Tag: VIA rail

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

Two incompatible traffic types share one corridor

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

Chapter 3 · The HPR Research Report

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

3.1 · The Opposing Models

North America and Europe run railways in opposite ways

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

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

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

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

Figure 3.1. Two irreconcilable optimisations: heavy freight and high-frequency passenger rail demand physically different infrastructure. Left: a CN intermodal freight train on a North American shared corridor. Right: dedicated, electrified passenger infrastructure. The two cannot be optimised on the same track.

This matters because

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

3.2 · The Incumbent Railway

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

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

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

Figure 3.2. CN market capitalisation versus operating ratio since privatisation, 1995–2025. Market capitalisation in CAD billions; operating ratio expressed ×100. The inverse relationship is this chapter’s central premise: as the operating ratio fell, market capitalisation compounded — value created by operating discipline on existing track, not by network construction. Sources: CN annual reports; Bloomberg; Railway Age.

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

Why this matters to the corridor

CN’s problem today is not speed—it’s capacity. Its three main intermodal terminals in the Greater Toronto Area are running at full capacity. It tried to build a new terminal at Milton and ran into a decade of local opposition, environmental litigation, and regulatory hurdles before construction could start. This tells us something crucial: the cost of building new capacity in a populated landscape is measured in years and billions of dollars, and community resistance is as big a factor as engineering difficulty.

Figure 3.3. Community friction at Milton: logistics development along Highway 401 (left) and the contested hub location within the town (right). Source: Google Maps.

3.3 · The Other Railway

What about CP? It runs on its own track

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

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

Why this matters

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

3.4 · The Root Problem

Entanglement: two traffic types, one track

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

Freight trains

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

Passenger trains

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

Under the “host railway priority” rules that govern shared track across North America, when a freight train and a passenger train want the same track at the same time, the freight train proceeds and the passenger train waits in a siding. VIA cannot unilaterally add frequency because every additional passenger train needs to be negotiated around CN’s freight schedule. CN controls the dispatcher and has no commercial reason to give up freight capacity to improve passenger reliability.

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

The corridor’s real problem

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

3.5 · The Solution

Separation: give each traffic type its own path

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When HPR moves passenger trains onto their own dedicated path, they vacate the Kingston Subdivision. The capacity they were consuming—the paths, the priority negotiations, the siding meets—reverts to CN as liberated freight capacity that the freight railway actively wants.

Think of it this way:

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

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

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

Why this structure matters

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

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

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

The host railway (CN)

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

Shippers and supply chain

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

The public

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

3.8 · The Contrast

Why ALTO cannot capture the freight dividend

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

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

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

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

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

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

The core difference

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

Key Findings · Chapter 3

The concept in eight parts

3.1 — North America runs the opposite railway

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

3.2 — CN is the incumbent, and it is constrained

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

3.3 — CP is not a party to the conflict

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

3.4 — Entanglement is the root cause

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

3.5 — Separation is the design principle

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

3.6 — Build one, make one free

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

3.7 — HPFR lands on a motivated beneficiary

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

3.8 — ALTO cannot capture it

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

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The HPR Concept: Untangling the Corridor

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

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

Canada’s rail exceptionalism

Canada’s Rail Exceptionalism

Why Canada’s passenger trains keep pulling over to let freight go by — and why almost no other wealthy country works this way.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Comparative Brief · Published July 2026

⚠ New this week: Ottawa’s $1.95-billion train order

On July 29, 2026, the federal government announced $1.95 billion to buy 45 new hybrid locomotives for VIA Rail, most of them to be assembled in Montréal. It is welcome news for jobs and for an aging fleet — but every dollar of it is about the train, not the track. Transport Canada CBC

A new locomotive doesn’t change who owns the rails or who goes first. On the routes this fleet will serve, VIA runs on tracks owned by the freight railways — and its shiny new trains will keep pulling into sidings to wait for freight, just as the last batch of new trains does today.

The bottom line

No G7 country has a law that makes freight trains more important than passenger trains. Where a law on the question exists at all, it does the opposite — it puts passengers first. The other big democracies reach the same result another way: a neutral company owns the tracks, or an independent referee decides who goes when, or freight is simply the guest on passenger-owned lines.

Canada is the only G7 country with none of these protections. VIA Rail owns less than 3% of the track it runs on and travels as a guest on lines owned by the freight railways CN and CPKC, under private contracts, with no law giving passengers priority, no neutral track owner, and no independent referee. Freight priority isn’t written into Canadian law — it is simply what happens when nothing protects passengers. That is what makes Canada the outlier.

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Canada’s Rail Exceptionalism — Full Brief (PDF)

The complete comparison of freight-versus-passenger priority across the G7 and other high-income countries, with sources

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The problem

Canada’s passenger trains are guests on someone else’s railway

Most people assume VIA Rail runs on its own tracks. It doesn’t. VIA owns under 3% of the track it uses. CN owns about 83%, and the rest belongs to CPKC and commuter agencies like Metrolinx. So across almost its whole network, VIA is a tenant — and when a VIA passenger train and a CN freight train want the same stretch of track, the freight company that owns and controls that track decides who waits.

<3%

of the track it runs on is actually owned by VIA Rail

CBC News, 2024

~83%

of VIA’s tracks are owned by the freight railway CN

CBC News, 2024

57%

of VIA trains arrived on time in 2022

CBC News, 2024

You can see the result on the timetable. In 2022, only about 57% of VIA trains arrived on time. But on the one short stretch VIA actually owns, between Ottawa and Montréal, on-time performance jumps to roughly 90%. Same country, same trains — the difference is who owns the track. That is the whole story of this brief in a single comparison.

A quick distinction

Three different things people call “priority”

Arguments about rail priority get tangled because “priority” can mean three different things. Keeping them separate is the key to an honest comparison.

1. Priority written into law

An actual law saying which kind of train goes first. This is rare. Where it exists — in the United States — it favours passengers, not freight.

2. A neutral referee decides

A neutral company owns the tracks and an independent regulator hands out timetable slots by published rules. This is how Europe and Japan work. Passenger trains are protected; freight gets fair, guaranteed access — but not the whip hand.

3. Whoever owns the track wins

What actually happens minute-to-minute when a dispatcher chooses. On freight-owned track, freight tends to win. Canada has only this third kind — with nothing above it.

The comparison

How Canada stacks up against the G7

0 of 7

G7 countries that put freight ahead of passengers by law

it’s a null set

6 of 7

protect passengers — by law, a neutral track owner, or a referee

every G7 member except one

the number of G7 countries with none of those protections: Canada

the outlier

Read down the list. Every other G7 country has at least one thing standing between passengers and the commercial interests of freight — a law, a neutral owner, or an independent referee. Canada has none.

Passengers first

United States — Federal law has put passenger trains ahead of freight since 1973. (Freight railroads often ignore it in practice, which is why the U.S. keeps trying to enforce it — but the law is clear.)

Passengers first

Japan — The passenger companies own the tracks; the freight operator is the guest and pays to use them. Bullet-train lines carry no freight at all.

Neutral referee

United Kingdom — A neutral company owns the track and an independent regulator hands out the slots. Neither passengers nor freight can simply push the other aside.

Neutral referee

France — A neutral track owner and an independent regulator allocate capacity under published EU rules; express passenger trains rank at the top.

Neutral referee

Germany — Same European model: neutral track owner, independent regulator, no freight-over-passenger rule.

Neutral referee

Italy — Same European model again: neutral track owner and independent regulator.

No protection

Canada — No law giving passengers priority, no neutral track owner, no independent referee. Freight wins by default.

Widening the lens beyond the G7 only makes the point sharper. Nearly every wealthy country runs on the neutral, refereed model. Switzerland is the clearest contrast: it builds its entire national timetable around passengers — freight is scheduled around passenger service, not ahead of it. The only rich country that really resembles Canada is Australia, and even there an economic regulator oversees track access, and there is almost no long-distance passenger service on the freight lines. Canada is alone in running a national passenger railway carrying millions of trips a year with none of these safeguards.

The $1.95-billion question

Why new trains won’t fix this

This week’s investment is real and worthwhile. But it buys a better machine; it does nothing about the track — which is where Canada’s problem actually lives.

What the $1.95 billion buys	What it leaves untouched
45 new hybrid locomotives, most assembled in Montréal, plus a new maintenance facility and about 1,200 jobs.	Who owns the track. The routes these trains will run on still belong to CN and CPKC.
A cleaner, more modern fleet to replace aging equipment on long-distance and remote routes.	Who goes first. A new locomotive still pulls into the siding to let the freight train pass.
The promise of better reliability from newer, more capable trains.	The real cause of delay. On freight-owned track, punctuality is capped by freight priority — no train upgrade can override it.

We already know how this ends, because Canada has run the experiment. The last new fleet — the Siemens Venture trains bought for the busy Québec City–Windsor corridor — is today slowed by speed restrictions CN imposes on its own track, a dispute now before the Federal Court. New trains, same track, same problem.

There’s an irony worth noting: the new locomotives are Swiss-built. Switzerland is exactly the country whose trains run on time — because it built its whole timetable around passengers. Canada is importing the Swiss hardware without the Swiss idea. It is buying the train, not the timetable.

The real obstacle

This is a political choice, not a technical one

None of this is destiny. Every tool Canada is missing already exists and is used routinely by its neighbours — and adopting any one of them would cost a tiny fraction of a single locomotive order. What is missing isn’t money or engineering. It’s political will.

The fix has been put to Parliament again and again — and set aside every time. Since 2013, at least half a dozen bills have tried to give passengers priority or put VIA Rail on a proper legal footing:

Defeated 2015

Bill C-640 (and its earlier version C-614), the VIA Rail Canada Act — Philip Toone. Would have given passenger service preference over freight. Voted down.

Died 2019

Bill C-370, VIA Rail Canada Act — Irene Mathyssen. Never debated to a vote; died when Parliament ended.

Never voted

Bills C-251 and C-236, VIA Rail Canada Act — Elizabeth May, reintroduced across two Parliaments.

Never advanced

Bill C-371, the Rail Passenger Priority Act — Taylor Bachrach, 2023. Would have required freight to give way to passengers, with fines up to $250,000 per violation.

The pattern is telling. Every one of these bills came from an opposition member; not one was ever taken up as government legislation; and the only one to reach a vote was voted down. The freight railways and their shippers have lobbied against each attempt — one shippers’ group dismissed passenger priority as “the tail wagging the dog” — even as VIA Rail’s own CEO has publicly asked Ottawa for exactly the U.S.-style priority these bills propose. The tools are drafted and the precedent is understood. What’s missing is a government willing to enact them.

What would actually fix it

Three tools — any one would help

Canada doesn’t need to invent anything. It can pick from the same toolkit every comparable country already uses. Each of these is cheaper than a single locomotive order.

A law that puts passengers first

Like the United States since 1973 — a statutory right for passenger trains to go ahead of freight, with penalties for ignoring it.

A neutral track owner

Like the UK and the EU — so the company running the trains isn’t also the company deciding who waits.

An independent referee

A regulator that hands out timetable slots by published rules and can enforce on-time performance.

The high-speed corridor project (ALTO) is, in part, a workaround for all of this — building brand-new, dedicated passenger track precisely because passengers can’t get priority on freight-owned lines. But dedicated track for one corridor doesn’t fix the national problem. The exceptionalism this brief documents is a policy choice, not a constraint — and closing it is a matter of political will, not engineering.

Read the full brief

The complete comparison, with sources

The full brief works through the G7 country by country, the other high-income comparisons, the corridor evidence, and the decade of failed legislation — with every claim sourced.

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Canada’s Rail Exceptionalism (PDF)

Comparative analysis for policymakers, MPs, journalists, and anyone following the passenger-rail file

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Sources

Key sources

Transport Canada, news release, “Passenger Rail Locomotive Assembly Returns to Canada Through a $1.95 Billion Government of Canada Investment,” July 29, 2026. canada.ca

CBC News, “Feds announce almost $2B for 45 hybrid battery-diesel Via Rail passenger locomotives,” July 29, 2026. CBC News

CBC News, “Work’s chugging along to try to prioritize people over freight on Canada’s rail lines,” December 23, 2023 — source for VIA owning under 3% of its track, CN owning about 83%, and 57% on-time performance in 2022. CBC News

The Canadian Press, November 26, 2024 — on VIA’s application to the Canadian Transportation Agency and CN’s freight prioritization as the leading cause of VIA delay, with the Montréal–Toronto scheduled time lengthening to 5 h 33 m.

Railway Age, November 2022 — noting that, unlike Amtrak, VIA Rail holds no government-mandated priority over freight.

United States: 49 U.S.C. §24308(c), the statutory passenger preference originating in the Amtrak Improvement Act of 1973.

European Union: Directive 2012/34/EU establishing a single European railway area (neutral infrastructure managers and independent regulators).

Passenger-priority bills in Parliament — Bill C-640 / C-614 (Philip Toone), defeated 2015; Bill C-370 (Irene Mathyssen), 2017; Bills C-251 / C-236 (Elizabeth May); Bill C-371, the Rail Passenger Priority Act (Taylor Bachrach), 2023. parl.ca openparliament.ca

Transport Action Canada, “Taylor Bachrach Proposes Rail Passenger Priority Act,” and coverage in Trains (February 2, 2024), including VIA CEO Mario Péloquin’s call for Amtrak-style priority and freight-sector opposition. transportaction.ca

July 30, 2026

Would and Alto stop help kingston

Would an ALTO Stop Help Kingston?

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

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Policy Brief · July 2026

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

ALTO’s chief executive has said Kingston will probably get a station, and that most trains would pass through without stopping. Neither the timetable nor the location of the station has been published.

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

The short answer

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

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

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

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

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

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The Comparison

Six versions of Kingston’s railway

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

+12%

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

the only option that grows ridership

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

matches today, does not beat it

−17%

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

central case for an out‑of‑town station

Table 1 · Headline comparison

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

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

Starting Point

Why Kingston already rides the train

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

It gets two sets of trains, not one

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

The station serves a region, not a city

Napanee, Gananoque, Amherstview and the western Thousand Islands have no intercity rail of their own, so people drive to Kingston to catch the train. Ridership credited to a city of 132,000 is actually generated by an area several times larger.

The population is unusually inclined to take the train

Roughly forty thousand post‑secondary students live in a city of about 132,000, one of the highest ratios in the country. Many come from the Toronto and Ottawa regions and travel without a car. Kingston also has a large retired population, for whom avoiding the highway is the point of the trip, and an unusually high share of hospital, university, military and public‑sector jobs where travel is expensed and defaults to rail.

But that ridership is hard to charge a premium for

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

Two things worth being clear about

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

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

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

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

Method

How the numbers were worked out

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

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

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

Table 2 · Everything the model assumes

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

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

Two possible futures for today’s trains

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

Replacement

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

Both together

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

What is assumed rather than known

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

Result One

Where the speed gain goes

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

Table 3 · One change at a time

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

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

Result Two

More trains cannot fix it on its own

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

Table 4 · ALTO at a station 27 minutes north

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

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

The fare premium matters more than the timetable

Table 5 · What moves the answer

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

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

How many trains would it actually take?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Result Three

What if you just made today’s trains faster?

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

Table 7 · Speed alone, from the existing station

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

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

The comparison that matters

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

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

Speed gives diminishing returns

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

A conservative figure, and a warning

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

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

What It Means

A stop is not the same as service

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

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

The two things ALTO has said do not fit together

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

A conventional railway does better here

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

What Would Change the Answer

Three commitments, and four documents

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

Would help

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

Would help most

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

Would help

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

Four things that should be published

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

Not published

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

Not published

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

Not published

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

Not published

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

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

The finding that matters

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

Download Full Brief

Kingston’s ALTO Ridership Analysis (PDF)

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

Download PDF

July 26, 2026

Which trains stop in kingston

Which Trains Stop in Kingston?

A probable station, an unpublished route, and the conditions Kingston City Council actually set.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Policy Brief · Published July 2026

⚠ New Statement: ALTO CEO on a Kingston Stop

On 22 July 2026, ALTO chief executive Martin Imbleau told CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning that Kingston will probably receive a station, citing demand — It’s doable, the ridership is very strong — because Kingston is a large community. In the same interview he said that most ALTO trains would pass through Kingston without stopping, along with Laval and Trois-Rivières, in order to preserve express service between the larger cities. CBC News

No alignment has been published for the segment that would carry the station. ALTO has said the Montréal–Ottawa route goes to public feedback this autumn, with the Toronto–Ottawa segment — the one containing Kingston — to follow.

Critical Finding

The two statements cannot both carry the weight assigned to them. If Kingston’s demand justifies building a station, it justifies serving it; if the timetable cannot absorb the stop, something other than the ridership case is driving the decision. But the more consequential question is not whether Kingston receives a platform. It is how many useful trains Kingston has the day the line opens, counting both operators — and on that question the announcement is silent.

Kingston City Council’s support is not unconditional and never was. Resolution 2026-73, adopted 17 February 2026 by a vote of 9–2, makes support for a southern route contingent upon development along the Highway 401 corridor around the South Frontenac and Kingston region and on a new stop being added in Kingston. It further asks that the route and stop sit as close to the urban core as possible, and resolves that if there is no station in Kingston, council formally opposes the southern route. Of these, the 22 July statement addresses one, provisionally. The 401 contingency and the urban-core request are not addressed at all.

Meanwhile the service Kingston already has is exposed from the other direction. Transport Canada’s 2025–26 estimates record funding to support the planning and eventual transfer of VIA Rail’s Québec City–Windsor corridor operations to the private partner. More than 80 per cent of VIA Rail’s revenue comes from that corridor. A station served by a minority of ALTO trains, combined with a thinned conventional service on the existing line, can leave Kingston with fewer useful daily trains than it has today.

The Arithmetic

What an intermediate stop costs at 300 km/h

A station call on a high-speed line is expensive in a way that is easy to underestimate. The train must decelerate from line speed, dwell at the platform, and accelerate back to line speed. On comparable systems the round-trip cost of a single intermediate stop is on the order of four to six minutes, before any allowance for the slower alignment geometry often required to reach a city-centre location.

That penalty falls on every through passenger, on every train that stops. Because the project’s commercial proposition is journey time between the anchor cities, the timetable resolves the conflict in the predictable direction: the stop is retained, and most services are routed past it. This is what the chief executive described on 22 July, and it is a rational operating decision given the design speed.

What it does not resolve is the capital exposure. The station, its platforms and approach works, and whatever alignment concession is required to bring the corridor within reach of Kingston are paid for in full, irrespective of how many trains call. A station served by a minority of services carries close to the full cost of one served by all of them while delivering a fraction of the utility. The frequency a passenger actually experiences — not the presence of a platform — determines whether a station changes travel behaviour.

This is not an argument that Kingston should be excluded. It is an argument that a stop and a useful service are different commitments, and that only the first has been signalled.

The Municipal Record

What Kingston City Council actually resolved

9–2

council vote adopting Resolution 2026-73, as amended

17 February 2026, meeting 2026-06

weekly Kingston stops the deferred VIA express pilot would have removed

September 2025 proposal

2029

end of the development phase, after which the federal government decides whether to proceed

ALTO briefing to council, February 2026

In March 2025, on a motion from the mayor, Kingston City Council voted unanimously to withdraw its support for ALTO. The stated grievance was the change from VIA Rail’s earlier High Frequency Rail proposal, under which Kingston was to have been a regional hub.

On 17 February 2026, council reversed that position. Senior ALTO representatives briefed council that evening, immediately before the vote. Eight delegations spoke to the motion — among them Queen’s University, Kingston Health Sciences Centre, the Downtown Kingston Business Improvement Area, Kingston Accommodation Partners and the Corridor Train Alliance; the minutes record none opposed. A motion to defer consideration to the March meeting was lost 3–8. Resolution 2026-73 then carried as amended, 9–2, with Councillors Glenn and McLaren opposed.

The adopted text is more specific than the public discussion of it has generally been. Its four operative clauses:

Clause 1 — the request

Calls on the federal Minister of Transport to enhance ALTO’s mandate to include the addition of a Kingston stop on the proposed ALTO High-Speed Rail Southern Route between Peterborough and Ottawa.

Clause 2 — the contingency

Expresses support for a southern route contingent upon development along the Highway 401 corridor around the South Frontenac and Kingston region, and provided there is a new stop added that is in Kingston.

Clause 3 — the location request

Requests that the southern route and planned stop be located as close to the urban core of the city as possible.

Clause 4 — the trigger

Resolves that if there is no station in Kingston, council formally opposes the creation of the ALTO southern route as one that would bypass Kingston and offer no benefit to the city or Eastern Ontario.

Clauses 1 and 2 do not describe the same corridor. The first asks the Minister to add a stop to the proposed southern route — the alignment already on the table, which despite its name still passes north of the city, and on which a station would sit roughly 25 to 30 minutes by road from downtown Kingston. The second makes support conditional on a Highway 401 alignment. The 401 contingency entered by amendment (carried 8–3); a second amendment (10–1) softened clause 2’s endorsement of the existing route, and left clause 1 as drafted.

The word “southern” has caused some confusion locally. It describes a route that is southern relative to the Havelock alignment through Peterborough — not one that approaches the lakeshore or the existing rail corridor through Kingston. The practical question for the city is therefore not downtown versus not-downtown. It is whether a Kingston station would be co-located with the existing VIA Rail station, inside the city and inside the existing network, or built new on the far side of it.

That is the inconsistency the two dissenting councillors identified on the night. Their objection was that language open to interpretation would be interpreted by others, and that Kingston risked breaking faith with South Frontenac Township — whose own council had days earlier opposed the line through the township and backed a route through Kingston instead.

“The details do still matter.”Councillor Conny Glenn, on the February motion — reported in The Kingston Whig-Standard, 18 February 2026

Five months later, ALTO can satisfy clause 1 without satisfying clause 2. A probable stop on the existing proposed southern alignment answers the request while leaving the contingency untouched — and nothing said on 22 July distinguishes between them.

What Resolution 2026-73 conditions support on	What the 22 July statement provides
A new stop in Kingston (clauses 1, 2 and 4). Absent one, council formally opposes the southern route.	A station described as probable, three years ahead of the federal decision on whether the project proceeds at all.
Status Signalled, not committed
Development along the Highway 401 corridor around the South Frontenac and Kingston region (clause 2) — the express contingency on which support rests.	Not addressed. The Toronto–Ottawa segment is third in ALTO’s publication queue and has not been released for feedback.
Status Not addressed
Route and stop as close to the urban core as possible (clause 3).	Not addressed. On the currently proposed southern alignment, which passes north of the city, a station would sit some 25 to 30 minutes by road from downtown and outside the existing rail network.
Status Not addressed
Service levels. Not addressed in the resolution, though its recitals rest on Kingston’s established rail demand and on a stop enabling meaningful shifts from passenger vehicles.	Most trains would pass through without stopping. No daily calling frequency has been stated.
Status Unstated on both sides

The resolution was circulated to the Prime Minister, the Minister of Transport, ALTO’s chief executive, area MPs and MPPs, the Mayor of South Frontenac, and the Eastern Ontario Mayors’ and Wardens’ Caucuses. Its conditions are on the record with every party who would need to honour them.

The Other Half of the Equation

A new station is a gain only if the service Kingston has survives

Transport Canada’s 2025–26 estimates record funding to VIA Rail to support the planning and eventual transfer of its Québec City–Windsor corridor passenger services to the private partner. That transfer is stated federal intent, not conjecture. More than 80 per cent of VIA Rail’s revenue and more than 90 per cent of its passengers are in that corridor.

The consequence for Kingston follows directly from ALTO’s own numbers. The project’s ridership forecast depends substantially on diverting existing corridor rail passengers — travellers who, by definition, stop buying VIA tickets. The economics of the Kingston Subdivision would then rest on intermediate-point traffic alone, having lost the end-to-end market that carries them. Either frequencies fall, or subsidy rises, or both. This is an observation about the project’s arithmetic, not an accusation about anyone’s intentions.

The commercial logic has already been demonstrated once

In September 2025, VIA Rail announced a pilot running four daily trains non-stop between Montréal and Toronto, bypassing intermediate Eastern Ontario communities. For Kingston it would have removed 33 weekly stops and the first five morning departures, leaving an 11 a.m. first eastbound train and making same-day travel impractical. Kingston, Belleville and Napanee councils passed motions opposing it. It was postponed on operational constraints with CN — not withdrawn — and VIA stated it would continue pursuing direct Montréal–Toronto service.

The same reasoning, ten months later, from the other operator

What ALTO’s chief executive described on 22 July is the same commercial logic, applied to the same city, by operators whose corridor business is slated to converge under the transfer. Kingston’s downside case is not speculative. It was tabled ten months ago, quantified, and shelved rather than abandoned.

The arithmetic Kingston should be doing is net

A platform served by a minority of ALTO services, combined with a thinned conventional service on the existing line, can leave the city with fewer useful trains than it has today — while being announced as a gain. No party is presently negotiating the second half of that equation, and Resolution 2026-73 does not address it.

The View From a Supporter of the Project

A long-standing advocate for high-speed rail reaches the same conclusions

On 15 July 2026, Transport Action Canada wrote to the Minister of Transport about the Kingston alignment; the letter was published by the organisation’s Ontario division on 22 July — the same day as the chief executive’s remarks. Transport Action Canada describes a decades-long record of advocating for high-speed rail in this corridor and welcomed the federal commitment to build it. Its letter is not an objection to the project. It is a warning about how this station is being contemplated, and its lead condition is that any ALTO stop in Kingston be co-located with the existing VIA Rail station.

Access time cancels the time saving

Transport Action Canada’s position is that any Kingston station must be co-located with, and fully integrated into, the existing VIA Rail network. Sited instead on ALTO’s currently proposed southern alignment — which they put at approximately 25 to 30 minutes by road from downtown Kingston — it would, in their assessment, likely fail to generate the anticipated ridership and modal shift, because the time spent reaching the station negates the journey-time advantage the line exists to deliver.

The net effect on both operators

The same letter states that such a station would divert passengers from VIA Rail, reducing ridership on existing services and increasing VIA Rail’s operating subsidy requirements — what the organisation calls a lose-lose scenario for both services. This is the net-frequency problem set out above, reached independently by an organisation that wants the project delivered.

Existing corridors before new right-of-way

The letter closes on the alignment question directly: of the two existing rights-of-way between Montréal and Toronto, one remains largely suitable for high-speed operation while the other could accommodate redirected freight if track capacity were restored. Every opportunity to use existing corridors, it argues, should be explored before undertaking the cost and disruption of an entirely new right-of-way. The letter also notes that the economic rationale and business case for the selected project — including the long-promised Joint Project Office report — have still not been published.

Read alongside Resolution 2026-73, the letter sharpens what Kingston should be asking for. Council’s condition was a station; the more exacting question is which station — one that joins the network the city already uses, or one that starts a second, thinner network beside it.

The Design Question Underneath

“We cannot stop in all the communities” is a choice, not a constraint

Asked about a possible stop at Smiths Falls, ALTO’s chief executive said VIA Rail remains an option for smaller communities, and that the project cannot serve every community if it is to remain fast and economical.

The first half of that answer describes a two-tier corridor whose lower tier has no identified funder, no committed frequency, and no infrastructure pathway. The communities on that lower tier — Oshawa, Cobourg, Port Hope, Trenton Junction, Belleville, Napanee, Kingston, Gananoque, Brockville, Cornwall, Dorval — have, with one exception, no viable airport. For most, conventional rail is the only intercity connection to healthcare, post-secondary institutions and economic centres.

The second half is presented as a constraint of physics. It is better understood as a consequence of a design choice. The number of communities a corridor can serve is a function of its design speed: the higher the speed, the more costly each stop becomes in schedule terms, and the fewer stops the business case will tolerate. A 300 km/h line is committed to skipping intermediate cities. A 200 km/h line is not.

That is the case for High Performance Passenger Rail as an alternative approach — a lower design speed permitting intermediate communities to be served on the fast network itself, rather than skipped and then handed back to a legacy service whose future funding no one has described. It produces a slower headline journey time between Toronto and Montréal, and a materially better network for the roughly one million people living between them.

Implications for autumn 2026

What could still be settled before the Toronto–Ottawa route is published

ALTO has stated that the Montréal–Ottawa alignment goes to public feedback this autumn, with the Toronto–Ottawa segment to follow. Kingston’s window to convert a signalled station into a specified one closes when that segment is published, not when it is built. The outstanding items divide into two categories.

Within ALTO’s authority to answer now

Whether the 401 contingency is being met Council’s support rests on development along the Highway 401 corridor around the South Frontenac and Kingston region. Confirming whether the segment under study satisfies that condition is a disclosure, not a study.

Station location, co-location and access time Where the station would sit, whether it would be co-located with and integrated into the existing VIA Rail station, and the door-to-door journey time from downtown Kingston.

Daily calling pattern at opening How many services call in each direction, and what commitment exists that the pattern survives timetable optimisation after opening.

Station capital cost and its treatment The cost of the station and its approach works, and how it is carried in the business case.

Requires a federal decision

Conventional service after the corridor transfer What service operates on the existing Kingston Subdivision once corridor operations transfer, at what frequency, funded by whom, and under what protection. This sits with Parliament and the Minister, not with ALTO.

Net frequency guarantee A commitment that a new station is additive to, not substitutive for, existing service — the demand advanced against the September 2025 express pilot, which applies unchanged to the pattern now described for ALTO.

Whether the project proceeds at all The development phase runs to 2029, after which ALTO reports to the federal government and the decision to continue is taken. Every commitment discussed above is made in advance of that decision.

Where things stand · July 2026

Summary ledger

Measured against the conditions Kingston City Council itself set:

Signalled

A new stop in Kingston. Described as probable by ALTO’s chief executive on 22 July 2026. No decision has been confirmed, and the mayor has said as much.

Not addressed

The Highway 401 contingency. Council’s support is expressly conditional on development along the 401 corridor around the South Frontenac and Kingston region. Nothing said on 22 July speaks to alignment.

Not addressed

Proximity to the urban core, and co-location. Whether a Kingston station would join the existing VIA Rail station and network, or be built new outside the city on an alignment passing north of it, determines its catchment, its access time and its ridership. The statement does not distinguish them.

Contradicted

Service frequency. The ridership justification and the express-running plan point in opposite directions. No daily calling pattern has been stated.

Not addressed

Conventional service after the corridor transfer. Frequency, funder and protection all unstated, on a line whose revenue base ALTO’s own forecast is designed to divert.

Not addressed

Net useful services. Whether Kingston has more usable daily trains after opening than before, counting both operators, is the only measure that answers the question residents are actually asking.

Deferred

The project decision itself. The development phase runs to 2029; the federal government decides afterwards whether to proceed.

None of these questions presumes the project fails. Each asks only that the analysis behind the statement be disclosed — and, in the case of the 401 contingency, that a condition Kingston placed on its own support be answered before the Toronto–Ottawa alignment is fixed. Until then, what has been announced is an intention, not a service.

Sources

Primary documents and statements

CBC News, “Kingston probably getting high-speed rail stop, says Alto CEO,” 22 July 2026 — interview with Martin Imbleau, CBC Radio Ottawa Morning. cbc.ca

City of Kingston, Council Meeting Minutes 2026-06, 17 February 2026 — Resolution Number 2026-73, “Support for Alto High Speed Rail Southern Route, as Amended,” carried as amended 9–2; amendment votes 8–3 and 10–1; deferral motion lost 3–8; ALTO briefing and delegations recorded. cityofkingston.ca

Elliot Ferguson, “Kingston city council supports a southern high-speed rail route,” The Kingston Whig-Standard, 18 February 2026 — contemporaneous report of the council debate and the dissenting councillors’ objections. thewhig.com

Christena Lawrie, “Council votes to withdraw support for federal high speed rail project,” CFRC / Local Journalism Initiative, 13 March 2025 — unanimous withdrawal of support, and the regional hub commitment under the earlier High Frequency Rail proposal. cfrc.ca

Kingstonist, “South Frontenac says no to high-speed rail line through township,” February 2026. kingstonist.com

Transport Canada (2025–26). Supplementary Estimates: High-Speed Rail Initiative — funding to VIA Rail supporting the planning and eventual transfer of Québec City–Windsor corridor services to the private partner. tc.canada.ca

Transport Action Canada, “VIA Rail launches Montréal–Toronto express trains but cuts service to lakeshore cities,” September 2025. transportaction.ca

CBC News, “Via Montreal–Toronto pilot that skipped eastern Ontario postponed,” 29 September 2025. cbc.ca

Kingstonist, “Pilot Pains: VIA Rail insists Kingston will remain among ‘best served’ cities in country,” 31 October 2025 — Belleville and Napanee council motions. kingstonist.com

11.

Tariq Khan, President, Transport Action Canada — letter to the Honourable Steven MacKinnon, Minister of Transport, “Re: Alto Kingston Alignment,” 15 July 2026. Published by Transport Action Ontario as “General Support for Alto Kingston Alignment, but Concerns Exist,” 22 July 2026. ontario.transportaction.ca letter (PDF)

July 23, 2026

Development ethics for Alto
Guest Submission · Development Ethics

Development Ethics for Alto

Brief to the Alto online public consultation

JD

Jay Drydyk

Professor Emeritus, Carleton University
Past President, International Development Ethics Association

Publisher’s Note

The ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative is pleased to publish this guest brief with the author’s permission. It is reproduced as written; the analysis, rankings, and recommendations are Dr. Drydyk’s own. Footnotes appear as endnotes at the foot of the page.

Contents

1The contractor and the public

2Good development vs. maldevelopment

3Public interest, public need

4Landowner impact

5Community impacts

6Indigenous peoples’ consent

7Environmental impact

8Ranking the options

9Recommendations to the Government of Canada

10Recommendations to Alto
Section 1

The contractor and the public

Suppose our roof is damaged, and we are restricted by our bank to dealing with only one contractor for the repair. The contractor tells us there are two options, A and B, both of which are risky and expensive. Then we find out there is a third option, which is not so risky or expensive. The contractor has not only concealed this from us but now refuses to talk about it.

Is this an ethically acceptable way of doing business? No, it seems to violate basic values of honesty and transparency.

By analogy, this seems to be how Alto has tried to do business with us as a public. The roof is our broken inter-city transportation system. The two expensive and risky options are two new high-speed rail [HSR] corridors put forward in the Alto project proposal of 2025-26. What I will call the ‘northern Shield corridor’ lies north of Highway 7, and what I will call the ‘Frontenac/Napanee corridor’ lies south of Highway 7. Farther south another corridor already exists, along the CN right of way and Highway 401. This third, most southerly corridor is the one that Alto is reluctant to discuss.¹

To put this in another way, the imaginary contractor and the real agents of Alto are both selling their solutions with logical fallacies. The contractor tells us: you need to fix your roof, so you need my options A or B. Alto: you need to fix your broken transportation system, so you need a new transportation corridor. Neither argument follows, because in each case there is a third option.

Section 2

Good development vs. maldevelopment

Some development is worthwhile, but some is quite undesirable; this is an ethical difference, based on values, and with 80 years of post-WWII experience we know a lot about what these values are. Worthwhile development not only produces more, it also enhances people’s well-being and freedom, so that they are better able to shape their own lives for the better; it also does so equitably and sustainably. These are the pillars of what has been identified as a worthwhile ‘human development’ approach by the influential economist Mahbub ul Haq in collaboration with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.²

Meanwhile, other development researchers have studied what these broad values require in practice in cases of development projects (like Alto) that involve land-taking.³ Some guidance can be found in national legal systems, in international human rights law, and in operational policies of international financial institutions. Yet the evidence shows that ‘even when all three approaches are applied consistently, outcomes … are generally still poor’, impacting negatively on the livelihoods and well-being of people affected.⁴ A recent synthesis of this research has formulated six guiding principles to fill these gaps. Three of these are most significant for the Alto proposal:

2. Fair procedures: promote inclusive decision-making through a fair and transparent procedure from the outset and throughout the lifecycle of the project;

3. Fair distribution: ensure a fair distribution of impacts and benefits and align with the Sustainable Development Goals;

6. Remedy and accountability: ensure remedy and accountability through access to grievance redress mechanisms, remediation and legal recourse.⁵

These values and principles help to distinguish between good development and maldevelopment in five dimensions of the Alto proposal: public interest, landowner impact, community impact, environmental impact, and Indigenous peoples’ consent.

Section 3

Public interest, public need

Development ethics tells us that people should not be displaced and land should not be taken for development except for projects that are in the public interest.⁶ What does ‘public interest’ mean here? It means that the gains or advantages created by the project are not entirely private gains, that very significant gains accrue to us as a public. An important standard of public interest is public need. Building schools and hospitals involves land-taking, by which some residents may be displaced, and yet there is great gain to the public, in having schools and hospitals, simply because schools and hospitals are things we need, as a public. This does not entail that building a particular school in a particular place is the best way to meet this need, but it does give very strong reason for building some such school where it is most needed.

The term ‘high-speed rail’ has been used with different meanings in recent discussions, and so I want to be clear that what I will mean is rail service with maximum speeds faster than 200km/hr. This range corresponds with the definition of HSR by the International Union of Railways.⁷ This range includes what Alto means by ‘high-speed’, which is faster than 300km/hr, but it also includes speeds in the 200 range. Unlike the Alto definition (>300km/hr), the broader UIC definition captures the majority of high-speed rail services currently offered in Japan and Europe.⁸

There is a strong case that high-speed rail, in this sense, is a public need in Ontario and Québec. According to this argument, HSR is needed to shift people’s choices in the Ontario-Québec corridor from airplanes, cars, and buses to trains. This is needed for two main reasons. First, continued reliance on cars, buses, and airplanes, for generations to come, has an unacceptable carbon footprint, which will contribute to ever greater loss of life, property, homes, and habitats through climate change. Second, continued reliance on cars, buses, and airplanes imposes a drag on economic productivity, putting downward pressure on livelihoods and well-being throughout the economy. For these two reasons, it is argued, we have a long-term need to change the mode of inter-city transport in this corridor, and, to achieve this we have a long-term public need for high-speed rail.⁹

However, this does not determine where and how HSR should be built – with one exception. Building HSR stations at locations removed from city centres defeats the purpose of HSR (for travelers) by adding commuting time to reach the stations.¹⁰ As to where and how HSR is built, public benefit is only one value that matters: we also have equity/fairness/justice and sustainability to consider. There are equity issues pertaining to landowners, communities, and Indigenous peoples, which I will consider in the next three sections; environmental values will be considered in section 7. All of these raise further issues of accountability.

Section 4

Landowner impact

When we notice unfairness or injustice, we are perceiving some kind of deprivation as being wrong. Even if a development project meets public needs and creates public benefits, our intuitive sense of justice will object if the project imposes unwarranted burdens and harms on others. It remains true for cooking that, ‘If you want make an omelet you have to break some eggs,’ – but not as a metaphor excusing harmful development. Thus it is widely accepted that development projects should not make people worse off, either by displacing them from their land, or through other community impacts.¹¹

Paying people market value for the land that is taken from them may still leave them worse off. One reason is the impact of land-taking on livelihoods. When his land was assessed for compensation by an oil pipeline project, a Ugandan farmer remarked, ‘I had 10 mango trees where I used to make a lot of money every season and look after 11 dependents, we got only 670,000 [shillings] … they didn’t think about the capital value required to plant new trees and how many years it would take us to start harvesting fruits again.’¹² The Alto project does not threaten any mango trees in Eastern Ontario, but it does threaten to impact livelihoods by dividing farms. It may be possible to mitigate these effects, but it would be complicated: organizing and paying for land swaps so that each farm is made whole by other land on the same side of the fenced-off right of way. One challenge of land replacement strategies like these is to ensure that the replacement land is of as good quality as the land lost. If this is not possible, compensation for lost revenue/livelihood would require revenue sharing plans on the part of the project.

The Ontario Federation of Agriculture has stated:

It is not acceptable for any railway to divide properties and thereby “landlock” the interior of the lot. Any crossing must be at least 10 metres wide to allow large and irregularly shaped farm and forestry equipment to be conveyed safely across the railway. Over- and underpasses must be engineered to accommodate the weight, height, and width of not only today’s farm and forestry equipment but also what machines may be used in the future. Crossings must also be engineered to prevent equipment rollovers. Alto must also preserve drainage system functionality and not adversely affect natural drainage systems.

Alto has stated that the entirety of the railway corridor will be fenced. Alto must consult on the fencing design to ensure farm animals cannot stray onto the tracks, as some farm animals have special fencing needs.

In addition, Transport Canada and Alto must provide fair and proportionate compensation for other negative affections caused by the railway, which will permanently affect farm production and limit growth potential.¹³

The issue here is equity: if these effects are not fully mitigated and/or compensated, the farmers will bear special burdens for the building of high-speed rail – as if an arbitrary high-speed rail tax were imposed upon farmers on whose land track was laid.

Currently no accountability mechanisms have been established to ensure that such mitigations and compensations are carried out, and to which landowners can seek recourse in case mitigation and compensation are not carried out. Government has an ethical obligation to establish such mechanisms before making a final investment decision.

Section 5

Community impacts

According to Alto:

High-speed rail is one of the world’s safest modes of intercity transportation. This partly stems from the fact that its tracks are physically separate from regular road traffic. There are no crossings connecting roadways and the tracks, thereby minimizing the risk of collisions. In addition, the high-speed rail network’s right-of-way is completely fenced in. Elevated tracks and tunnels mean the trains can cross entire cities without interacting with other road vehicles or trains.¹⁴

However, this same railway separation also has other consequences for human security. Limited overpass/underpass crossings may increase distances and times for fire and ambulance services, potentially causing fatal delays.¹⁵ These security gaps can be mitigated by careful planning of overpasses and underpasses; mitigation plans should be agreed with the municipalities responsible for delivering these services. Best practices of high-speed rail systems in other countries should be followed.

Once again accountability is a problem. To date no accountability mechanisms have been established to ensure agreement and planning for timely fire and emergency health services after Alto rail lines have been built and separated from roadways. Nor is there any body to which municipalities can seek recourse in case such agreement and planning do not occur, or in case agreements are not fulfilled. Government has an ethical obligation to establish such mechanisms before making a final investment decision.

If the Frontenac/Napanee or northern shield corridors are chosen for HSR, existing VIA service will be impacted by service cuts as longer-distance travellers shift to HSR. At present Kingston is the fifth-busiest passenger train station in the country. There is a public need to maintain viable service for these passengers and others from stations along the existing VIA corridor. Moreover, community impacts from Alto would reach far beyond eastern Ontario. If 80% of VIA revenue currently comes from passengers travelling in the Windsor-Québec corridor, and much of this is diverted to Cadence as operator of HSR between Toronto and Québec, much less will be available to support other major VIA trains, such as: Montréal-Halifax (‘The Ocean’); Toronto-Vancouver (‘The Canadian’); Winnipeg-Churchill; Jasper-Prince Rupert; Sudbury-White River; Montréal-Jonquière/Senneterre. Allowing these train services to be degraded or discontinued would constitute a clear neglect of public interest. Accordingly, the Alto HSR Citizens Research Initiative has called for two immediate legislative responses:

Statutory Service Guarantee for the Kingston SubdivisionAny federal legislation enabling ALTO must include a statutory charter guaranteeing minimum VIA Rail service levels on the Kingston Subdivision. The charter must specify minimum daily frequencies, protect morning and evening service windows, and require public consultation before schedule changes affecting intermediate communities.

Dedicated, Legislated Funding for the National Rail NetworkParliament must establish a dedicated funding stream for VIA Rail’s non-corridor network — The Ocean, The Canadian, and remote services — entirely independent of corridor revenue that will transfer to Cadence. This fund must be protected as a condition of any ALTO implementation agreement.¹⁶

The appropriate timing for such legislative action would be as close as possible to the final investment decision on the Alto project.

Section 6

Indigenous peoples’ consent

Alto has stated, ‘We are committed to engaging in meaningful consultations with the aim of securing the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), of potentially impacted communities.’¹⁷ The phrasing is ambiguous. Are they committed to achieving FPIC, or only to holding ‘meaningful consultations with the aim’ of doing so? The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is unambiguous on this point.

Article 322. States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utilization or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources.¹⁸

Meaningful consultation is not the end; it is only a means to achieving ‘free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources’.

The earlier High Frequency Rail project which preceded Alto included consultation with ‘more than 40 potentially impacted Indigenous communities and organizations’.¹⁹ However, that consultation focused entirely on supplementing the Request for Proposals with provisions for Indigenous social benefits and participation. There was no mention of consent with regard to impact on Indigenous territory; in any case, the Request for Proposals for HFR has been superseded by the Alto HSR proposal awarded to Cadence, now in co-development phase. Site selection and alignment have not yet been specified by Alto and Cadence. At the present time it is unclear whether any discussions have been undertaken with the Mohawk of the Bay of Quinte in Ontario or the Mohawk of Kanesatake in Quebec about use of or impact on their territories. Nor is there any evidence of commitment to recourse or accountability mechanisms for benefit/land/participation commitments that will be made to them.

Section 7

Environmental Impact

For the route through the Frontenac Arch and Napanee Plain, environmental risks are significant. For the northern route largely over Canadian Shield, risks are less clear. For the southernmost corridor, environmental risks have already been incurred by the CN right of way and Highway 401; one would expect additional risks from HSR to be small by comparison. Doing nothing to shift travelers over to rail also incurs the environmental risks incurred by flying and driving, notably contributions to climate change. The difficult question is actually the normative question: which risks must be avoided? If worthwhile development is environmentally sustainable, then the answer is that we must avoid risks that are unsustainable, and this shifts the question to: what are the meaning and standards for sustainability?

While precise answers to these normative questions are elusive, two broad ways of framing them have emerged over the past forty years to provide starting points for public deliberation about environmental risks. The 1987 Brundtland Commission proposed that development is sustainable when it meets the needs of present generations without jeopardizing the needs of future generations.²⁰ More recently, the UNDP Human Development Report of 2020 called for steering development to ease the ‘planetary pressures’ that historical and contemporary social and economic development unleash.²¹ The main idea here is that development puts pressures on the planet, and the planet pushes back in ways that make present and future human flourishing more uncertain. At the extreme:

Climate change and biodiversity integrity loss are tightly coupled core boundaries, and human activities are currently pushing both of them into a high-risk zone. If humanity breaches planetary boundaries too far or for too long, it may disrupt planetary life support systems, with substantial risks for human life as we know it.²²

The HSR corridor over part of the Frontenac Arch will also traverse an adjoining limestone plain surrounding the Napanee and Salmon Rivers. Under the limestone plain is found karst geology, featuring sinkholes, fissures, caves, and disappearing streams; above it are rare alvar ecosystems based on terrain with thin or no soil cover. These ecosystems harbour several species protected by the Species at Risk Act; it is doubtful that Alto could show that its construction can meet requirements of this Act. Construction would also affect subsurface water flows in unpredictable ways, possibly damaging freshwater access and use downstream. For other ecosystems in other places it may be possible to mitigate environmental impacts of HSR, as for example best practice standards have evolved in Europe for protecting essential pathways for migratory species. If such mitigation strategies can succeed for a CN/401 corridor, or for a northern shield corridor, they must be planned, budgeted, and carried out. However, in the Frontenac Arch and Napanee Plain these particular mitigation strategies may be of no use, due to the combination of karst geology below and alvar ecosystems above. Since biodiversity and freshwater access are two dimensions in which there are planetary boundaries, it follows that, in this corridor, an HSR line would be adding to planetary pressures rather than reducing them. Building HSR in the Frontenac/Napanee corridor, then, qualifies as environmental maldevelopment.²³

In the northern Shield corridor, biodiversity and freshwater impacts may be less pronounced and more amenable to mitigation. The HSR line and its construction are less likely to disrupt water flow in this corridor, where streams run parallel to rail alignment. The line would disrupt movement by larger mammals such as moose, elk, and bear, but these are not species at risk. More research is needed to determine what kinds of mitigation are required; international evidence suggests that there are few types of overpass that large mammals will actually use, and these are quite expensive.²⁴ Effects on other species also requires further study and assessment. A clear standard for wildlife mitigation, with accountability mechanisms, is needed to ensure that adequate mitigation measures are chosen and implemented.

Section 8

Ranking the options: from morally worst to not so bad

These two frameworks – future generations and planetary pressures – can help to orient discussion of environmental and social impacts in ethical, value-based terms. We can consider what will be the result of rolling out the various HSR options over multiple future generations. How will these decisions now affect planetary pressures exerted by humans then? Is it possible to assess or at least imagine how much closer to or in excess of planetary boundaries we get, in each scenario? In light of this, we can rank those options, as to how comparatively undesirable they are, from a development ethics perspective.

The following rankings are only illustrative, expressing my own moral assessment, based on reasons for concern that I am aware of at the present time. This illustration, however, does have a point, namely that it is plausible and powerful to rank the options before us in terms of their enduring impact both to enhance human well-being and to reduce the dangerous pressures we are placing upon the planetary systems that sustain us. What we need, I conclude, is a public deliberation to make such a ranking.

1

Status quo.If there is no replacement for current VIA Rail levels of service, travelers will continue to be shunted into cars, buses, and airplanes to travel between Québec, Montréal, Ottawa, and Toronto (and indeed London and Windsor). The carbon footprint for this travel will grow apace. There being no other proposals on the horizon to compensate, I conclude that continuation of the status quo on VIA Rail will mean continued contribution to the death, illness, and destruction of property and habitats that result from carbon-induced climate change.

2

Frontenac/Napanee corridor, without mitigation.Mitigation for landowners and community safety are feasible and morally mandatory; however, for the sake of ranking consider the possibility that it is not carried out, so we have: unnecessary and inequitable loss to livelihoods and human security. In that respect, this option ranks worse than the following one:

3

Frontenac/Napanee corridor, with human/community mitigation.Well-being and equity issues in the previous option are removed, but, on the environmental side, ecological mitigation seems unlikely. Over many generations, then, the effects we can anticipate from HSR include (a) expansion of human well-being; (b) reduction in the particular pressures imposed by the carbon footprint of travel between Windsor and Québec; but (c) significantly increased planetary pressures both on biodiversity and on freshwater access.

4

Northern Canadian Shield corridor, without mitigation.Although much of this territory is more remote, there are still roads, tracks, and migratory paths that can be cut off by HSR fencing. Human security and wildlife migration will still be impacted unless mitigation measures are adopted.

5

Northern Canadian Shield corridor, with mitigation.With landowner and community mitigation, inequitable losses are reduced, so that we can anticipate (a) expansion of human well-being, along with (b) reduction in the particular pressures imposed by the carbon footprint of travel between Windsor and Québec; (c) with mitigation it may be possible to avoid increasing planetary pressures on biodiversity, but this is not perfectly clear, either; (d) adverse impacts on fresh water are less likely. Rolling this forward over multiple generations, we want to ensure monitoring for unforeseen environmental problems. This could be addressed by establishing capability in each region affected by HSR for ongoing environmental monitoring, funded by revenue sharing from operation of HSR service.

6

Southern CN/401 corridor, without mitigation.Because this corridor already exists, one might expect fewer new adverse impacts. However, without mitigation, mandatory grade separation and fencing will adversely affect humans and other species alike, which makes this option worse than the final one.

7

Southern CN/401 corridor, with mitigationfor community and wildlife impacts to highest standards of European/Asian HSR, with further direction from the environmental assessment. With landowner and community mitigation, inequitable losses are reduced, so that we can anticipate (a) expansion of human well-being. In addition, the problem of depriving service to Kingston is avoided. Over future generations we can also expect (b) reduction in the particular pressures imposed by the carbon footprint of travel between Windsor and Québec. Following best European/Asian practices, modified by site-specific environmental assessment, (c) with mitigation it may be possible to avoid increasing planetary pressures on biodiversity as well as (d) impacts on fresh water. Still, rolling this forward over multiple generations, we want to ensure monitoring for unforeseen environmental problems by establishing, in each affected region, capability for ongoing environmental monitoring, funded by revenue sharing from HSR operation.

The worst option, according to this, is the status quo. Doing nothing now about intercity travel has the worst impact on well-being and planetary pressures for future generations. The Frontenac/Napanee options are not much better. An independent public panel, I believe, would confirm these rankings and could also shed more light on the others.

Section 9

Recommendations to the Government of Canada

1

Make corridor proposals public, including the CN/401 corridor. Immediately require Alto to develop and make public feasible alignment plans for (a) the CN/401 corridor, along with any alignment plans under active consideration for (b) the northern Canadian Shield corridor; and (c) the Frontenac/Napanee corridor. Require each of these plans to include cost estimates for wildlife and road crossings at high international standards, for land replacement to maintain farm viability, and for revenue sharing to fund ongoing monitoring of environmental impacts.

2

Make corridor choice a public choice. Prior to Final Investment Decision, appoint an independent public panel to recommend choice between corridor proposals (including the status quo), (a) on grounds of public interest, community impact, and environmental impacts/pressures; (b) considering these impacts for several generations (c) with powers to modify any proposals submitted, and (d) with a mandate to recommend mechanisms of recourse and accountability.

3

Obtain Indigenous peoples’ consent. Prior to Final Investment Decision, ensure that free and informed consent to impacts on their lands has been given by affected Indigenous peoples, along with mechanisms of recourse and accountability for community and environmental impacts on those lands as well as for commitments to Indigenous participation and community benefits.

4

Establish accountability mechanisms and environmental monitoring. Withhold Final Investment Decision until mechanisms of recourse and accountability have been established to support commitments for (a) landowners, (b) communities, (c) wildlife impacts, and (d) Indigenous communities. Do not invest in an HSR proposal that does not allocate revenue in the operational phase for ongoing regionally-controlled environmental monitoring.

5

Protect VIA Rail with legislation and funding. Establish service levels and funding streams for regional service along the Windsor-Montreal corridor and for VIA Rail’s non-corridor network – The Ocean, The Canadian, and remote services.

Section 10

Recommendations to Alto

A1

Corridor proposals. From the perspective of development ethics, corridor choice is not yours to make; this is properly a public choice. Accordingly, you are obligated to prepare development options for all of the feasible HSR corridors, to facilitate public choice among them.

A2

Request and obtain Indigenous people’s consent. Ensure that free and informed consent to impacts on their lands has been given by affected Indigenous peoples.

A3

Negotiate livelihood replacement. In negotiating with landowners, ensure that compensation covers livelihood replacement (including, for farmers, drainage and access to fields), including revenue sharing if necessary.

A4

Negotiate revenue sharing for ongoing regionally-controlled environmental monitoring during the operational phase.

A5

Negotiate mechanisms of recourse and accountability to support commitments made for (a) landowners, (b) communities, (c) wildlife impacts and environmental monitoring, and (d) Indigenous communities.

References

Notes

1
ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, How History Led Us Here, March 2026, citizenresearch.ca/how-history-led-us-here, and Where We Stand on the Route, altohsrcitizenresearch.ca, accessed April 9, 2026.

2
Mahbub ul Haq, Reflections on Human Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

3
Peter Penz, Jay Drydyk, and Pablo Bose, Displacement by Development: Ethics, Rights, and Responsibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

4
Smyth, Eddie, Susanna Price, and Frank Vanclay, ‘Fair and Equitable Land Access (FELA) by Development Projects: Enhancing Governance for Sustainable Development Outcomes When Projects Displace People,’ (Sustainable Development 2025, p. 3.

5
Ibid.

6
Penz, Drydyk, and Bose 2011, p. 211.

7
Union Internationale des Chemins de fer (UIC), ‘The Definition of High Speed Rail’ (UIC Communications: 2018). Accessed April 13, 2026. uic.org.

8
Wikipedia, ‘High-Speed Rail in Europe’ (March 31, 2026) en.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia, ‘Shinkansen’ (March 14, 2026) en.wikipedia.org.

9
While I find that this argument is sound, it is only fair to note that others disagree. The core argument I have outlined is supplemented with other lines of argument in Alto’s ‘Fast Forward’ document (Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.), ‘Fast Forward: Shaping Canada’s Future with a High-Speed Rail Network’ (March 2025) altotrain.ca) For opposing arguments see Tasnim Fariha, and David Jones, ‘High-Speed Potential, High-Stakes Decisions: The Policy Case for Alto’ (C.D. Howe Institute, December 11, 2025) cdhowe.org, Jerome Gessaroli, ‘Canada’s next Budget Bomb Is the Alto High-Speed Rail Project’ (Macdonald-Laurier Institute, January 14, 2026.) macdonaldlaurier.ca. The Citizens Research Initiative argues for upgrading the status quo to a ‘High Performance Rail’ system with top speeds not exceeding 200km/hr. (Where we Stand on the Route, op. cit.) For arguments that raise complications rather than expressing outright opposition, see also: Johnny Renton, ‘The Good, Bad and Awful of the Alto High Speed Rail Project, and How to Fix the Flaws and Concerns Surrounding It.’ (Substack: Next Stop, Downtown Canada, February 4, 2026) johnnyrenton.substack.com; Kathryn Smith Exon and Egon Terplan. ‘Keeping High-Speed Rail on Track: Learning from Other North American Projects’ (Toronto: School of Cities, June 6, 2025) schoolofcities.utoronto.ca; and Michael Schabas, ‘Alto Conceptual Design and Business Case” (January 12, 2026) available on Google Docs, Google Docs.

10
ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, The Station Location Problem (2026) citizenresearch.ca/station-location.

11
Penz, Drydyk, and Bose, Chapter 7.

12
Nassir Mwanje, ‘Community Perceptions of Fair Compensation in Land Expropriation: Insights from Uganda through a Capability Approach’ (Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, forthcoming).

13
Ontario Federation of Agriculture, ‘High-Speed Rail’ (2026) ofa.on.ca/issues/high-speed-rail.

14
Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.), Advanced Engineering Driving High-Speed Rail (February 19, 2026) altotrain.ca.

15
ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, Fire Services – Citizen Research (March 2026) citizenresearch.ca/fire-services, and Healthcare Access – Citizen Research (March 2026) citizenresearch.ca/healthcare-access.

16
ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, ‘VIA Rail on the Kingston Subdivision: Service Erosion, Funding Collapse, and the National Rail Risk from ALTO HSR’ (April 2026) citizenresearch.ca/via-future.

17
Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.), ‘Building Together: Indigenous Partnerships in Alto’s Vision’ altotrain.ca.

18
United Nations, Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (General Assembly, 2007) un.org

19
Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.). What We Heard & What We’re Doing Report. 2023. altotrain.ca.

20
World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

21
The ‘planetary pressures’ framework is based on several decades of ‘planetary boundaries’ research. To simplify: the core idea is that there are nine specific dimensions of planetary change that range from low risk to growing risk to high risk for human flourishing. Among these, ozone depletion, climate change, biodiversity, ocean acidification, land use change, and freshwater use are most familiar in the public sphere. A good entry point into the literature is Human Development Report 2020: The Next Frontier; Human Development and the Anthropocene, Chapter 2, ‘Unprecedented – The Scope, Scale and Speed of Human Pressures on the Planet’ (New York: UNDP, 2020), pp. 45-68.

22
UNDP op. cit., p. 51.

23
See Andrew Hyett, How Hydrology Shapes the Design – and Cost – of High-Speed Rail (March 2026) citizenresearch.ca, and the following publications by ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative (2026): Potential Effects of High-Speed Rail on the Napanee River citizenresearch.ca/napanee-river-2; A River in the Path of Two Rail Corridors citizenresearch.ca/salmon-river;

24
See Hyett op. cit. and two other publications of ALTO HSR Citizen Research Imitative (2026): The Wildlife Crossing Problem citizenresearch.ca/wildlife-crossings; Wildlife Connectivity, Hunting Heritage, and Game Species Habitat: Impacts of the Proposed ALTO High-Speed Rail Corridors citizenresearch.ca.

Guest submission by Jay Drydyk, Professor Emeritus, Carleton University · Published by the ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · citizenresearch.ca
Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.
July 17, 2026

A friendly witness

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Research Brief

A Friendly Witness

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

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

Critical Finding

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

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

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A Friendly Witness — Full Brief (PDF)

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

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The Endorsement

An endorsement built on a poll, not a case

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

recommendations in Trajectoire’s memoir

memoir summary of recommendations

~0.07

ALTO benefit–cost ratio, central estimate

Initiative reference-class analysis

43 → 54

community friction, before → after the consultation

Initiative friction index

Recommendation by Recommendation

Nine recommendations, measured against the design

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

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

The Pattern

A supportive submission describes a different train

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

The recommendations describe high-frequency rail

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

Even the friendly witness describes the gaps

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

Structural, not merely contingent

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

Where Things Stand · July 2026

Summary ledger

In summary, against the recommendations in the memoir:

Open

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

Not met

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

Not met

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

Not met

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

Not met

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

Not met

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

Not met

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

Not met

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

Not met

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

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

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A Friendly Witness (PDF)

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

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The submission assessed

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

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

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Note de recherche

Un témoin bienveillant

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

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

Constat essentiel

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

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

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Un témoin bienveillant — note complète (PDF)

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

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L’appui

Un appui fondé sur un sondage, non sur un argumentaire

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

recommandations dans le mémoire de Trajectoire

sommaire des recommandations

~0,07

ratio avantages-coûts d’ALTO, estimation centrale

analyse sur classe de référence de l’Initiative

43 → 54

friction communautaire, avant → après la consultation

indice de friction de l’Initiative

Recommandation par recommandation

Neuf recommandations, mesurées à la conception

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

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

Le motif

Un mémoire favorable décrit un autre train

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

Les recommandations décrivent un train à grande fréquence

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

Même le témoin bienveillant décrit les lacunes

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

Structurel, non simplement contingent

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

Où en sommes-nous · juillet 2026

Bilan récapitulatif

En résumé, au regard des recommandations du mémoire :

Indéterminé

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

Non satisfait

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

Non satisfait

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

Non satisfait

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

Non satisfait

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

Non satisfait

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

Non satisfait

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

Non satisfait

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

Non satisfait

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

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

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Un témoin bienveillant (PDF)

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

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Source

Le mémoire évalué

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

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

July 11, 2026

The Stations that aren’t there

The Stations That Aren’t There

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

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

⚠ A short list of city stops

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

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

Critical Finding

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

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

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

The Market

A large market, already on the road

1 in 3

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

StatCan National Travel Survey

~14%

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

StatCan National Travel Survey

~$200M

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

Initiative scenario

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

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

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

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

The Geography

Where the leisure map meets the line

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

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

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

The Mechanism

An express spine concentrates; it does not distribute

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

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

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

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

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

The comparison is both-and, not either-or

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

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

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

The Estimate

A transparent scenario, not a forecast

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

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

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

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

The Reference Class

Integration is the unlock — the Swiss test

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

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

The Condition

The benefit is conditional, and the brief says so

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

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

Where things stand · July 2026

Summary ledger

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

Overlooked

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

Bypassed

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

Adverse

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

Available

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

Conditional

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

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

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The Stations That Aren’t There (PDF)

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

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Sources

Documents and data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 10, 2026

Undressing the addressable market

Technical Brief · Corridor Demand

Undressing the Addressable Market

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

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

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

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

Key Finding

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

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

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Undressing the Addressable Market — Full Brief (PDF)

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

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The Claim

Alto’s demand case, in its own words

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

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

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

What the Evidence Shows

Six findings

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

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

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

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

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

The 95-million figure itself is unsourced

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

The demand-growth story reverses the per-capita trend

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

The population base is the pre-cap one

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

The one comparator offered is a best case

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

Method 1 · Reference Class

What comparable corridors actually carry

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

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

Methods 2 & 3 · The Three Markets

Demand, counted not modelled

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

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

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

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

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

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

Method 4 · The Population Basis

The 6.3-million deficit

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

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

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

Triangulation

Where Alto’s target sits against every independent forecast

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

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

The Claim, Audited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendation

Three things follow

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

Release the demand model for independent audit

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

Adjust toward the reference class and current population

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

Size the corridor decision to the audited demand

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

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Undressing the Addressable Market (PDF)

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

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Sources

Primary documents and data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 7, 2026

The more you look

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

The More You Look, the Worse It Gets

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

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

⚠ The bottom line, up front

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

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

In one minute

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

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

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

Read the full report

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

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

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How we know

Thirty studies. Same questions. Fifty-six years.

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

major studies of this railway, read into one matrix

1970–2026

questions asked of every single study

so the answers compare

years of studies, all priced in today’s dollars

a level playing field

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

What we found

Nine things every reader should know

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

1The answer depends on who paid for the study

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

2It has never paid for itself. Not once.

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

3The closer you look, the more it costs

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

4The ridership numbers don’t hold up

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

5The freight idea is good — with one catch

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

6Going faster barely helps

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

7We’ve seen this financing risk before

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

8The climate math only counts the good half

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

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

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

The gap, side by side

What the promoters say vs. what independent studies find

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

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

Ridership

Same railway. Forecasts from 6 million to 56 million.

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

~10M

independent, survey-based forecast for 2050

McGill, 2026

24–43M

the proponent’s own forecast

ALTO prospectus, 2025

42–56M

the highest numbers ever produced for this line

2026 advocacy paper

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

Study (year)

Who produced it

Yearly riders

Basis

Air Canada / CP (1993)

Airline / railway

5.8 M

the low end of the record

Task Force (1991)

Governments

7.8 M

full corridor

Tri-government (1995)

Governments

10–12 M

full corridor

EcoTrain (2011)

Governments

10–11 M

full corridor

Lynx (1998)

Private consortium

11.1 M

Québec City–Toronto

SNCF (2010)

Equipment maker

up to 22.5 M

best-case scenario

ALTO prospectus (2025)

Proponent

24–43 M

full network

Advocacy paper (2026)

Paid advocacy

42–56 M

the highest ever

McGill (2026)

Independent

~10 M

survey-based, 2050

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

What it means

Five takeaways

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

What the record points to

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

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

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

What to insist on

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

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

The evidence

All thirty studies, at a glance

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

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

Year

Study — who did it

Independent of the builder?

Verdict

1970

Intercity Passenger Transport Study — CTC

Federal

Upgrade

1984

High-Speed Passenger Rail in Canada — VIA

Crown corp

Mixed

1990

Review of Previous Studies — TRANSURB

Consultant

Wait

1990

A Pragmatic Approach (SPRINTOR) — ABB

Equipment maker

Upgrade

1990

The Canadian TGV Project — Bombardier / GEC Alsthom

Equipment maker

Build new

1991

Rapid Train Task Force — Ontario / Québec

Governments

Wait

1991

Competition in Rail Carriage — Berkowitz

Academic

Build new

1992

FAST TRACKS — VIA (advocacy)

Crown corp

Build new

1993

HST Market Assessment — Air Canada / CP

Airline / railway

Upgrade

1994

Demand-model re-estimate — Gaudry & Le Leyzour

Academic

No verdict

1995

Industrial Strategy (Vol II) — Simpson-Guerin

Consultant

No verdict

1995

Routing & Costing Study — SNC-Lavalin / Delcan

Consultant

No verdict

1995

Québec–Ontario HSR, Final Report — tri-gov

Governments

Wait

1998

The Lynx Proposal — Lynx consortium

Private consortium

Build new

2002

VIAFast — VIA Rail

Crown corp

Upgrade

2003

VIAFast validation — IBI for Transport Canada

Gov’t reviewer

No verdict

2009

Infrastructure and the Economy — Martin Prosperity Inst.

Academic

Build new

2010

Socio-Economic Study of HSR — SNCF

Equipment maker

Build new

2011

Updated Feasibility (EcoTrain) — tri-government

Governments

Wait

2014

Toronto–Kitchener–London HSR — Schabas

Consultant

Build new

2015

Future of Passenger Rail — Library of Parliament

Parliament / indep.

Upgrade

2016

Preliminary Business Case — SDG (Steer)

Consultant

Build new

2016

High Speed Rail in Ontario — Special Advisor

Provincial

Build new

2021

Toronto–Montreal Analysis — Munk School

Academic

Build new

2022

Speed and Frequency — Alstom

Equipment maker

Build new

2025

All Aboard — C.D. Howe Institute

Advocacy

Build new

2025

Fast Forward — ALTO (the proponent)

Proponent

Build new

2026

Conceptual Design & Business Case — Schabas

Advocacy

Build new

2026

Corridorwide Survey & Financial Analysis — McGill

Academic

No verdict

2026

Eastern Ontario Route (Hwy 401) — Schabas & Antinucci

Advocacy

Build new

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

The independent studies to trust

Where the sober numbers come from

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 6, 2026

Freight and the Vanishing train

The Freight Dividend and the Vanishing Train

Alto’s own freight report builds its economic case on removing passenger trains from the shared Toronto–Montreal corridor — the same line VIA Rail runs through Eastern Ontario.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Research Brief · June 2026

⚠ Companion to “VIA Rail on the Kingston Subdivision”

In April 2026 we set out how Alto would foreseeably erode intercity passenger service on the Kingston Subdivision. Alto’s own June 2026 freight report now supplies the missing piece from the proponent’s side: a business case in which that erosion is not a risk to be managed but a source of value to be captured. Read the April brief →

The finding in brief

In June 2026 Alto published a report, High-Speed Rail and Freight Capacity (CPCS in association with HDR), whose central benefit is the capacity freed by lowering the number of passenger trains on the shared CN corridor between Toronto and Montreal — the Kingston Subdivision that carries VIA Rail through Oshawa, Cobourg, Belleville, Kingston, Brockville and Cornwall.

The benefit grows as passenger service shrinks. In the report’s own words it “would be shared between passenger and freight, depending on the level of passenger rail services that may be maintained on the CN corridor.” The party positioned to decide how much survives is Alto’s own development partner, the Cadence consortium — also slated to operate the corridor’s existing passenger trains. The risk falls squarely on VIA Rail.

The report is right about one thing: separating passenger and freight traffic relieves both. But Alto achieves that separation by removing the passengers. A dedicated passenger spine along the same corridor achieves the same separation while keeping the lakeshore served — the constructive alternative set out below.

↓ Download the full brief (PDF)

The Freight Report

What the report claims

The report’s stated purpose is to show how Alto could “generate economic and strategic benefits for freight rail by lowering passenger traffic on the shared corridor.” It documents that the Toronto–Montreal segment runs on CN-owned track with a passenger-to-freight mix close to 50-50, and that passenger trains — because of higher speeds and precise scheduling — consume more track capacity than freight trains.

From this it assembles a set of claimed freight benefits: deferred or avoided capital investment in the CN corridor; headroom to “protect for” 55 per cent higher freight volumes over 30 years; induced freight demand and mode shift; new rail-adjacent industrial development; and roughly $90 million a year in avoided societal costs from shifting one daily intermodal train off Highway 401. Every one of these flows from the same source: fewer passenger trains on the shared line.

The Mechanism

The benefit is the removal of passenger trains

The report is explicit that the enabling condition is fewer passenger trains, and it ties the size of the avoided-investment benefit directly to how much passenger service is cut: the benefit “would be shared between passenger and freight, depending on the level of passenger rail services that may be maintained on the CN corridor.” Read plainly, the fewer passenger paths retained on the Kingston Subdivision, the larger the freight benefit Alto can claim.

The report then treats the retreat of passenger rail as an inducement to development, suggesting that reducing the volume of passenger trains may signal to industry that rail-adjacent parcels have become more desirable. Yet the same report opens with a disclaimer that its introduction is “not assumed to result in the discontinuation of local passenger rail services.” These two positions cannot both hold at full strength: the benefit is defined as the capacity released by removing passenger trains, while the disclaimer promises they will not be removed. The gap is bridged only by soft language — and by recasting intercity trains as “local offerings” that feed the high-speed line.

Who Benefits, and How

Who gains from fewer VIA trains

Freight does gain — that much is the report’s central claim: CN, the freight railway, avoids the spending it would otherwise need to expand its own line. But CN does not decide how much VIA service survives, and it is not the only party that gains. The consortium positioned to make that decision, Cadence, runs no freight and earns nothing from it — its stake is in Alto. So the pressure to thin VIA’s service comes not from freight alone, but from four further interests the report’s framing keeps in the background.

Alto’s ridership depends on it

Cadence is paid to fill Alto, whose business case rests on very high ridership: a target of 24 million passengers a year by 2055 — roughly eight times the three million or so the corridor carries today. The only independent modelling of the route (University of Toronto’s Munk School) projects about 9 to 10 million, and a reference-class adjustment for the ~65 per cent overstatement typical of rail forecasts lands near 8 million. As a single concessionaire with no open-access competition, Cadence has every reason to price for yield, not volume — making a cheaper conventional train on the same corridor competition to be minimized, not preserved.

It makes the case for building Alto look better

The report’s headline “avoided investment” benefit is explicitly larger the more passenger service is cut, inflating the benefit-cost ratio used to justify the project — the very project that gives the consortium’s contract its reason to exist.

It lowers the subsidy the government pays

VIA Rail’s Toronto–Montreal corridor service ran an operating shortfall of about $117 million in 2025 — roughly $50 of public subsidy per passenger, at a corridor cost-recovery ratio near two-thirds (VIA Rail, 2025 Annual Report). Shrinking that service, or folding it into the Alto concession, reduces what the federal funder pays; the party deciding the corridor’s future is also the party writing that cheque.

It sheds the cost of using CN’s track

Passenger trains on the Kingston Subdivision run on CN-owned track under access and cost-sharing arrangements — including, as the report notes, payments to CN to maintain track at passenger speeds. Moving intercity trains onto Alto’s dedicated line sheds those payments.

The gains flow to Cadence, to CN, and to the federal treasury. VIA Rail — and the passengers between Toronto and Montreal — bear the loss.

The Consequence

The risk to VIA Rail

What Alto describes is two passenger railways on one corridor. A dedicated high-speed line, built and operated by Cadence, would carry the fast intercity market. What remains on the Kingston Subdivision — the trains that serve Oshawa through Cornwall — is left as a residual “local” service, running between freight trains on CN-owned track, with no committed frequency and no protected floor.

Under the project’s public-private structure, even that residual service is not assured to remain with VIA Rail: the existing corridor passenger operations, designated the “Local Services” in the procurement, are slated to pass to the same Cadence consortium as feeders to the high-speed line. And this is not a distant hypothetical. VIA Rail’s corridor on-time performance has already collapsed — from 72 per cent to 30 per cent inside a single year — as passenger trains are squeezed on infrastructure the operator does not own.

The National Dimension

The risk reaches the whole network

The danger does not stop at the lakeshore. The Quebec City–Windsor corridor is not merely VIA Rail’s busiest route — it is the financial engine of the entire national network. More than 90 per cent of VIA’s passengers, and about 80 per cent of its revenue, come from this one corridor (VIA Rail, 2025 Annual Report). That revenue is what helps sustain the long-distance and regional trains connecting the rest of the country — Vancouver and Prince Rupert, the Prairies, Churchill, and the Maritimes.

Hand the corridor’s ridership and revenue to a private consortium, and VIA is left, in the words of the federal NDP transport critic Taylor Bachrach, with “the crumbs” — a fraction of the revenue it uses to operate rail across Canada. Alto’s own answer is that corridor services will “eventually” be “integrated with Alto services into a single network”; asked what the loss of that revenue would mean for VIA, the proponent did not say. The choice being made on the busiest corridor, in other words, quietly decides the future of passenger trains in places thousands of kilometres away. CBC News reported the warning.

A Constructive Alternative

A straighter, quieter line

The freight report identifies a real prize: separating passenger and freight traffic on the Toronto–Montreal corridor relieves the mixed-traffic conflict that degrades both. The question is how that separation is achieved. Alto achieves it by removing the passengers — routing a 300 km/h greenfield line inland through Peterborough and Ottawa, past the lakeshore communities entirely, and leaving VIA’s corridor service to wither.

There is a straighter, quieter way to reach the same result. Build a dedicated, lower-speed passenger spine along the existing Toronto–Montreal transportation corridor — the lakeshore route the CN Kingston Subdivision and Highway 401 already follow. Give passengers their own tracks, engineered for reliable service at conventional-to-higher-performance speeds (up to about 200 km/h), and the passenger–freight conflict is resolved the same way — by separation — but without deleting the service the corridor’s communities depend on. The strong Toronto–Montreal market runs fast and reliably on the direct line; Ottawa and Quebec City are reached on upgraded existing track; and Kingston, Cobourg, Belleville, Brockville and Cornwall stay on the intercity network rather than being bypassed. The routing and demand-density case for this spine is set out in our companion brief, A Straighter Line. And because the spine stays in public hands, the fare revenue from the country’s busiest corridor keeps flowing to VIA rather than to a private concession — sustaining, rather than starving, the national network it helps fund.

Alto as planned	A dedicated passenger spine
A 300 km/h greenfield line detouring inland via Peterborough and Ottawa, roughly 900 km of all-new track.	A direct passenger line along the existing lakeshore corridor, far less new build, largely alongside the rail line and Highway 401 already there.
Cobourg, Belleville, Kingston, Brockville and Cornwall are bypassed entirely.	The lakeshore communities stay on the intercity network, served on the way through.
Today’s VIA corridor service is demoted to a residual “Local Service,” slated to the private concession, with no protected floor.	The corridor service is the spine — upgraded, reliable, and kept in the public interest.
Freight relief is delivered by removing passenger trains from the shared line.	Freight relief is delivered by giving passengers their own dedicated line within the existing corridor.
Operated by a single private consortium pricing for premium yield, with a $60–90 billion cost baseline.	Operated in the public interest at affordable conventional fares, at a fraction of the greenfield cost.
Corridor fare revenue flows to the private concession, weakening the cross-subsidy that helps fund VIA’s national network.	Corridor revenue stays in the public system, where it can keep supporting long-distance and regional service across Canada.

In plain language

The freight report is right that passengers and freight should not have to fight over the same tracks. But there are two ways to end that fight: take the passengers away, or give them their own line. Alto takes them away — and prices the loss as a benefit.

The alternative keeps the trains and separates the traffic: a dedicated passenger spine down the existing Toronto–Montreal corridor, reliable and affordable, serving the lakeshore towns Alto would leave behind. It delivers the genuine freight dividend the report identifies — without the vanishing train.

Sources

Primary sources

High-Speed Rail and Freight Capacity: Potential Freight Benefits of Alto (June 2026). Prepared for Alto by CPCS in association with HDR. Cited pages: 5, 6, 8, 11, 18, 19. Read the report.

VIA Rail on the Kingston Subdivision: Service Erosion, Funding Collapse, and the National Rail Risk from ALTO HSR (April 2026). ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative. Read the brief.

VIA Rail Canada, 2025 Annual Report — Toronto–Montreal corridor operating shortfall of roughly $117 million, per-passenger subsidy of about $50, and corridor cost recovery near two-thirds.

On the ridership targets: this Initiative’s ridership analysis, setting Alto’s stated 24 million (2055) and 43 million (2084) figures against the corridor’s current ridership of roughly three million; the University of Toronto Munk School (Global Economic Policy Lab) independent projection of about 9 to 10 million; and the reference-class forecasting literature (Flyvbjerg) finding rail ridership overstated by an average of 65 per cent.

On the operating model and the transfer of corridor “Local Services” to the private consortium: Government of Canada, “Canada is getting high-speed rail” (news release, 19 February 2025); Transport Action Canada, “Cadence wins $3.9B High-Speed Rail development contract” (2025).

On the national-network risk: A. Kurjata, “NDP warns privatizing high-speed rail from Toronto to Quebec could kill passenger trains in rest of Canada,” CBC News (19 February 2025) — corridor revenue as roughly 80 per cent of VIA’s total; MP Taylor Bachrach’s warning on cross-subsidy of national service.

A Straighter Line (June 2026). ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative — routing and reference-class demand-density analysis for the dedicated passenger spine.

June 30, 2026

Tag: VIA rail

Two incompatible traffic types share one corridor

North America and Europe run railways in opposite ways

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

What about CP? It runs on its own track

Entanglement: two traffic types, one track

Freight trains

Passenger trains

Separation: give each traffic type its own path

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

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

The host railway (CN)

Shippers and supply chain

The public

Why ALTO cannot capture the freight dividend

The concept in eight parts

3.1 — North America runs the opposite railway

3.2 — CN is the incumbent, and it is constrained

3.3 — CP is not a party to the conflict

3.4 — Entanglement is the root cause

3.5 — Separation is the design principle

3.6 — Build one, make one free

3.7 — HPFR lands on a motivated beneficiary

3.8 — ALTO cannot capture it

Canada’s Rail Exceptionalism

Canada’s passenger trains are guests on someone else’s railway

Three different things people call “priority”

1. Priority written into law

2. A neutral referee decides

3. Whoever owns the track wins

How Canada stacks up against the G7

Why new trains won’t fix this

This is a political choice, not a technical one

Three tools — any one would help

A law that puts passengers first

A neutral track owner

An independent referee

The complete comparison, with sources

Key sources

Would an ALTO Stop Help Kingston?

Six versions of Kingston’s railway

Why Kingston already rides the train

It gets two sets of trains, not one

The station serves a region, not a city

The population is unusually inclined to take the train

But that ridership is hard to charge a premium for

Two things worth being clear about

How the numbers were worked out

Two possible futures for today’s trains

Replacement

Both together

What is assumed rather than known

Where the speed gain goes

More trains cannot fix it on its own

The fare premium matters more than the timetable

How many trains would it actually take?

What if you just made today’s trains faster?

The comparison that matters

Speed gives diminishing returns

A conservative figure, and a warning

A stop is not the same as service

The two things ALTO has said do not fit together

A conventional railway does better here

Three commitments, and four documents

Four things that should be published

The finding that matters

Which Trains Stop in Kingston?

What an intermediate stop costs at 300 km/h

What Kingston City Council actually resolved

A new station is a gain only if the service Kingston has survives

The commercial logic has already been demonstrated once

The same reasoning, ten months later, from the other operator

The arithmetic Kingston should be doing is net

A long-standing advocate for high-speed rail reaches the same conclusions

Access time cancels the time saving

The net effect on both operators

Existing corridors before new right-of-way

“We cannot stop in all the communities” is a choice, not a constraint

What could still be settled before the Toronto–Ottawa route is published

Within ALTO’s authority to answer now