?

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

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

Sources

Primary documents

ALTO, Fast Forward: Shaping Canada’s Future with a High-Speed Rail Network (March 2025) — cost ranges, travel times, and ridership targets, main text and Annex B. altotrain.ca

Joint Project Office High Frequency Rail Project, Business Case Update, V.002 (December 10, 2021) — dedicated-track design, $27.7 billion costing, and four-year construction estimate.

The Globe and Mail, “Transport Canada reviewing studies on Via Rail expansion” (July 2017) — the original 2016 high-frequency concept at roughly $4–6 billion. theglobeandmail.com

“VIA HFR-TGF Journey Times” memorandum and accompanying email chain (August–September 2023), released under the Access to Information Act as file A-2025-00333 — simulated base case versus estimated higher-speed times.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, ALTO Financial Analysis (methodology paper and supporting research notes) — cost-per-kilometre model, ridership frontier, subsidy spectrum, benefit-cost ratio, and lifecycle carbon. ALTO-Financial-Analysis.pdf

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, 50-Year Lifecycle CO₂ Budget — Parametric Analysis (March 2026) — construction, operational, payback, and modal-comparison figures, drawing on HS2, UIC, and international HSR lifecycle studies.

Statements examined: public video by an ALTO Vice-President (June 2026).

June 7, 2026

What Alto told Parliament

ALTO HSR · Budget Disclosure · June 2026

What ALTO Told Parliament

For the first time, ALTO has had to list its contractors by name. The picture is of a head office — not a railway.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Source: Written Question Q-1087, House of Commons (Sessional Paper 8555-451-1087, tabled June 5, 2026)

In plain terms

A Member of Parliament asked the federal government, in writing, five basic questions about ALTO: how much public money it has received, what its budget is, how it is organized, how many people it employs, and every contract it has signed worth more than $10,000. The government’s written answer was tabled in the House of Commons on June 5, 2026.

The answer is the most detailed look yet at where ALTO’s money has gone — and the first time its contracts have been disclosed by vendor. What it shows: after more than three years and roughly a quarter-billion dollars, the money has gone into building an organization — staff, software, advisers, and communications — and almost none of it into building a railway.

⬇ Download this brief as a PDFWhat_ALTO_Told_Parliament.pdf

How this came to light

What a written question is — and what this one asked

In Canada’s Parliament, any MP can put a question to the government in writing. The government is then required to research it and table a formal written answer, which becomes part of the public record. It is one of the main tools MPs have for getting specific facts out of departments and Crown corporations that do not otherwise publish them.

This question — numbered Q-1087 — was asked on April 20, 2026 by Michael Barrett, the MP for Leeds–Grenville–Thousand Islands–Rideau Lakes, and answered on June 5, 2026 on behalf of the Minister of Transport. It asked ALTO five things:

Total funding: how much money ALTO has received from the government since it was created.
Operating budget: ALTO’s yearly budget, broken down by type of spending.
Structure: how the corporation is organized.
Employees: how many people it employs, broken down by position.
Contracts: every contract over $10,000 — with the date, amount, vendor, what was bought, and the start and end dates.

The full question and the government’s answer are on the House of Commons website (link at the foot of this page).

The Answer

Four numbers that tell the story

$266M

Received from the government since ALTO was created in November 2022 (precisely $265,976,355)

~11%

Share of that money that appears as listed contracts (~$29.5M of ~200 contracts). The rest is mostly salaries and smaller spending

216

Employees — of whom 67 (about a third) are directors or above, and only 7 are managers

Engineering contract among nearly 200 — the rest is software, advisers, recruitment, and communications

The first figure is the eye-catching one, but it needs care: receiving $266 million is not the same as wasting it. Most of that money pays the people who work at ALTO and covers spending too small to be listed. The point is what it is being spent on — and the contract list answers that plainly.

Where the Contracts Go

Software, advisers, and communications — not track

ALTO listed close to 200 contracts over $10,000. Grouped by what they paid for, the pattern is clear. (The groupings below are ours; the figures are ALTO’s.)

What the contract paid for	Share	In plain terms
Software & IT systems	25%	Software licences and one large $4.09M IT system build — the single biggest contract
Strategic & management advice	23%	Outside consultants advising the corporation on how to run itself and the project
Individual consultants	13%	Named and self-employed contractors
Data & mapping	7%	Land-registry data and GIS mapping — growing sharply in 2025–26
Communications, branding & polling	6%	PR firms, design agencies, video, and opinion surveys
Executive recruitment	6%	Headhunting firms hired to build out the senior team
Indigenous engagement	4%	Consultation and advisory work
Engineering	2.5%	A single engineering consulting contract

There are no contracts for civil works, track, signalling, or trains — the things a railway is made of.

The most expensive single thing ALTO has bought is not a piece of railway. It is a computer system.

What It Adds Up To

An organization, not yet a railway

The numbers describe a head office that is still hiring, buying software, and shaping its public image. For 216 people there are 23 executives — a CEO, 9 chiefs, and 13 vice-presidents — but only 7 managers. ALTO has spent far more telling its story and standing itself up than on the engineering a railway actually requires.

This is the same pattern our earlier analysis found inside ALTO’s own corporate plan, where communications staff outnumbered environmental scientists 18 to 1. Q-1087 now confirms that pattern with named contracts. After more than three years and a quarter-billion dollars, ALTO is a fully-staffed, executive-heavy organization — and the railway it exists to plan is still entirely on paper.

A Companion Disclosure

What ALTO paid itself in bonuses

A second written question — Q-1058, asked by Andrew Scheer and answered on June 1, 2026 — required every federal Crown corporation to report the bonuses it paid. ALTO’s answer is striking for an organization that has yet to lay a metre of track.

$2.76M

Paid in bonuses, for a short-term incentive covering roughly the first half of 2025

100%

Of ALTO staff — every executive and every non-executive employee — received a bonus

~30×

ALTO’s bonus pool compared with VIA Rail’s in the same disclosure

$1M+

Potential annual compensation for ALTO’s chief executive

ALTO reported paying $2,758,967.68 in bonuses to 134 people: all 18 of its executives and all 116 of its below-executive staff. The executives shared about $1.23 million (an average near $68,000 each); everyone else shared about $1.53 million (an average near $13,000 each). The payment covers January 1 to July 16, 2025, which ALTO describes as its most recent short-term incentive payment.

The same parliamentary return lets us set ALTO beside the railway it is meant to complement.

Crown corporation	Bonuses paid	Recipients	Trains running?
ALTO	$2,758,968	134 — 100% of staff	None — still in planning
VIA Rail Canada	$95,500	10	National network, ~3,500 staff

VIA Rail’s bonus program reaches only a small group of managers; ALTO’s reaches its entire staff. ALTO, which runs no trains, paid out roughly thirty times what the operating national railway did.

The pattern starts at the top. According to ALTO’s own business plan summary, reported in May 2025, chief executive Martin Imbleau’s base salary falls between roughly $562,000 and $661,000, with an incentive worth up to 65% of that base — a potential total above $1 million a year. ALTO’s six other top executives have base salaries of $170,000 to $330,000, with bonuses of up to 40%.

ALTO’s chief executive can earn more than $1 million a year. The head of VIA Rail, who runs an actual national railway with some 3,500 employees, earns about $575,000.

One Figure to Read Carefully

The operating budget is almost certainly missing three zeros

The answer reports ALTO’s 2026–27 operating budget as $710,158 — $549,754 for operating costs and $160,404 for capital. Read at face value, that is impossible: salaries alone for 216 employees run into the tens of millions of dollars a year.

What almost certainly happened

Government financial statements are routinely presented “in thousands of dollars.” Read that way, $710,158 becomes about $710 million — which closely matches the roughly $695 million that ALTO’s own corporate plan projects for 2026–27. The likeliest explanation is simply that the answer dropped the “in thousands” notation. The substance is the more important point: ALTO’s operating budget for a single pre-construction year, before any track is laid, is on the order of $700 million.

The fuller picture

Q-1087 confirms, with named contracts, what ALTO’s own planning documents already implied. Our budget analysis sets out the full $3.9-billion pre-construction spending plan, the workforce breakdown, and the cost-estimate accuracy problem behind it.

Sources

Written Question Q-1087, House of Commons of Canada — Sessional Paper 8555-451-1087, tabled June 5, 2026 (asked by Michael Barrett, MP; answered on behalf of the Minister of Transport). Funding received, workforce by position, and all contracts over $10,000. ourcommons.ca/written-questions/45-1/q-1087

Written Question Q-1058, House of Commons of Canada — Sessional Paper 8555-451-1058, tabled June 1, 2026 (asked by Andrew Scheer, MP). Bonuses awarded at Crown corporations, 2025–26, including the ALTO and VIA Rail figures used above. ourcommons.ca/written-questions/45-1/q-1058

Executive compensation ranges: ALTO (VIA TGF) business plan summary, as reported by Le Journal de Québec, May 26, 2025 — base-salary and incentive ranges for the chief executive and senior executives, and the VIA Rail chief-executive comparison.

June 6, 2026

Estimated not simulated

Estimated, Not Simulated

The journey times behind ALTO were drawn from a spreadsheet of international averages — not from a model of the actual corridor. What that distinction means, and who set the target.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Research Note · Published June 2026 · Based on Access to Information release A-2025-00333

Critical Finding

A government record released under the Access to Information Act shows that, of the journey times prepared for the project, only the slowest case was produced by an actual simulation of the railway. That case was a 110 mph (177 km/h) train — a roughly four-hour Toronto–Montréal trip. Every faster time, including those near the speeds ALTO now markets, came from a spreadsheet that applied average speeds borrowed from intercity railways in other countries.

The technical memorandum describes those faster figures, in its own words, as “for information and comparison purposes.” And the email chain attached to it records the most senior Transport Canada official on the file directing that the times not assume Toronto speeds above 160 mph (257 km/h), because a higher figure was “not the intent of the Government.” The journey time, in other words, was managed as a policy and cost target — not derived as an engineering result.

The Record

What the document is

The release (A-2025-00333) was obtained under the Access to Information Act and provided to the Initiative. It consists of an email chain dated August 30 to September 4, 2023 among Transport Canada and Via HFR / Via TGF officials and their technical advisers, together with the attached memorandum “VIA HFR-TGF Journey Times.” It dates from the procurement period, when the project was still a high-frequency rail (HFR) programme under Transport Canada’s lead, before the February 2025 announcement re-scoped it as high-speed rail at 300 km/h.

The memorandum is the engineering note that sits beneath the project’s headline travel times. It is explicit about how those times were calculated — and it used two very different methods for two different parts of the answer.

The Distinction That Matters

Two ways to get a journey time

A train’s journey time is the single number a project like this is sold on — “Toronto to Montréal in X hours.” There are two fundamentally different ways to produce that number, and they are not equally reliable.

A simulation builds a digital twin of the real railway and “drives” a train along it. The software knows the actual track: every curve that forces the train to slow, every hill, every station stop, where the signals are, how fast the specific train accelerates and brakes, and whether other trains — including freight — are in the way. It runs the trip second by second on that line and reports how long it genuinely takes. The memorandum names the tool used for this: RailSys, drawing on the JPO’s 2021 Rail Operational Summary Report. It is the railway equivalent of a flight simulator, or of a mapping app with live traffic.

A spreadsheet estimate does something far cruder: it takes the distance, assumes an average speed borrowed from how fast trains run in other countries, and divides one by the other. It never looks at this corridor’s actual geometry, terrain, urban approaches, or shared freight track. The memorandum is candid that its faster figures are of this kind — an “estimated calculation based on the maximum permissible speed,” provided “for information and comparison purposes.”

Simulation — the RailSys tool	Spreadsheet estimate
Drives the actual route. Models every curve, gradient, station stop, signal and conflicting train on the real Toronto–Québec line, second by second.	Distance ÷ an assumed average speed. Takes the route length and an average operating speed benchmarked to comparable intercity rail abroad, and divides.
Knows the corridor. A curve too tight for high speed shows up as a slower section; a freight train ahead shows up as lost minutes. Constraints surface before construction, not after.	Blind to the corridor. Cannot see this line’s curves, hills, city approaches or freight sharing. The memorandum labels its outputs indicative only.
What ALTO simulated. Only the 110 mph (177 km/h) base case — roughly a four-hour Toronto–Montréal trip.	What ALTO estimated. Every faster time, including the 160 and 186 mph figures (257 and 300 km/h) closest to the marketed speeds.

The difference is the difference between “we modelled it and it works” and “we estimated it from comparables.” The first is a tested result for this railway. The second is an educated guess that a later, detailed study would have to confirm.

What Was Actually Run

The only simulated number is the slow one

~4 hrs

the only Toronto–Montréal time actually simulated (110 mph / 177 km/h base case)

RailSys, per the memorandum

Spreadsheet

the source of every faster journey time on the page

benchmarked to foreign averages

160 mph

(257 km/h) — the speed ceiling set as “the intent of the Government”

TC official, Aug–Sept 2023

The memorandum’s own tables make the gap plain. The single time it produced by simulation — the 110 mph (177 km/h) base case — is roughly 3:59 to 4:19 for Toronto–Montréal. The faster times on the same page, for a 186 mph (300 km/h) or 160 mph (257 km/h) train, run from about 2:40 to 3:10. But those faster figures are the spreadsheet ones. The four-hour trip is the only number anyone actually drove through the model. The under-three-hour trips that make high-speed rail attractive were never simulated for this corridor.

This matters because the public ALTO project is now built on 300 km/h (186 mph) running. Even the “calculated” 186 mph (300 km/h) times in this 2023 record trace back to the spreadsheet, not the simulator — and the simulator was only ever pointed at the slow case.

A second problem: not the door-to-door time

There is a second issue with these numbers, separate from how they were produced. Every figure here — simulated or estimated — is a train-in-motion time, measured platform to platform. It is not the door-to-door time that decides whether a traveller picks rail over flying, and door-to-door time depends on something ALTO has not settled: where the stations are. With downtown stations at both ends the corridor is competitive; with the suburban or peri-urban stations most consistent with the project’s cost structure, the advantage over air narrows or disappears. A separate academic submission to the consultation went further, noting that ALTO’s published times do not appear to even include the time for a stop in Ottawa — so the in-motion figures may be understated before the door-to-door question is reached. We treat that in full in The Station Location Problem and The Last Mile; the point here is narrower — the headline time is an estimate, and even taken at face value it is not the number that matters.

Who Set the Target

The journey time as a government decision

The instruction to hold the journey times down did not come from a technician. The email chain records that when a Toronto figure was put forward assuming sustained speeds above 160 mph (257 km/h), a Transport Canada official objected that it “assumes a full journey time from Toronto at speed greater than 160, which is not the intent of the Government,” and explained that the intent was to have bidders identify the segments with the lowest marginal cost for higher speed. The exchange closes on September 4, 2023 with the project director’s note: “No change to journey time agreed by Vincent.”

That official is Vincent Robitaille. According to Transport Canada’s own published biography, Robitaille has served as Assistant Deputy Minister – High Frequency Rail since December 2021 — the month the project’s governance passed to a Transport Canada–led integrated team — and he leads that team. His background before the role was in commercial policy and financing, not rail engineering: from 2018 to 2021 he was Director General of Transport Canada’s Centre of Excellence on Strategic Investments, working on the commercial elements and alternative financing of major transportation investments, and before that he led the public-private-partnership procurement of the new Champlain Bridge Corridor in Montréal. His credentials are financial and project-management designations (CFA, PMP, Certified Director, and an MBA). Transport Canada

Why the background is relevant, not incidental

This is an observation of record, not of motive. The person defining the journey-time ceiling as the Government’s intent — and steering bidders toward “the lowest marginal cost” rather than the fastest trip — is the project’s most senior Transport Canada official, whose professional expertise is procurement and project financing. It is consistent with a journey time being treated as a commercial and cost target to be managed, rather than an engineering output to be measured. The released record shows the target being set; it does not require any inference about why.

Two Years Later

The same official, now selling the fast times

In a public podcast interview in December 2025, Robitaille — by then leading the project for Transport Canada — described the corridor to a general audience in precisely the terms the 2023 record could not support with simulation: Montréal reachable in well under current rail times, a city you could reach for a day trip and return the same evening, trains “every half an hour,” the corridor as “commuting distance.” Those are the fast, frequent-service figures — the ones drawn from the spreadsheet.

The internal record from 2023 shows the same official holding the specification below those speeds — directing that journey times not assume sustained running above 160 mph (257 km/h), because faster was “not the intent of the Government” — and relying on benchmarked estimates for anything quicker. The public pitch and the internal caution are two years apart and point in opposite directions. The travel times now used to sell the project are of the kind the same official described internally, in 2023, as indicative.

The Bottom Line

A promise, or an estimate?

When a government tells the public “this train will get you there in X hours,” people reasonably assume engineers modelled the actual route and confirmed it. This record shows that, for the fast times, they did not. They did the back-of-an-envelope version — distance against speeds observed in other countries — and said so internally. A spreadsheet estimate is a hope; a simulation is the closest thing to a tested promise. The faster ALTO travels in its marketing, the further it gets from the only journey time anyone actually ran.

One caveat, stated plainly so the point is not overdrawn. The memorandum does say these estimates were always meant to be refined through later design and operational modelling by the eventual private partner. So the fair claim is not that the numbers were invented. It is that the detailed validation was deferred, and that as of this 2023 record the project’s faster journey times — including those near what is marketed today — had no corridor-specific engineering behind them, only benchmarked estimates. No simulation of high-speed running on the Toronto–Québec line appears anywhere in the released record.

Sources

Primary documents

Transport Canada / Via HFR (Via TGF), “VIA HFR-TGF Journey Times” (HFR JT note 20230831) and accompanying email chain, August 30 – September 4, 2023. Released under the Access to Information Act as file A-2025-00333.

Joint Project Office, Phase 2C Rail Operational Summary Report (2021) — the RailSys simulation source referenced in the memorandum for the 110 mph (177 km/h) base case.

Transport Canada, Briefing Documents 2025, biography: “Vincent Robitaille — Assistant Deputy Minister – High Frequency Rail.” tc.canada.ca

“From Bridges to Trains: Career lessons with Vincent Robitaille,” The Supply Chain Ambassador podcast, premiered December 3, 2025. Public interview; transcript auto-generated. youtube.com

June 2, 2026

The bill that has to balance
The Bill That Has to Balance

A plain-language guide to how we evaluated the cost of the proposed ALTO high-speed rail line — starting from one simple rule that every railway in the world has to obey, and following it through to a number the government’s own claims do not match.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Financial Framework · Published May 2026

⚠ What this is

This is the readable version of a longer technical paper. The full document and slide deck show every calculation; this post explains, in everyday terms, what we did, why, and what we found — with no maths background assumed.

The short version: the project’s likely capital cost is roughly double what the government has stated; the trains cannot pay for themselves at any realistic ticket price; and the project’s headline ridership target of 24 million passengers a year sits outside the range that any comparable line has ever achieved.

The one idea to take away

Every operating railway in the world has a bill that has to balance every year. What it costs to build and run the line on one side; where the money to cover that comes from on the other. The money can only come from three places: ticket sales, a government subsidy, or value captured from land near the stations.

You can argue about any single number. What you cannot do is leave one side of the bill short. If a proponent quotes you a low cost and a high number of riders but never tells you the subsidy, the subsidy is simply the part of the bill they haven’t shown you — it doesn’t disappear. Our whole method is just: fill in every blank on the bill using independent evidence, and see what the missing number turns out to be.

Read in full

A Framework for Independent Evaluation of the ALTO HSR Project

The complete methodology, every rubric and dataset, and a slide deck version — all published and reproducible

All documents Full PDF Slide deck

Start Here

The bill every railway has to balance

Imagine your household budget. Whatever you spend has to be matched by money coming in — from your salary, your savings, a loan. A railway is no different, just bigger. There are two kinds of cost: the enormous one-time cost of building the line (paid off gradually, like a mortgage), and the ongoing cost of running it every year — staff, electricity, maintenance, replacing worn-out trains.

Those costs have to be paid for. There are only three sources. Here is the whole thing on one line:

The annual fiscal ledger

Cost to build (yearly share) + cost to run = ticket sales + government subsidy + land value capture

The left side is what the railway costs each year. The right side is where that money comes from. The two sides must be equal — that’s what “balance” means.

In plain terms

“Land value capture” means a railway can sometimes raise money from the rise in nearby land prices that a new station creates — for example by developing land around the station. It’s a real tool, but a modest one in Canada, and ALTO has named no such mechanism. So for ALTO that third source is effectively zero, which leaves only two: tickets and subsidy.

Here is the consequence that does all the work. Once you’ve pinned down the cost, the ticket revenue, and the land capture using evidence, the subsidy isn’t a choice anyone gets to make — it’s whatever is left over to make the bill balance. It’s a leftover, not a decision. That single insight is why a project can claim to be “self-sustaining” and still, on its own numbers, need billions of dollars of public money a year. The subsidy was always there; it just wasn’t written down.

The Method

Seven steps to fill in the blanks

To fill in each part of that bill honestly, we built a seven-step process. Each step answers one question using published evidence rather than the project’s own marketing, and each step shows its work so that anyone who disagrees can re-run it with their own assumptions. Here is what each step asked, and what it found for ALTO.

1

How hard is this to build?

Engineering complexity, compared to rail lines around the world

We scored the corridor’s technical difficulty against an international database of comparable projects. ALTO lands in the upper “High” band — among the most demanding corridors anywhere in the world. Hard things cost more and run late more often; this matters for every number that follows.

2

How smooth will getting it approved and built be?

Community, consultation and consent risk

We measured the friction the project faces from communities, landowners and the consultation process. The score lands in the band where comparable megaprojects’ cost overruns tend to cluster — another reason to expect the final bill to climb.

3

What will it really cost to build?

Capital cost, calibrated against similar projects

The government states $75 billion. Comparing ALTO to a reference class of similar railways and adjusting for its difficulty, our central estimate is $143 billion — nearly double — with a worst-case ceiling of $264 billion. The stated budget sits at the very bottom of the plausible range.

4

What will it cost to run, every year?

Operating cost, built up from the actual assets

Adding up staff, operations, maintenance and replacing trains as they wear out gives about $2.15 billion a year. To cover just that running cost from fares, the line would need roughly 12.5 million passengers a year — and even then it only recovers about 80 cents of every dollar.

5

How many people would actually ride it?

Realistic ridership, and the subsidy that follows

Based on how many travellers comparable lines actually pull off the roads and out of the air, a realistic range is 5 to 12 million riders a year, with a sensible target near 8 million. ALTO’s headline figure of 24 million sits outside that range entirely.

6

Is it worth it?

Benefits weighed against costs

Weighing all the benefits against all the costs gives a ratio of about 0.11 — roughly eleven cents of benefit for every dollar spent. To make the 24-million target pay, tickets would need to cost between $381 and $1,596 — and 24 million riders is unreachable anyway.

7

Would a serious gatekeeper approve it?

Tested against Norway’s independent project-review system

Norway runs big projects through two independent quality gates before funding. Run through those gates, ALTO fails most of the criteria at both stages — described as a textbook example of exactly the kind of project the Norwegian system was built to catch.

What “reference class” means

Rather than trust a project’s own optimistic forecast, you line it up against a large group of similar projects that have already been built, and ask: what actually happened to those? It is one of the most reliable ways known to forecast cost and ridership, precisely because it sidesteps wishful thinking.

The Headline Figures

Three numbers that frame the whole thing

Cost to build

$143B

Our central estimate — against a stated budget of $75B

Value for money

11¢

Of benefit returned per dollar spent (a benefit-cost ratio of 0.11)

Ridership gap

24M

The stated target — against a realistic ceiling near 12M

None of these is a guess plucked from the air. Each one is the output of one of the seven steps above, and each step publishes the data and the scoring behind it. The point of putting them together is simple: a project whose costs are understated, whose value-for-money is low, and whose ridership is overstated does not become viable just because its three weaknesses are described in separate documents.

The Part Nobody Mentions

No ticket price makes the bill disappear

Here is where the “bill that has to balance” idea pays off. There is a temptation to think the subsidy could be designed away — charge higher fares, or fill more seats. So we tested the three obvious strategies. In every case, a large public subsidy remains. The only thing that changes is how the cost is split between the passenger and the taxpayer.

Charge premium fares

~$1B / yr

Trade-off:High ticket prices, so fewer riders. Lowest subsidy — but still about a billion a year.

Match airline fares

~$2B / yr

Trade-off:Prices in line with flying. A moderate middle path — roughly two billion a year.

Deep discounts, fill seats

~$3.5B / yr

Trade-off:Cheap tickets, more riders — but the lowest fares mean the largest subsidy.

Notice what this means. Choosing among these isn’t a choice between “subsidised” and “unsubsidised” — every option is subsidised. It’s only a choice about who pays: the rider at the ticket window, or the taxpayer through the public purse. That is a perfectly legitimate political decision to make out in the open. What isn’t legitimate is pretending the choice doesn’t exist.

And that is exactly why one specific government claim does not hold up. On 22 April 2026, the government stated the operation would be “financially self-sustaining” — meaning fares alone would cover running costs. But no realistic level of ridership produces enough ticket money to cover the $2.15 billion annual running cost. Measured against every comparable high-speed line operating in the world, that claim simply isn’t consistent with the evidence.

The Bottom Line

What the filled-in bill shows

Put the seven steps together and the picture is consistent, not cherry-picked:

Roughly double the cost

The likely cost to build is about twice the stated budget — and the stated figure sits at the bottom edge of what’s plausible.

Cannot pay its own way

At no realistic fare do ticket sales cover even the cost of running the trains, let alone building the line.

Eleven cents on the dollar

The central value-for-money ratio is about 0.11 — far below the level at which a project is normally considered worthwhile.

A ridership target out of reach

The 24-million figure lies outside the range any comparable line has achieved, and the subsidy is required no matter what.

Measured against Norway’s independent review standard — one of the most respected gatekeeping systems for large public projects — ALTO fails the majority of the tests at both the early-concept stage and the pre-funding stage.
In Fairness

This is a recommendation, not a verdict

It matters how this is meant to be read. The seven-step process produces a recommendation, not a decision. The decision belongs to elected officials and the public — ideally informed by an independent authority such as the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

The purpose of all this work is narrow and, we hope, fair: to put a balanced, contestable record on the table, so that the choice about which rail corridor Canada builds rests on evidence rather than on headline numbers. Every step publishes its rubric, its scoring, and its data. If you disagree with any finding, you are invited to re-run it under your own assumptions — that openness is the whole point.

A good public investment can survive this kind of scrutiny. The questions below are the ones any major rail proposal should be able to answer plainly.

On cost: If the stated budget sits at the bottom of the plausible range, what is the realistic central figure — and what happens to the case if the cost lands there?

On the subsidy: Since fares cannot cover running costs at any realistic ridership, what annual public subsidy is the government planning for, and who decided how to split the cost between riders and taxpayers?

On ridership: What evidence supports 24 million riders a year when comparable lines top out far below that — and what does the business case look like at a realistic 8 to 12 million?

None of these questions presupposes opposition to passenger rail, which many people support. Each asks only that the project state plainly what its own numbers imply — so the public can weigh a real proposal rather than a hopeful one.

Read the full framework

A Framework for Independent Evaluation of the ALTO HSR Project

The complete methodology, the seven-stage pipeline, and every rubric, score and dataset — published and reproducible

All documents Download PDF
ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · citizenresearch.ca · Financial Framework — Plain-Language Edition · May 2026
Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.
May 25, 2026
Land Value Capture
The $12 Billion That Isn’t There

What the land value capture line in the McGill TRAM financial model actually rests on — and why a number doing the heaviest lifting in ALTO’s only public financial model is a planning placeholder, not a financing prospect.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Land Value Capture Brief · Published May 2026

⚠ What This Brief Examines

The McGill TRAM financial model assumes that land value capture — the public capture of property-value uplift around new stations — will contribute $12 billion toward ALTO’s capital cost, reducing the amount that must be borrowed from roughly $53 billion to $41.23 billion.

This brief traces that figure to its origin, tests it against the international precedents the model invokes, against the realised Canadian record, against the legal authorities ALTO actually holds, and against the timing of when capture revenue could plausibly arrive. On every test, the $12 billion comes apart.

Headline Finding

The $12 billion land value capture line is reverse-engineered from a 15-percent rule of thumb, not built from any property analysis. It contains no parcel-level valuation, no station-area market study, no comparable transactions, and no discounted cash flow.

A defensible figure for the present value of plausible station-area capture is in the low single billions — well under 5 percent of capital cost — and it accrues over decades rather than during the construction window when borrowing must actually be priced. The line is the difference between a model that reads as “tolerable on paper” and one that reads as “permanently subsidised.”

Download

Land Value Capture — Assessing the $12 Billion Claim (PDF)

Full research note for federal decision-makers, parliamentarians, journalists, and residents along the corridor

Download Note

Section 1 · Origin of the Figure

A percentage, not a forecast

The $12 billion originates in the McGill TRAM financial analysis, where it is described as land and real estate development gains “equivalent to roughly 15 percent of the total cost.” Fifteen percent of the assumed $79.8 billion capital cost is $12 billion. The ratio is asserted; the dollar figure follows arithmetically.

That is the whole of its derivation. The report contains no parcel-level valuation, no station-area market analysis, no comparable transaction work, no discounted cash flow of expected development revenues, and no sensitivity analysis. Change the cost assumption and the “capture” number moves with it — without any change to the underlying property economics, because there are no underlying property economics in the figure to begin with.

The line is also structurally load-bearing. Remove it and the borrowed principal rises from $41.23 billion to roughly $53 billion. At the model’s own 8 percent rate over 50 years, that adds about $1.05 billion a year in debt service. The companion brief concedes the consequence directly: its “No LVC” scenario requires average annual subsidies of $2.12 billion and never reaches self-sufficiency by Year 50.

15%

Rule-of-thumb ratio applied to capital cost — the figure’s entire basis

$12B

The resulting line — with no property analysis behind it

$53B

Borrowed principal without the line, up from $41.23B
Section 2 · The Precedents

The international examples do not transfer

The TRAM brief grounds its capture case on three precedents — Hong Kong’s West Kowloon, an Australian East Coast HSR pre-feasibility study, and California’s High-Speed Rail. None is institutionally analogous to the ALTO corridor.

Hong Kong West Kowloon

The only case with realised capture at scale: a single super-prime tower site sold for HK$42.2 billion. But Hong Kong’s land is overwhelmingly state-owned under a colonial leasehold system, and the government grants development rights as a primary fiscal instrument. It bears no resemblance to Peterborough, Trois-Rivières, Laval, or even Ottawa-Gatineau.

Australia East Coast HSR

The cited evidence is a 2022 preliminary investigation with a near three-fold range ($43–126 billion), for a project that remains unbuilt. Citing an aspirational range from an unconstructed project as proof that ALTO can capture $12 billion is circular reasoning.

California HSR

Cited for proposed tax-increment financing concepts. After fifteen-plus years and over $13 billion of spending, California HSR has captured essentially zero, while costs escalated from $33 billion to over $128 billion. It is a cautionary precedent, not a supporting one.

Two precedents the brief omits are more directly relevant. The UK’s HS2 explicitly considered capture and recovered a negligible fraction of capital cost — property values along the route fell on construction blight, and the government spent more on compensation than it recouped. Brightline in Florida, the closest North-American analogue with vertically integrated real-estate interests, is in distress on its Private Activity Bonds despite favourable conditions: no winter operations, sustained population growth, and no expropriation politics.

The most relevant evidence is Canadian — and it comes from a source the federal government itself supports. A 2023 study by the University of Toronto’s Infrastructure Institute, prepared for and supported by the Canada Infrastructure Bank, surveyed the realised Canadian record:

Per-deal ceiling: realised Canadian capture deals — joint development and surplus land sales — have typically raised $30 million to $110 million, with only the largest sales in the most expensive markets exceeding that band.

Corridor analogue: Montréal’s REM, the closest comparable, raised a $512 million station-area contribution — covering just 7.4 percent of the project’s $6.9 billion cost, itself well below a 2014 estimate of up to 35 percent.

Single station: Vancouver’s Capstan Station, described as having near-ideal conditions for capture, raised only $32 million over nine years.

The Hong Kong verdict: the same CIB-supported study attributes West Kowloon’s success to a combination of factors unique to Hong Kong, and concludes the model is fundamentally different from most capture models.

A CIB-supported source thus reaches the same conclusion this note does: the marquee precedent does not transfer, and realised Canadian capture operates two to three orders of magnitude below the $12 billion line.
Section 3 · Canadian Institutional Constraints

The authorities required do not exist

Capture at the scale TRAM assumes requires legal authorities ALTO does not have and that no level of government has proposed. Property and land use are provincial jurisdiction. Municipal zoning, development charges, and the property tax base lie outside federal control. There is no Canadian equivalent of U.S. tax-increment financing as a station-area capture tool, and Ontario’s closest analogue — Section 37 / community benefits charges — generates modest, parcel-by-parcel sums and has been further constrained by recent provincial reform.

A structural obstacle compounds the jurisdictional one. The same CIB-supported study identifies fragmented land ownership as a core constraint: unlike Hong Kong’s state leasehold system, prime station-adjacent land in Canada is held by many separate owners. ALTO’s catchments — especially built-out central areas like Toronto Union and Montréal Central — are precisely this kind of fragmented holding, where capturing uplift at scale would first require slow, costly, politically fraught land assembly.

The brief’s recommendation that government “empower Alto to lead development and value capture within 2 km around the stations” implies development authority over roughly 88 km² of station catchment — about 12.6 km² around each of seven stations. No mechanism in Bill C-15, the Cadence consortium structure, or any published ALTO document contemplates this. The Bill C-15 expropriation provisions are scoped to the right-of-way, not to station catchments; acquiring 88 km² would be a separate expropriation programme of significant scale, with compensation costs the model never nets against the $12 billion gross.

On the procurement record

Housing and TOD intent does exist in the procurement. A federal housing and TOD presentation to bidders — released under access to information — sets out a four-pillar housing strategy and contemplates that Canada would acquire project lands and explore station-hub development with the developer partner. That intent carried forward into the ALTO procurement, which required a high-speed rail proposal from all bidders.

But the presentation is explicitly provisional throughout: “provisional guidelines,” requirements “to be refined,” an affordable-housing threshold “to be determined.” It attaches no budget, no land-assembly cost, no carrying-cost provision, and no capture-revenue target — and it describes a federal-acquisition-then-explore model that is the opposite of ALTO-led capture across catchments. The procurement confirms an intention to pursue TOD; it does not supply the costed mechanism on which the $12 billion depends.

Section 4 · Station-Level Realism Check

Even a generous bottom-up envelope falls short

The TRAM model is corridor-wide and does not allocate the $12 billion to specific stations. Spread across the seven announced stations, it implies an average of roughly $1.7 billion per station. A station-by-station review of catchment characteristics shows how implausible that is — most of the corridor’s stations serve small markets or are already built out, so most uplift would accrue to existing landowners rather than to a public capture programme.

Already built out

Toronto:$1.0–2.0B — incremental only

Montréal:$1.0–2.0B — incremental only

Note:Most uplift to existing owners

Small / thin markets

Ptbrgh:$0.1–0.3B — CMA ~90k

T-Rivières:$0.1–0.3B — CMA ~85k

Québec:$0.3–0.8B — heritage limits

Suburban / uncertain

Ottawa:$0.5–1.5B — core receding

Laval:$0.3–0.8B — greenfield TOD

Total:$3.3–7.7B gross envelope

Summed, a generous corridor-wide envelope — gross, undiscounted, spread over 20–30 years — reaches $3.3 to $7.7 billion. Even its upper bound falls short of the $12 billion the model requires. And that envelope still assumes full institutional empowerment of ALTO as a development corporation, which is not on the table, while ignoring both the carrying cost of land assembly and the compensation cost of catchment-area expropriation.

Section 5 · The Timing Mismatch

Most of the value, in present terms, is fictional

The model treats $12 billion as available during construction, to reduce the principal borrowed. In practice, capture accrues over decades. Land sales and development gains around new stations typically materialise five to fifteen years after a station opens, and construction on the full corridor is projected to take well over a decade. A realistic capture stream would produce most of its value between roughly 2040 and 2060 — long after the borrowing is priced.

Discounted at the model’s own 8 percent rate, $12 billion realised over Years 15–35 has a present value of only about $3 to $4 billion at financial close. That is the figure that can actually reduce the borrowing requirement. The remaining $8 to $9 billion in the arithmetic is, in present-value terms, fictional — and the construction debt still has to be priced against the full undiscounted principal.

$12B

Gross, undiscounted — as the model treats it

$3–4B

Present value at financial close, at the model’s own 8% rate

$8–9B

The remainder — fictional in present-value terms

Section 6 · Why It Matters

One line, three improvements, all of them collapse

The $12 billion capture line is the single most important — and least scrutinised — financing assumption in the only publicly available financial model for ALTO. It does three things at once, and all three depend on the same unsupported number.

1

It cuts the borrowed capital

From roughly $53 billion to $41 billion — the difference being the $12 billion the model assumes capture will supply.

2

It pulls self-sufficiency forward

From “never” to Year 48. Without the capture line, the companion brief’s own “No LVC” scenario never reaches self-sufficiency by Year 50.

3

It lowers the annual subsidy

From $2.12 billion to $1.23 billion a year on average — the gap between “tolerable on paper” and “permanently subsidised.”

Professor El-Geneidy has said publicly that the model uses “very generous” assumptions, particularly on demand, and that breakeven “can happen … but it requires a lot of work from the government to make it happen.” The capture assumption falls into the same category. Even on its own optimistic terms, the model shows cumulative subsidies of $61.6 billion through Year 50, on top of the initial $26.6 billion federal investment — a combined taxpayer exposure of $88.2 billion before any recovery from project revenues.

Where Things Stand

A placeholder, not a pillar

The $12 billion figure should be treated as a planning placeholder rather than a financing prospect. Any business case, public communication, or appraisal that relies on it as a stable revenue pillar is overstating ALTO’s financial position by an order of magnitude — at the present-value point that matters most, the moment construction debt is priced. The defensible number is in the low single billions, it arrives over decades, and it cannot be borrowed against today.

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Land Value Capture — Assessing the $12 Billion Claim (PDF)

Reference note for federal decision-makers, parliamentarians, journalists, and residents along the corridor

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Sources

References

1.
Zhang, B., Negm, H., & El-Geneidy, A. (2025). High-Speed Rail in Canada: Insights from a corridor-wide survey and a financial analysis. Transportation Research at McGill, McGill University. Updated January 2026. Source of the $79.8 billion capital cost, the 15-percent capture ratio, and the $41.23 billion borrowed-principal figure.

2.
El-Geneidy, A., et al. (December 2025). Importance of Land Value Capture regarding the Canada High-Speed Rail. Transportation Research at McGill, McGill University. Source of the “No LVC” scenario and the $2.12 billion average annual subsidy.

3.
Pettit, C., Thackway, W., & Wade, R. (2022). High Speed Rail Value Uplift Preliminary Investigation Report. City Futures Research Centre, UNSW Sydney. The Australian East Coast HSR pre-feasibility range.

4.
On the UK case see HM Treasury, Oakervee Review of HS2 (2020); on Brightline see filings under SEC EDGAR for Brightline Holdings LLC and reporting in Bond Buyer through 2025–2026.

5.
Siemiatycki, M., Fagan, D., & Arku, R. N. (April 2023). Land Value Capture Study: Paying for Transit-Oriented Communities. Infrastructure Institute, School of Cities, University of Toronto. Supported by the Canada Infrastructure Bank. Source of the $30–110 million per-deal range, the REM 7.4-percent figure, the Capstan Station case, and the fragmented-ownership finding.

6.
Infrastructure Canada (April 10, 2024). Housing and Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) — High Frequency Rail (HFR) Project, Subject-Specific Meeting #4B. Government of Canada. Released under the Access to Information Act, file A-2025-00223.

7.
El-Geneidy quoted in Canadian Affairs, “The high cost of high-speed rail” (January 9, 2026; corrected February 27, 2026).

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · citizenresearch.ca · Land Value Capture Brief · May 2026
Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.
May 24, 2026

Modal shift subsidy

Citizen Research Initiative · Modal Shift Analysis · Note 4

The Subsidy Frontier and the ALTO Operating Trilemma

High ridership and low subsidy are mutually exclusive on this corridor. A continuous-spectrum framework relating subsidy, fare revenue, ridership and net public cost — and the structural reason the published 24-million target sits outside every operating point on the frontier.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Modal Shift Note 4 · Published May 2026

⚠ What This Note Examines

This note extends Notes 1, 2 and 3 from three discrete regimes to a continuous subsidy spectrum, relating four quantities along it: annual operating subsidy, ridership, fare revenue, and net public cost. It identifies the welfare-efficient and revenue-maximising operating points, and adds full-cost accounting across three capital-cost scenarios.

The result is the corridor’s operating trilemma: high ridership, low subsidy, and P3 break-even cannot be achieved simultaneously. The choice among them is a single-degree-of-freedom political-economy decision — one that the published business case does not make explicit.

Bottom Line

The modal-shift framework from Notes 1 and 2, combined with the demographics of Note 3, produces a fixed frontier of (subsidy, ridership) combinations. The corridor cannot simultaneously deliver Regime A ridership (11–12 million) at Regime C subsidy levels ($0.5–1.5 billion/yr). Any public communication implying otherwise is selecting figures from different points on the frontier and presenting them as one outcome.

Ridership rises concavely with subsidy — from ~5M at $0.3B/yr to ~12M at $5B, hitting diminishing returns as it approaches the modal-shift ceiling. Revenue is hump-shaped, peaking at ~$1.29 billion at $1.9 billion subsidy. The marginal net public cost per added rider has a U-shaped minimum at ~$400/rider near Regime B. Different objectives select different optima: maximising revenue or minimising per-rider cost → Regime B; minimising total public cost → Regime C; maximising ridership under a fiscal cap → Regime A.

And the P3 break-even corner is structurally unreachable: against an achievable peak fare revenue of $1.29 billion, P3 break-even revenue is ~$4.3 to $5.0 billion — a gap of $3.17 billion/yr at peak revenue, even under the proponent’s own $75B capex base case. ALTO’s published 24-million-by-2055 target sits outside every point on the frontier and is incompatible with any defensible operating-regime choice.

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Modal Shift Note 4 — Subsidy Frontier & Optimisation (PDF)

The full note with all four figures and two tables: the trilemma, the ternary locus, the four-panel frontier, the scissors chart, the five optimisation objectives, and the full-cost accounting across three capital scenarios

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The Trilemma

No operating regime achieves all three objectives

The corridor faces three ideal objectives that cannot be reconciled: high ridership (at the level of ALTO’s public targets), low subsidy (operating surplus), and P3 break-even (revenue covering operating cost plus private capital service). Every point inside the realistic operating frontier is achievable under some combination of fare, subsidy and modal-shift parameters; every point outside it is structurally infeasible.

The ALTO operating trilemma: a dashed outer triangle of three ideal objectives with a smaller solid feasible operating region inside, and Regimes A, B, C positioned within it — **Figure 1.** The ALTO operating trilemma. The dashed outer triangle marks the three ideal corners; the solid inner triangle is the realistic operating frontier. Regimes A and C approach their respective corners but cannot reach them; Regime B sits on the frontier edge, achieving the revenue peak. The P3 break-even corner is structurally unreachable: operating cost (~$1.8–2.5B/yr) plus private capital service ($2.49B/yr at the $75B base case) puts break-even revenue at ~$4.3–5.0B/yr, against an achievable peak of $1.29B at Regime B — a $3.17B/yr gap that operating-posture choice alone cannot close.

The operating locus in objective space, ternary view: a one-dimensional curve tracking the low-subsidy to high-ridership edge, never entering the P3 break-even corner — **Figure 2.** The operating locus in objective space, ternary view. Each operating point is mapped to barycentric coordinates of its normalised achievement of the three objectives. Two features stand out: the locus is a **one-dimensional curve**, not a region — the corridor has only one operational degree of freedom (the subsidy level); and it tracks the low-subsidy ↔ high-ridership edge closely, never entering the P3 break-even wedge. The maximum P3 score along the locus is ~0.30 under the $75B base case. The trilemma is not three symmetric tradeoffs but a single dominant tradeoff (ridership ↔ subsidy) with P3 break-even as a structurally unreachable third axis.

1 · Framework

From three regimes to a continuous spectrum

Note 3 developed three discrete regimes — A (heavy subsidy), B (moderate, at parity with air), C (minimal, P3 yield management) — producing aggregate corridor modal shares of ~40, 30 and 22% and requiring annual operating subsidies of ~$3.5B, $2.0B and $1.0B. This note extends that to a continuous subsidy spectrum to identify the optimisation properties of the corridor’s operating posture.

The framework relates four quantities along the spectrum: annual subsidy (the federal operating contribution for the chosen fare posture), ridership (the resulting modal shift across air, road and existing rail), fare revenue (riders × average fare), and net public cost (subsidy minus revenue, negative meaning self-financing). Each is anchored on Note 3’s central demographic 2055 scenario (corridor population 20.1 million, addressable trips 34.2 million). The mapping from subsidy to fare ratio is a smooth logistic reproducing the three regime anchors — ~1.3 at $1.0B (deep premium), ~1.0 at $2.0B (parity), ~0.6 at $3.5B (deep discount) — and the mapping from fare ratio to per-mode capture comes directly from the Note 1 and Note 2 S-curves.

2 · The Frontier

Ridership, revenue, and net public cost vs subsidy

Disaggregating the relationships folded together in Note 3’s regime summary reveals the corridor’s subsidy frontier across the continuous spectrum, with the three regime anchors (C, B, A) marked.

Four-panel subsidy frontier: ridership vs subsidy, revenue vs subsidy, net public cost vs subsidy, and marginal cost per added rider — **Figure 3.** The subsidy frontier at the central 2055 anchor. **(a)** Ridership rises concavely from ~5M at $0.3B to ~12M at $5B — diminishing returns toward the modal-shift ceiling. **(b)** Fare revenue peaks near $1.9B subsidy at ~$1.29B, then declines as fare cuts overwhelm ridership gains — a Laffer-like structure. **(c)** Net public cost crosses zero near $1.3B subsidy: below it the corridor runs a surplus, above it a net outlay rising to ~$4B at $5B subsidy. **(d)** Marginal net public cost per added rider has a U-shaped minimum of ~$400/rider near Regime B, rising to ~$1,000 at Regime A. The ~$85/rider reference line is an illustrative federal value-of-time figure.

Ridership is concave

The first dollars of subsidy buy many riders (the steep part of the S-curves); the last buy few (the saturating top). Marginal effectiveness falls sixfold — ~2.5M riders per $B at the low end, ~0.4M per $B at the high end.

Revenue is hump-shaped

At low subsidy the corridor is in the premium-fare zone where each rider pays more, so revenue rises with ridership; past the $1.29B peak, the fare reduction overwhelms the ridership gain.

Net cost flips at ~$1.3B

Net public cost transitions cleanly from negative (revenue exceeds subsidy) to positive at ~$1.3B subsidy — between the Regime C anchor ($1.0B) and Regime B ($2.0B).

3 · The Scissors

Revenue and subsidy versus ridership

Plotting the same data with ridership on the horizontal axis shows how subsidy and revenue diverge as the corridor moves up the ridership scale — and overlays the federal capital service ($2.49B/yr at the $75B base case), so each regime shows three quantities: operating subsidy, fare revenue, and full federal cost.

Scissors chart: operating subsidy rising convexly with ridership while fare revenue stays flat, with full federal cost and the three regimes marked against a modal-shift ceiling near 12 million — **Figure 4.** Subsidy and revenue against ridership, central 2055 anchor. The two curves form a **scissors**: subsidy (navy) rises convexly while revenue (terracotta) is essentially flat. At Regime C (6.1M riders) the corridor returns a ~$260M operating surplus — full federal cost ~$2.23B with capital service added. At Regime B (8.2M) it needs ~$710M net operating outlay — full federal cost ~$3.20B. At Regime A (11.2M), ~$2.42B net outlay — full federal cost ~$4.91B. **Capital service exceeds operating subsidy at every regime, even under the proponent’s base case.** The chart caps at the ~12M modal-shift ceiling; beyond it, each added rider requires sharply rising per-rider subsidy.

The scissors structure has direct policy implications. Below ~6.5 million annual passengers the corridor runs a net public revenue surplus — fare revenue exceeds the subsidy needed. Above that it crosses into net-public-cost territory, rising convexly with the target. By 11 million (near Regime A) the corridor needs ~$2.4 billion annually in net public outlay above its fare revenue. Beyond 11.5 million the curve steepens sharply — pushing toward the 24-million public target would require an entirely different operating regime than any of the three considered here.

4 · Optimisation

Five objectives, five different optima

The frontier supports several distinct optimisation objectives that each select a different operating posture. There is no single “optimal” point without first specifying the criterion.

**Table 1.** Optimal operating posture under different objective functions, central 2055 anchor. The five candidate optima span Regime C (minimum total public cost), Regime B (revenue peak, per-rider welfare efficiency), an intermediate position (total welfare under moderate social-value assumptions), and Regime A (maximum ridership). “Total welfare” includes ridership × value-of-time × emissions avoided − net public cost, and is strongly sensitive to the assumed social value per rider.
Objective	Optimal regime	Riders 2055	Subsidy	Revenue	Net public cost
Maximise fare revenue	Regime B (parity)	~8M	$1.9–2.0B	$1.29B (peak)	+$0.7B
Min. net cost per rider	Regime B (parity)	~8M	$1.9–2.0B	$1.29B	$400 marginal
Min. total net cost	Regime C (yield mgmt)	~6M	$0.5–1.5B	$1.26B	+$0.2B or surplus
Max. ridership s.t. cap	Regime A (heavy)	~11M+	$3.5B+	$1.08B	+$2.4B
Max. total welfare	Between B and A	~9M	$2.5B	$1.2B	+$1.3B

Four observations follow. Revenue-maximisation and per-rider welfare-efficiency converge on Regime B — not coincidentally, since the same marginal-revenue-equals-marginal-cost condition defines both the Laffer peak and the marginal-cost-per-rider minimum. Minimum-total-net-public-cost points to Regime C or below, where the corridor runs a small surplus but carries only 5–6 million riders — approximately the posture implied by the Cadence consortium’s announced commercial structure. Ridership-maximisation under a fiscal cap points to Regime A or beyond — but reaching the 24-million target would require pushing past Regime A into subsidy well above $5B/yr and modal share above the 40% ceiling, not feasible under the modal-shift framework. And total-welfare-maximisation is strongly sensitive to the assumed social value per rider: at the illustrative ~$85/rider federal value the optimum is at or below Regime C; only at a high $400/rider — crediting network effects, large emissions externalities, and agglomeration benefits — does it move between B and A.

There is no single “optimal” operating posture without specifying the criterion. The corridor decision is not one quantitative question but three sequential ones: whether to build at all, what fare posture to operate under, and how to communicate the chosen posture transparently.

5 · Full-Cost Accounting

Capital service dominates the operating choice

The subsidy frontier above considers operating subsidy only — but capital cost service dominates the corridor’s total fiscal commitment, and the capital cost itself is deeply uncertain. ALTO’s materials cite ~$60–90 billion, prepared without reference-class adjustment. The CRI’s reference-class analysis (Flyvbjerg methodology on the international HSR cost database, with corridor-specific complexity premia) produces three scenario points: $75B as the proponent-stated P50, $143B as the reference-class-adjusted P50 (after the 44.7% average rail-project overrun), and $264B as the P95 worst case — with the proponent’s $75B sitting at roughly the 25th percentile of the distribution.

**Table 2.** Full federal cost implications across three capital cost scenarios. Full annual federal cost = federal share of capital debt service + Regime B operating subsidy of $2.0B/yr (the welfare-efficient point). Full cost per rider = full federal cost ÷ 8M annual riders (Regime B central 2055). Debt service at 6% blended cost of capital, 40-year amortisation, 50% federal share.
Capital cost scenario	Total capital	Annual debt service	Federal share (50%)	Full annual federal cost	Full cost / rider
ALTO proponent-stated	$75B	$4.5B	$2.3B	$4.3B	$540
CRI reference-class central	$143B	$8.6B	$4.3B	$6.3B	$790
CRI P95 worst-case	$264B	$15.8B	$7.9B	$9.9B	$1,240

Capital dominates operating

Even at $75B, federal capital service ($2.3B/yr) exceeds Regime B’s operating subsidy ($2.0B). At $143B it’s more than double; at $264B, ~four times. The full-cost optimisation is dominated by the capital assumption, not the operating regime.

6 to 14× the benefit

Full cost per rider spans $540–$1,240. Against an illustrative ~$85/rider value-of-time, the corridor is 6 to 14× more expensive than the public benefit. Even generous $200–250/rider social values stay 2–6× below full cost.

Decide before committing

Once the capital is sunk, the A/B/C choice is second-order. The first-order question — whether to build at all — turns on which capital scenario materialises, and the realistic expected value sits between $143B and $264B.

ALTO’s composite engineering complexity score is 73–81 (upper part of the High band, approaching Extreme) — the Frontenac Arch crossing, the Napanee Limestone Plain karst, the Leda clay segment, the St-Lawrence crossing, and a Canadian P3 delivery record that includes Eglinton Crosstown (+280%), the Confederation Line (+57%), and the Ontario Line (+250% scope-adjusted). Under Flyvbjerg reference-class forecasting, a corridor at this complexity cannot be reliably costed from the lower-complexity international comparators the proponent’s estimate appears to draw on. The realistic expected capital cost is between $143B and $264B, producing a benefit-cost ratio materially below 1.0 across the full plausible range.

6 · Implications

What this means for the corridor decision

The subsidy choice is a policy decision, not a technical one

The same physical infrastructure produces materially different outcomes depending on the operating point. Regime C gives ~6M riders at a small surplus; Regime A gives 11M at $2.4B net public cost. That choice should be made explicit in the public business case rather than implicit in the procurement structure.

The welfare-efficient point sits near Regime B

Parity with air, ~$1.9–2.0B operating subsidy, ~8M riders, ~$400/rider marginal net public cost — also the revenue-maximising point. A welfare-maximising government and a revenue-maximising operator would converge on similar fares. The business case does not specify which objective is being applied.

Third, and most important: the public ridership targets cannot be reached from any operating point on the frontier developed here. The 24-million-by-2055 figure would require modal share above the 40% ceiling under heavy subsidy, plus upper-case demographic growth, plus full-corridor mature operation in 2055 — three conditions the modal-shift literature does not support simultaneously. The frontier brackets the realistic operating space; ALTO’s published targets sit outside it. An independent review should ask which point on the frontier the corridor is actually targeting, and what fiscal commitment and modal-shift assumptions that point implies.

High ridership, low subsidy, and P3 break-even cannot be achieved at once. The 24-million target is not the welfare-efficient operating point under any reasonable parameter choice — it is achievable, if at all, only under heroic assumptions about every operating, demographic, and modal-shift variable simultaneously.

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Modal Shift Note 4 — Subsidy Frontier & Optimisation (PDF)

Reference document with all four figures, both tables, the five optimisation objectives, the full-cost accounting, and the methodology and parameters

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Methodology

Framework and parameters

The framework anchors on Note 3’s central demographic 2055 scenario (corridor population 20.1 million, addressable trips 34.2 million at 1.7 trips per capita) with the regime-coupled phase-maturity factor (Regime C ≈ 0.80, B ≈ 0.88, A ≈ 0.94, following a smooth logistic asymptoting to ≈ 0.96). The market structure is air 15%, existing rail 10%, road 75% of the addressable pool. The mapping from operating subsidy S ($B) to fare ratio r is a logistic, r(S) = 0.4 + 1.3 / (1 + exp(S − 1.8)), calibrated to the three regime anchors; the mapping from fare ratio to per-mode capture comes from the Note 1 air–rail S-curve at 3.0 h and the Note 2 road–rail S-curve at τ = 0.5. Average air fare $160 one-way; rail revenue = riders × (air fare × r). Net public cost = subsidy − revenue.

Capital cost scenarios ($75B / $143B / $264B) are derived from Flyvbjerg reference-class forecasting on the international HSR cost database with corridor-specific complexity adjustments (composite engineering complexity score 73–81). Capital service is computed at 6% blended cost of capital (combining federal debt service and private equity return), 40-year amortisation, 50% federal share. The CRI’s full capital cost analysis is documented separately at citizenresearch.ca.

Sources

Principal sources

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative (2026). Modal shift between high-speed rail and air on the ALTO corridor (Note 1).

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative (2026). Modal shift between rail and car on the ALTO corridor (Note 2).

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative (2026). ALTO ridership envelope, 2035–2080 (Note 3) — the population, trip-generation and regime inputs this note’s frontier is built on.

Statistics Canada (2026). Population Projections for Canada (2025 to 2075), catalogue 17-20-0003, released 27 January 2026.

Transport Canada (2024). Guide to Benefit-Cost Analysis of Transportation Investments — value-of-time and emissions valuation parameters. — and Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (2007). Canadian Cost-Benefit Analysis Guide: Regulatory Proposals.

Flyvbjerg, B., Holm, M.S. & Buhl, S. — reference-class forecasting and the international rail-project cost-overrun database (44.7% average overrun).

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative companion material: the Modal Shift & Ridership synthesis brief, which sets this note alongside Notes 1, 2 and 3.

May 24, 2026

Modal shift ridership

Citizen Research Initiative · Modal Shift Analysis · Note 3

The Ridership Envelope for the ALTO Corridor, 2035–2080

What can the corridor actually carry? Population times trips-per-resident times modal share, scaled by a realistic phased opening — and measured against ALTO’s published 24-million target and every other independent forecast.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Modal Shift Note 3 · Published May 2026

⚠ What This Note Examines

This note builds a 45-year ridership envelope from three multiplicands — corridor population, per-capita intercity trips, and ALTO’s modal share under three fare-and-subsidy regimes — using the modal-shift machinery from the two companion notes on rail–air and rail–car substitution, and scaling the result by ALTO’s announced three-phase opening.

The resulting envelope is then compared against ALTO’s published forecasts, the McGill TRAM stated-preference projection, the Munk School GEPL model, the C.D. Howe scenario analysis, and the federal government’s own 2021 Joint Project Office business case.

Summary

The corridor population baseline is about 14.9 million across the directly-served CMAs in 2025. The 2024–25 federal cap on non-permanent residents produced a structural inflection — Toronto’s CMA shrank by ~1,000 people in 2024–25 after gaining 269,000 the year before — creating a credible lower trajectory (0.5%/yr) that did not exist in pre-2024 forecasts and bounding the upper trajectory (1.6%/yr) below pre-2024 expectations.

Three regimes span the policy envelope: heavy subsidy ($2.5–4.5B/yr, ~38–42% capture), moderate subsidy at parity with air ($1.5–2.5B/yr, ~28–32% — the canonical business-case configuration), and minimal subsidy under P3 yield management ($0.5–1.5B/yr, ~20–23%). The combined envelope at mature operation runs from 6.1 to 25.7 million by 2080, central case 12.5 million. The 2055 reading — ALTO’s headline year — is 3.7 to 17.2 million, central case 9.2 million; the corridor is not yet at mature operation in 2055 under the announced phasing.

ALTO’s published 24-million-by-2055 figure sits ~40% above the upper bound for 2055 and is incompatible with the announced phasing under any plausible ramp curve. Every forecast built from a disclosed methodology — TRAM, Munk GEPL, the federal JPO — sits within or close to the CRI envelope. ALTO’s published targets are the outlier against every other forecast for the corridor.

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Modal Shift Note 3 — Ridership Envelope Research Note (PDF)

The full note with all figures and tables: the population trajectories, the three regimes, the phasing and ramp framework, the 2035–2080 envelope, and the comparison with every published forecast

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1 · Framework

Three multiplicands

ALTO’s annual ridership in any year is the product of three quantities: the corridor population served, the average number of intercity trips each resident makes per year across air, rail and car, and ALTO’s share of those trips. Forecasting ridership therefore means forecasting each multiplicand and combining their realistic ranges into an envelope of outcomes.

The two companion notes supply the modal-share machinery. Note 1 derives the air-substitution S-curve and locates the corridor’s three rail scenarios on it at travel time and price. Note 2 extends the framework to road–rail under a North American calibration anchored on VIA’s 13% rail share against road, and develops the price-ratio, group-size, gas-price and reliability sensitivities. What the two notes do not provide is the population denominator that converts share into absolute volume, the per-capita trip generation that scales the market with demographic change, the temporal phasing that distinguishes opening-year from mature ridership, and the explicit fare-and-subsidy regimes. This note adds those four pieces.

Ridership = corridor population × intercity trips per capita × ALTO modal share, scaled by ramp-up. Each multiplicand has a defensible range. The envelope combines them.

2 · Population

The baseline and the 2024 demographic break

ALTO directly serves CMAs from Toronto to Québec City. The 2025 baseline is about 14.9 million — Toronto (7.10M), Montréal (4.62M), Ottawa-Gatineau (1.55M), Québec City (0.86M), plus the smaller served centres (~0.8M combined).

The 2024–25 demographic year produced a structural inflection. The federal Immigration Levels Plan announced in October 2024 was the first to cap temporary residents, requiring a multi-year drawdown. The effect on the two largest CMAs was immediate: Toronto’s CMA shrank by ~1,000 people in 2024–25, following a gain of 269,000 the year before, and Greater Golden Horseshoe growth collapsed from ~313,000/yr to ~40,000. This is a structural break from the baseline pre-2024 forecasts assumed — it invalidates the linear extrapolation of the 2022–24 surge.

**Table 1.** Three population trajectories for the directly-served corridor CMAs, anchored on the 2025 baseline of ~14.9M. The central trajectory is the working assumption for the envelope; the upper and lower trajectories define the population-side bounds. Anchored on StatCan’s January 2026 projections (LG / M1 / HG scenarios) with a ~0.4-point corridor-CMA growth premium.
Trajectory	Annual growth	2050	2080	Driver
Lower	0.5%	16.9M	19.6M	NPR drawdown is structural; aging accelerates
Central	1.0%	19.1M	25.7M	NPR drawdown is one-off; immigration normalises
Upper	1.6%	22.2M	35.6M	Pre-2024 pace partly resumes after political cycle

Corridor population: pre-2024 versus post-2024 trajectories, 2025 to 2080, showing the demographic correction the federal cap on non-permanent residents introduced — **Figure 1.** Corridor population trajectories, 2025–2080, comparing pre-2024 (dashed) and post-2024 (solid) demographic assumptions on the same axis. The dashed lines represent the population input comparable published forecasts used; the solid lines reflect the 2024 federal cap and the StatCan data released January 2026. By 2080 the gap is striking — ~50M vs 35.6M (upper), 33.8M vs 25.7M (central), 23.1M vs 19.6M (lower). The post-2024 upper trajectory sits below the pre-2024 central across much of the horizon. Roughly **15 to 25% of the gap** between the CRI envelope and the other forecasts is attributable to this single demographic correction alone.

The trajectories are anchored on Statistics Canada’s official projections (released 27 January 2026), with a ~0.4-point corridor-CMA growth premium reflecting the directly-served CMAs’ historically faster growth — population-weighted ~1.8%/yr over 2000–2025 against the national 1.23%, moderated for Quebec’s projected demographic-weight decline and the Western redirection of interprovincial migration. The 0.4-point premium is a deliberately conservative reading, chosen so the envelope is not vulnerable to the argument that it underweights the corridor’s growth advantage.

3 · Trip Generation

Per-capita intercity trips

The three principal pairs together carry ~19.9 million annual person-trips across air, rail and car (Note 2). Adding the secondary pairs and intermediate-station traffic brings the addressable market to about 25 million annual person-trips — against a 2025 population of 14.9 million, a per-capita rate of about 1.68 trips per resident per year.

Over a 45-year horizon, competing effects roughly cancel. Hybrid work has structurally reduced corridor business travel below the pre-pandemic baseline, and AI-mediated meetings continue to erode marginal demand for in-person business travel — the literature consistently finds business travel adjusts more elastically to communication technology than leisure travel does. On the supporting side, urbanisation, economic concentration into the corridor, and rising affluence in the secondary centres lift demand. The net effect is roughly stable to mildly declining; this note uses a range of 1.6 to 1.8 trips per capita, central case ~1.7.

4 · Modal Share by Regime

Three fare-and-subsidy regimes

ALTO’s share of the addressable market is the third multiplicand — and the dimension on which the corridor decision turns most directly. The aggregate share is a weighted blend across air, current rail and car markets on the three principal pairs, with realistic group composition (a mix of solo, couple and family travellers) rather than the solo-traveller readings that anchor the time-and-price geometry.

Heavy operating subsidy — low fares

Fares at VIA-equivalent levels (rail-to-air ratio 0.4–0.5; per-person rail-to-car ~1.0 solo), capital absorbed into the public account. Annual subsidy $2.5–4.5 billion. Captures ~85% of the air market, ~100% of existing VIA demand, ~22% of the rail+car market on a group-weighted basis. Aggregate share: ~38–42%.

Moderate subsidy — parity with air (canonical)

Fares at parity with air (rail-to-air ratio ~1.0; per-person rail-to-car ~2.0–2.4 solo). Annual subsidy $1.5–2.5 billion. Captures ~70% of air, ~95% of existing VIA demand, ~9–11% of rail+car. Aggregate share: ~28–32%. This is the configuration under which the 24-million headline is implicitly framed.

Minimal subsidy — P3 yield management

Fares above air parity (rail-to-air ratio 1.1–1.4; per-person rail-to-car 3–4 solo, above 12 for a family of four). Annual subsidy $0.5–1.5 billion — still positive, because the fully self-funded P3 model is not survivable arithmetic at any modal share consistent with the framework. Captures ~50% of air, ~80% of existing VIA demand, ~4% of rail+car. Aggregate share: ~20–23%.

**Table 2.** Three fare-and-subsidy regimes, with implied modal capture and aggregate share of corridor person-trips. The factor-of-two range across regimes operates *independently of the infrastructure choice* — the same physical asset produces double or half the ridership depending on the fare-and-subsidy decision. No regime delivers self-funding at any modal share consistent with the framework.
Regime	Fare structure	Annual subsidy	Air capture	Car capture	Aggregate share
A — Heavy	T–Mtl ~$80–130; r_air ≈ 0.4–0.5	$2.5–4.5B/yr	~85%	~22%	38–42%
B — Moderate	T–Mtl ~$150–220; r_air ≈ 0.9–1.0	$1.5–2.5B/yr	~70%	~9–11%	28–32%
C — Minimal	T–Mtl ~$220–350+; r_air ≈ 1.1–1.4	$0.5–1.5B/yr	~50%	~4%	20–23%

5 · Phasing & Ramp

Opening-year is not mature-year

Ridership in any specific year depends on three timing variables: the construction schedule, the segment opening sequence, and the ramp curve on each opened segment. The 2026–2034 period is consumed by consultation, environmental assessment, expropriation, design, P3 negotiation and enabling works — none of it revenue service. Canadian P3 megaproject experience (Eglinton Crosstown, Confederation Line, Ontario Line) suggests timelines slip rather than compress; the earliest plausible phased opening is ~2038, central scenario closer to 2040.

Phase 1 — Montréal–Ottawa

Opens first: shortest (~190 km), simplest engineering, but the smallest pair. Serves only the Ottawa–Montréal demand pool (~20% of corridor) — it cannot draw Toronto flows because Toronto isn’t connected yet. Early-year ridership is structurally small.

Phase 2 — Toronto extension

The demand inflection point. Adds ~450 km and unlocks Toronto–Ottawa and Toronto–Montréal — ~60% of corridor demand. Cumulative Phase 1+2 coverage is ~80%: the full Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal triangle. Plausible window 2042–2046.

Phase 3 — Québec City extension

The most schedule-vulnerable: the St-Lawrence crossing, Leda clay risk, an unsettled routing, and an unresolved federal-provincial cost-share with Québec. Adds the final ~20%. Window 2047–2052, with a credible permanently-deferred scenario.

The ramp curve in the North American context is meaningfully slower than European comparators. Madrid–Barcelona took ~4 years to decisively overtake the air bridge, under conditions far more favourable to rail than ALTO faces; Brightline Miami–Orlando remains in financial ramp-up with bond ratings downgraded to CCC+. The envelope is calibrated against the Brightline profile for the lower and central cases and Madrid–Barcelona for the upper case.

**Table 3.** Ramp factors applied to each opened segment — the fraction of that segment’s mature ridership realised in each year post-opening. Regime C (yield management) ramps slowest; Regime A (low fares) fastest. Applied separately to each phase, with each segment’s clock starting from its own opening year.
Years post-opening	Lower (Regime C)	Central (Regime B)	Upper (Regime A)
Year 1	15%	25%	35%
Year 3	35%	50%	65%
Year 5	55%	70%	80%
Year 8	75%	85%	92%
Year 10+	90%	95%	100%

**Table 4.** Phase opening schedule by scenario. The fare-and-subsidy regime correlates with delivery pace: heavily-funded projects face political pressure for early openings and federal cost-overrun absorption removes renegotiation friction; lean P3 structures slip. Phase 3 moves most widely because of the St-Lawrence crossing and the Québec cost-share. Defensible bounds extend each year by ±2–3.
Scenario	Regime	Phase 1 (Mtl–Ott)	Phase 2 (Ott–Tor)	Phase 3 (Mtl–QC)
Lower	C — minimal	2042	2048	2055
Central	B — moderate	2040	2045	2050
Upper	A — heavy	2038	2042	2046

Under the central scenario, the corridor is at ~29% of mature potential in 2045, ~65% in 2050, and ~88% in 2055 — genuine full-corridor maturity is not reached until around 2060. ALTO’s 24-million-by-2055 figure is incompatible with the announced phasing under any plausible ramp curve: the corridor cannot be mature in 2055 if Phase 3 only opens in 2050. If Phase 3 is permanently deferred but Phases 1–2 complete, mature ridership is ~4.9 to 20.5 million across regimes — the more credible of the downside readings given Québec’s negotiating position.

6 · The Envelope

Ridership, 2035–2080

Combining population, trip generation, regime and phasing produces the envelope below. The lower bound combines Regime C with the lower population trajectory and 1.6 trips/capita; the central case combines Regime B with the central trajectory and 1.7; the upper bound combines Regime A with the upper trajectory and 1.8 — each paired with its corresponding ramp curve and opening schedule.

9.2M

CRI central case at 2055 (Regime B)

3.7–17.2M

Full 2055 envelope across regimes and demographics

24M

ALTO’s published 2055 target — ~40% above the upper bound

**Table 5.** ALTO annual ridership envelope, 2035–2080, in millions, with the three-phase opening sequence and ramp applied. Lower: Regime C × lower population × 1.6 trips/cap. Central: Regime B × central × 1.7. Upper: Regime A × upper × 1.8. The 2040 figures reflect Phase 1 alone; 2045 reflects Phase 2 just opening; 2050 reflects Phase 3 just opening. Full-corridor maturity is reached around 2060, not 2055.
Year	Status	Lower (M)	Central (M)	Upper (M)
2035	Construction; no revenue service	0	0	0
2040	Phase 1 (Mtl–Ott) opening years	0	0.4	1.8
2045	Phase 1 maturing; Phase 2 opens	0.5	2.8	9.2
2050	Phase 1+2 maturing; Phase 3 opens	1.9	6.7	14.8
2055	Phase 1+2 mature; Phase 3 ramping	3.7	9.2	17.2
2060	All phases near-mature plus growth	4.8	10.2	18.7
2070	Mature plus sustained growth	5.8	11.3	21.9
2080	Mature plus full forecast growth	6.1	12.5	25.7

Figures 2a–2c plot the year-by-year trajectory under each regime separately. Within each figure, the three lines are the demographic trajectories; the spread within a figure shows demographic uncertainty, and the spread across the figures shows the fare-and-subsidy choice — a policy decision, not an infrastructure one. The 24-million target is marked on each as a reference.

Ridership trajectory under Regime A, heavy subsidy, low fares: lower, central and upper demographic lines against the 24-million ALTO target — **Figure 2a.** Regime A (heavy subsidy, VIA-equivalent fares, $2.5–4.5B/yr). Aggregate share 38–42%. Phase openings 2038/2042/2046. The 2055 readings are 11.0 / 13.6 / 17.2M; the 2080 readings 12.5 / 17.5 / 25.7M. **Even the most favourable combination — Regime A with upper demographic growth — leaves the 24M target ~40% above the trajectory at 2055.**

Ridership trajectory under Regime B, moderate subsidy, parity with air: the canonical business-case configuration against the 24-million target — **Figure 2b.** Regime B (moderate subsidy, parity with air, $1.5–2.5B/yr) — the canonical configuration under which the published business case is implicitly framed. Aggregate share 28–32%. Phase openings 2040/2045/2050. The 2055 readings are 7.4 / 9.2 / 11.6M; the 2080 readings 8.9 / 12.5 / 18.3M. The target sits above the achievable range by a factor of ~2.1 to 3.2 at 2055.

Ridership trajectory under Regime C, minimal subsidy, P3 yield management: fares above air parity against the 24-million target — **Figure 2c.** Regime C (minimal subsidy, P3 yield management, fares above air parity, $0.5–1.5B/yr) — the configuration most consistent with the consortium’s announced commercial structure. Aggregate share 20–23%. Phase openings 2042/2048/2055. The 2055 readings are 3.7 / 4.6 / 5.8M; the 2080 readings 6.1 / 8.5 / 12.4M. Even the upper demographic falls below the McGill TRAM projection at 2055.

Three patterns emerge. The regime choice (a policy lever) shifts 2080 central ridership by a factor of ~2 — 17.5M (A), 12.5M (B), 8.5M (C). The demographic choice shifts it by another factor of ~2 — 12.5M (lower) to 25.7M (upper) under Regime A. And the 24-million target sits above every plausible 2055 trajectory in every figure: the closest reading, Regime A with upper growth, produces 17.2M — 28% below the target. Reaching 24M by 2055 requires the most favourable regime, a demographic trajectory above the upper case, and a corridor fully mature by 2055 — three conditions that cannot all hold under the announced phasing. The Regime A upper trajectory does reach the 24M neighbourhood — but a full quarter-century later, in 2080.

7 · Comparison

ALTO’s target is the outlier

The CRI envelope can be placed alongside the other published forecasts for the same corridor. The pattern is unambiguous: every forecast built from a disclosed methodology clusters near the CRI envelope, and ALTO’s public targets stand alone above all of them.

**Table 6.** Published and modelled ridership forecasts for the corridor. Not strictly comparable across columns — ALTO’s 2055 figure assumes full-corridor completion well before 2055; the Munk GEPL figures are Toronto–Montréal scaled to a corridor equivalent; C.D. Howe applies sensitivity analysis to VIA’s forecasts; the JPO 2021 figure is for the predecessor HFR 177 km/h spec. The pattern is robust: every disclosed-methodology forecast sits within or close to the upper end of the CRI envelope, and well below the ALTO public targets.
Source	Method	By 2050	By 2055	By ~2080–85
ALTO public targets	Not disclosed	—	24M (2055)	43M (2084)
ALTO Corporate Plan	Treasury Board filing (incl. Local Services)	—	17M (2059)	—
McGill TRAM	Stated-preference survey, n ≈ 8,300	10.5M	—	~19.7M (yr 50)
Munk School GEPL	Disclosed logit with induced demand	~16–17M	~18–19M	—
C.D. Howe	Scenario analysis on VIA’s forecasts	12–21M	—	—
Federal JPO 2021	Pre-procurement business case (HFR spec)	~13.5M	—	—
Flyvbjerg adjustment	ALTO −65% reference class	—	8.4M (from 24M)	15M (from 43M)
CRI envelope	Modal-shift × population × regime	1.9 / 6.7 / 14.8	3.7 / 9.2 / 17.2	6.1 / 12.5 / 25.7

The dispersion among the disclosed-methodology forecasts is narrow — TRAM at 10.5M by 2050, Munk GEPL at 16–17M corridor-equivalent, the JPO 2021 at 13.5M, and C.D. Howe’s 12–21M range all sit in the same zone. The CRI central case sits on the conservative side of this cluster; the CRI upper bound sits centrally within it. The dispersion between the cluster and ALTO’s public targets, by contrast, is wide: the 24-million figure is ~40% above the CRI upper bound for that year, more than double the TRAM number, and 14% above the top of the C.D. Howe range. Notably, ALTO’s own Corporate Plan figure of 17M by 2059 — filed with Treasury Board — is ~30% below its public 24M figure and closer to the CRI upper bound; the reconciliation of the two ALTO figures is not publicly disclosed.

Every forecast for the corridor built from a disclosed methodology — TRAM survey, Munk GEPL logit, federal JPO business case — sits within or close to the CRI envelope. ALTO’s 24-million public target sits 40 per cent above the upper bound at 2055 and is the outlier in the published literature.

8 · Why the Gap

Why the CRI envelope sits below the cluster

The CRI central case sits below the disclosed-methodology cluster, and its upper bound sits centrally within it. This is not a forecasting error in those studies — they were built for different purposes, finalised on different timelines, and applied different assumptions where the modal-shift literature offers latitude. Six factors account for the bulk of the divergence, in roughly descending order of impact.

1. The 2024 demographic inflection is post-cutoff for every other forecast

The single largest source. Every published forecast was finalised before the federal NPR caps produced observable effects. The January 2026 StatCan data was not available to any of them. ~15–25% of the gap, before any other consideration.

2. North-American modal-shift recalibration

The comparators use European-anchored elasticities. Note 2 recalibrates the rail–car curve against VIA’s ~13% road share, shifting the inflection from τ₀ = 0.65 to 0.46. ~15–25% of the gap, largest on the road-substitutable share.

3. Explicit phased opening

The CRI envelope models each phase’s own opening date and ramp; the comparators assume an implicit step-change to maturity. ~30–40% of the gap at the 2050–2055 horizon specifically, converging by 2070–2080.

4. Group-composition weighting

Family and 3+ travel essentially cannot be captured by rail at any defensible fare. Most models use an average traveller; the CRI weights across realistic solo/couple/family proportions. ~5–15% of the gap, largest on the car-substitutable share.

5. Canadian P3 vs European open-access pricing

Madrid–Barcelona’s gains came from open-access competition (25–50% fare cuts). The Cadence monopoly concession, with Air Canada’s equity stake, eliminates that mechanism. ~10–20% of the gap, largest on the lower-end scenarios.

6. Bottom-up vs top-down or stated-preference

ALTO’s targets are top-down (subject to the Flyvbjerg ~65% optimism bias); TRAM is stated-preference (overstates realised behaviour). The CRI is built bottom-up from observed VIA shares. ~5–15% of the gap, operating as a multiplier on the rest.

Taken together, the six factors are not independent surprises pushing the same way — they are mostly visible to the other forecasts too, but each embedded different assumptions where the literature offers latitude. The CRI envelope’s central case sits below the cluster because it applies all six defensible positions at once; its upper bound, by construction, relaxes the unfavourable end of each while staying internally consistent, and sits centrally within the cluster. By 2080, when the demographic, phasing and ramp factors have all played out, the CRI upper bound of 20.7M sits in the centre of the published cluster’s mature-state range. None of the comparators is wrong; each answers a different question. The CRI envelope answers a sixth: what realised annual ridership is consistent with current empirical evidence, the announced phasing, and the modal-shift literature applied to the Canadian context.

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Modal Shift Note 3 — Ridership Envelope Research Note (PDF)

Reference document with the full framework, all six tables, the four figures, and the complete source list

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Sources

Principal sources

Statistics Canada (27 January 2026). Population projections for Canada (catalogue 17-20-0003; dashboard 71-607-X-2022015), LG / M1 / HG scenarios. — and the 2024–25 demographic estimates and the federal Immigration Levels Plan (October 2024) cap on non-permanent residents.

El-Geneidy, A. et al. — Transportation Research at McGill (TRAM), stated-preference corridor projection (March 2026), n ≈ 8,300. tram.mcgill.ca

Munk School Global Economic Policy Lab, University of Toronto — disclosed logit corridor model with induced demand.

Jones & Fariha (February 2025). All Aboard. C.D. Howe Institute scenario analysis. cdhowe.org

Federal Joint Project Office (2021) pre-procurement business case (HFR 177 km/h specification), released through Access to Information, November 2025.

Flyvbjerg, B., Holm, M.S. & Buhl, S. — meta-analysis of rail-project ridership forecast accuracy (mean ~65% overstatement).

VIA Rail Canada Annual Report 2023; corridor person-trip volumes and modal shares as developed in Note 2, Table 1. — and Brightline Florida (2024–2026) ridership reports and KBRA bond rating actions; Madrid–Barcelona AVE ramp and open-access pricing record.

ALTO public communications (the Imbleau / Fast Forward 24- and 43-million figures) and the ALTO Corporate Plan filed with Treasury Board (17M by 2059, including Local Services).

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative companion notes: Note 1 — rail–air substitution and Note 2 — rail–car substitution, which supply the modal-share machinery; and the Modal Shift & Ridership synthesis brief that sets this note alongside Notes 1, 2 and 4.

May 24, 2026

Modal shift synthesis
ALTO Ridership Against the Modal-Shift Evidence

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

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Modal Shift & Ridership Brief · Published May 2026

⚠ What This Brief Synthesises

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

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

Headline Finding

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

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

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ALTO Ridership Against the Modal-Shift Evidence — Full Slide Deck (PDF)

Seven slides synthesising the modal-shift S-curves, the price families, the 2055 ridership envelope, and the three-test verdict on the 24-million target

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The Four Underlying Notes

Note 1 Modal shift between high-speed rail and air — the rail–air S-curve and the competitive zone

Note 2 Modal shift between rail and car — the North-American–calibrated rail–car curve and the group-size effect

Note 3 The ALTO ridership envelope — population × trips × modal share, scaled by phasing, vs the 24M target

Note 4 The operating-subsidy frontier — the trilemma of ridership, subsidy and P3 break-even, and why 24M sits off the frontier
The Question

How many people would actually have to switch?

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

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

Three forces set that ceiling: the journey-time geometry against air, the harder competition against the car in a North-American setting, and the price the traveller actually faces. The notes treat each in turn before combining them into a ridership envelope and testing the 24-million figure against it.
Note 1 · Rail vs Air

Modal shift versus air follows a logistic S-curve

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

< 2 h

Rail dominates — near-full capture of the rail+air market

2–4 h

Competitive zone — 60–80% rail share, infrastructure decisive

> 5 h

Rail share collapses — only price-sensitive or rail-loyal travellers

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

Paris–Lyon (TGV): rail share rose from 40% to 72% after high-speed service opened.

Madrid–Barcelona (AVE): roughly 75% rail share at a 2 h 30 min journey time.

Madrid–Seville: rail share rose from 16% to 52%.

Beijing–Shanghai: 1,318 km covered in 4 h 18 min, rail-dominant despite the distance.

For ALTO, the implication is straightforward: the air-substitution share the corridor can win is bounded by where each city-pair sits on this curve. Pairs that fall inside the two-to-four-hour competitive zone can deliver strong rail capture; pairs that fall outside it cannot, regardless of how the target is set.
Note 2 · Rail vs Car

Modal shift versus the car is harder in North America

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

Why North America shifts the curve

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

What this does to predicted share

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

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

ALTO Toronto–Ottawa (τ ≈ 0.44): about 51% North-American versus 67% European.

ALTO Toronto–Montreal (τ ≈ 0.56): about 41% North-American versus 58% European.

HPR on both pairs (τ ≈ 0.65–0.67): about 33% North-American versus 50% European.

The lesson is that a forecast borrowed from European experience — as the older studies effectively are — systematically overstates how much of the road market the corridor can win. The car does not behave here the way it behaves there.
Notes 1 & 2 · Price

Price shifts the whole modal-shift curve

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

Elasticity differs by mode

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

Group travel hurts rail

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

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

Note 3 · The Ridership Envelope

The 2055 envelope is 3.7 to 17.2 million

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

9.2M

CRI central case at 2055, Regime B (fares at parity with air)

3.7–17.2M

Full 2055 ridership envelope across regimes and demographic paths

24M

ALTO’s published target — 2.6× the central case

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

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

Regime B ridership envelope, 2030–2080. The central demographic path reaches 9.2M in 2055 and 12.5M in 2080; the ALTO target of 24M (2055) sits above the upper bound of the envelope. Figure from Note 3 — Ridership envelope for the ALTO corridor.

Note 3 · The Comparison

The 24M target is the outlier

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

The immigration inflection

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

Pre-cap demographics elsewhere

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

Structural travel decline

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

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

The Verdict

The 24-million target fails three independent feasibility tests

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

1

Modal-shift framework

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

2

Demographic baseline

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

3

Subsidy frontier

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

Side by Side

Three tests, one number

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

Modal-shift ceiling

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

Reaches:~11–12M even at heaviest subsidy

vs 24M?Falls short by half

Demographic baseline

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

Reaches:9.2M central; 3.7–17.2M envelope

vs 24M?Above the upper bound

Subsidy frontier

Limit:Defensible operating regimes (A–C)

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

vs 24M?Outside any defensible regime

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

Three questions to ask

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

On modal share: What rail share of the rail+air and rail+car markets does the 24-million target assume on each city-pair, and is that share calibrated on North-American or European travel behaviour?

On demographics: Does the ridership forecast incorporate the 2024 federal cap on non-permanent residents, or does it rest on pre-2024 population assumptions that the cap has since superseded?

On subsidy: At the fare level required to reach the target, what is the projected annual operating subsidy — and how does it compare with the $5 billion-plus the subsidy frontier implies under the proponent’s own capex base case?

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

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ALTO Ridership Against the Modal-Shift Evidence (PDF)

Reference deck for federal decision-makers, parliamentarians, journalists, and residents along the corridor

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Where Things Stand

Two numbers, one of them public

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

Sources

Underlying notes and references

1.
Note 1 — Modal shift between high-speed rail and air on the ALTO corridor. ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative. Source of the logistic rail–air S-curve, the 3.5-hour inflection, the short-haul / competitive-zone / long-haul thresholds, and the Paris–Lyon, Madrid–Barcelona, Madrid–Seville and Beijing–Shanghai empirical anchors.

2.
Note 2 — Modal shift between rail and car on the ALTO corridor. ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative. Source of the North-American-calibrated rail–car S-curve anchored on VIA Rail’s ~13% road share, the inflection shift from τ = 0.65 (EU) to τ = 0.46 (NA), and the predicted rail shares for the Toronto–Ottawa, Toronto–Montreal and HPR city-pairs.

3.
Note 3 — Ridership envelope for the ALTO corridor, 2035–2080. ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative. Source of the ridership framework (population × per-capita trips × modal share × ramp-up), the post-2024 demographic inputs reflecting the federal NPR cap, the 9.2M central case, and the 3.7–17.2M envelope.

4.
Note 4 — Operating-subsidy frontier for the ALTO corridor. ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative. Source of the Regime A/B/C fare mapping, the subsidy frontier corrected to be operating-cost-consistent, and the >$5B/yr operating subsidy (~$7B/yr full federal cost) implied by pushing ridership toward 24M under the $75B capex base case.

5.
El-Geneidy, A., et al. Transportation Research at McGill (TRAM), McGill University (2025). Independent corridor ridership forecast built on pre-2024 population assumptions. tram.mcgill.ca

6.
C.D. Howe Institute (2025). Independent assessment of the high-speed rail corridor, using pre-2024 demographic inputs. cdhowe.org

7.
Statistics Canada — population projections (low-growth / medium / high-growth scenarios) and the corridor population base; and the 2024 Immigration Levels Plan establishing the cap on non-permanent residents. statcan.gc.ca

8.
ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative companion briefs: Reading the Answer (cost, ridership and subsidy claims) and The Report That Vanished. This brief is intended to be read alongside them.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · citizenresearch.ca · Modal Shift & Ridership Brief · May 2026
Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.
May 22, 2026

Modal shift HSR air

Citizen Research Initiative · Modal Shift Analysis · Note 1

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

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

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Modal Shift Note 1 · Published May 2026

⚠ What This Note Examines

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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Modal Shift Note 1 — Air–Rail Research Note (PDF)

The full 16-page note with all seven figures, the segment-level travel-time and price analysis, and the methodology and sources

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1 · Travel Time

The competitive zone

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

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

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

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

Empirical anchors

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

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

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

2 · Price

The elasticity factor

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

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

How to read the chart

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

Price sensitivity differs by traveller

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

Air’s connecting-flight advantage

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

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

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

3 · Travel Time on the Corridor

Where the corridor sits on the curve

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

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

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

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

Current VIA Rail service plotted on the S-curve: Toronto-Ottawa at 21% and Toronto-Montreal at 10% — **Figure 3a.** Current VIA Rail service. Both principal Toronto pairs sit well below the inflection point: Toronto–Ottawa at ~4 h 30 min captures around 21% of the rail+air market, and Toronto–Montréal at 5 h 13 min around 10%. The corridor’s air-substitutable demand is structurally outside the competitive zone.

High Performance Rail at 200 km/h on the S-curve: Toronto-Ottawa at 68% and Toronto-Montreal at 46% — **Figure 3b.** High Performance Rail at 200 km/h on a dedicated, electrified 401-corridor mainline (CRI HPR Strategy Express times). Toronto–Ottawa moves to ~68% rail share at price parity; Toronto–Montréal to ~46% — across the inflection but still in the steeper portion of the curve.

ALTO at 300+ km/h on the S-curve: Toronto-Ottawa at 88% and Toronto-Montreal at 66% — **Figure 3c.** ALTO at 300+ km/h on a dedicated 1,000 km HSR network (published targets). Toronto–Ottawa moves onto the upper plateau at ~88% rail share at price parity; Toronto–Montréal to ~66% — still on the steeper portion, where additional time savings continue to produce meaningful gains.

**Table 2.** Predicted rail share of the combined rail+air market on each principal pair under each scenario, derived from the logistic curve in Figure 1 with prices held at parity. Order-of-magnitude estimates; actual shares would also depend on fare structure, frequency, reliability, station accessibility, and traveller mix.
City pair	VIA current	HPR (200 km/h)	ALTO (300+ km/h)
Toronto–Ottawa	~21%	~68%	~88%
Toronto–Montréal	~10%	~46%	~66%

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

4 · Price on the Corridor

Where the corridor sits on the price axis

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

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

For the corridor’s three scenarios, plausible operating price ratios are: VIA at r ≈ 0.5 (current subsidised rail), HPR at r ≈ 0.7 (modest premium, partial capital recovery), ALTO at r ≈ 1.0 (parity with air, subsidy absorbing the larger debt-service gap).

Modal share as a function of rail-to-air price ratio for each scenario on Toronto-Ottawa and Toronto-Montreal — **Figure 4.** Modal share as a function of rail-to-air price ratio, with each scenario’s travel time held fixed at its published value. Markers indicate the canonical operating ratio: VIA at r = 0.5, HPR at r = 0.7, ALTO at r = 1.0. The vertical separation between lines shows how much share is driven by infrastructure; the slope of each line shows how price-sensitive that scenario is at its operating point.

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

The HPR pricing lever, with ALTO held at parity

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

HPR and ALTO modal share as a function of the HPR-to-ALTO fare ratio, ALTO held at parity — **Figure 5.** HPR and ALTO modal share as a function of the HPR-to-ALTO fare ratio, ALTO fixed at parity (r = 1.0). ALTO’s share appears as a flat reference; HPR’s varies along the gold curve. Markers show the canonical HPR/ALTO = 0.7 operating point.

ALTO minus HPR modal-share differential as a function of the HPR-to-ALTO fare ratio — **Figure 6.** ALTO − HPR modal-share differential. The gap rises from ~7 points (Toronto–Ottawa) and 3 points (Toronto–Montréal) at HPR/ALTO = 0.5, to 19–20 points at parity. The diamond marks the canonical 0.7 point: 12 points on Toronto–Ottawa, 11 on Toronto–Montréal.

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

5 · Where the Returns Sit

Where the modal-shift returns sit on the curve

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

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

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

36–47

Percentage points captured by the VIA → HPR step (at parity)

19–20

Additional points from HPR → ALTO at parity — 11–13 once priced

$3–6B

Incremental capital cost per percentage point of ALTO-only modal shift

HPR delivers the majority of the achievable modal shift on both Toronto pairs at price parity. ALTO’s additional speed adds 19 to 20 percentage points — a residual that shrinks to 11 to 13 once the canonical price assumptions are applied.

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

6 · Implications

What this means for the corridor decision

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

The opportunity is real and concentrated

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

HPR does the larger part of the work

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

Price reduces ALTO’s advantage

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

This is the HPR regime

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

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

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Modal Shift Note 1 — Air–Rail Research Note (PDF)

Reference document with the full methodology, sensitivity analysis, and the complete source list

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Methodology

Modelling approach

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

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

Sources

Principal sources

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative (2026). HPR Strategy, Chapter 4 — High Performance Passenger Rail (Express journey times). citizenresearch.ca

International Council on Clean Transportation (2022). The bullet train to lower-carbon travel.

Mineta Transportation Institute (2017). Modal Shift and High-Speed Rail: A Review of the Current Literature. P. Haas.

World Bank Group (2019). China’s High-Speed Rail Development.

Bergantino, A. & Madio, L. (2020). Intermodal competition and substitution: HSR versus air transport. Research in Transportation Economics, 79.

AECOM (2011). High-Speed Rail Overseas Experience Report. C. Nash.

Sun, X. et al. (2024). A review on research regarding HSR interactions with air transport. Transport Policy, 157.

Wardman, M. (2014). Price Elasticities of Surface Travel Demand: A Meta-analysis of UK Evidence. Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, 48.

Ben-Akiva, M. & Lerman, S. (1985). Discrete Choice Analysis: Theory and Application to Travel Demand. MIT Press. — and Train, K. (2009). Discrete Choice Methods with Simulation, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.

10.

Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (CNMC), annual rail market reports for Spain; VIA Rail Canada Annual Report 2023 and published timetables, travel times and Economy fare ranges; Alto Inc. published travel-time targets and corridor descriptions (February 2025 announcement).

11.

Energies (2025). Emission Reductions in the Aviation Sector: A Systematic Review of the Sustainability Impacts of Modal Shifts.

12.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative companion material: the Modal Shift & Ridership synthesis brief, which sets this note alongside Notes 2–4 (rail–car substitution, the ridership envelope, and the operating-subsidy frontier).

May 22, 2026

Tag: Toronto–Quebec City corridor

The Thirty Pieces Problem

It begins with a logo at a festival

Visibility and “activation,” made visible

A familiar playbook

The Community Partnerships Policy: what it actually says

ALTO Community Partnerships Policy (Published)

The prohibition on advocacy

Lobbying campaigns

Projects of a controversial nature… or raising issues of social acceptability

What has been reported in the corridor

A trail alongside the tracks

Other avenues: conservation land and offsets

Community partnership grants

The future Kingston station

A festival sponsorship in the francophone corridor

The rationalization on the record

The rationalization trap

The asymmetry of the exchange

Why tacit acceptance is dangerous — for everyone

What communities can do

01Oppose the project and engage with the process — both at once

02If you have accepted ALTO funding, say so publicly

03Get every promise in writing — or treat it as no promise at all

04Do the full accounting before you assess any offer

05Know that there is a better option

06Stand with other corridor communities

What we are asking you to do

What lasts is the record

High Cost, Low Benefit — For Whom?

What the video claims

It claims a cost convergence the record contradicts

It never engages the alternative the Initiative proposes

Three claims, three answers

Estimated, not simulated

Read the full record

A carbon debt, not a carbon saving

The cost difference is structural, not arithmetic

High cost, low benefit — for whom?

Primary documents

What ALTO Told Parliament

What a written question is — and what this one asked

Four numbers that tell the story

Software, advisers, and communications — not track

An organization, not yet a railway

What ALTO paid itself in bonuses

The operating budget is almost certainly missing three zeros

What almost certainly happened

The fuller picture

Estimated, Not Simulated

What the document is

Two ways to get a journey time

The only simulated number is the slow one

A second problem: not the door-to-door time

The journey time as a government decision

Why the background is relevant, not incidental

The same official, now selling the fast times

A promise, or an estimate?

Primary documents

The Bill That Has to Balance

The bill every railway has to balance

Seven steps to fill in the blanks

Three numbers that frame the whole thing

No ticket price makes the bill disappear

What the filled-in bill shows

Roughly double the cost

Cannot pay its own way

Eleven cents on the dollar

A ridership target out of reach

This is a recommendation, not a verdict

The $12 Billion That Isn’t There

A percentage, not a forecast

The international examples do not transfer

Hong Kong West Kowloon

Australia East Coast HSR

California HSR

The authorities required do not exist

Even a generous bottom-up envelope falls short

Most of the value, in present terms, is fictional

One line, three improvements, all of them collapse