Quote:
Originally Posted by kool maudit
I am trying to find information about this and can't, but what I can find is very telling as to VIA's shittiness.
VIA transported 4.4 million passengers in 2017, which was seen as a success:
https://london.ctvnews.ca/via-rail-c...cade-1.3919894
DSB, its Danish equivalent, carried 195 million that year in a country smaller than Metro Toronto. So you can see why the Danish government really needs to keep its trains in good shape while Canada's does not.
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I'm no expert but doesn't DSB run both intercity trains and commuter trains? Then it would kind of be the equivalent of VIA plus the Toronto and Montreal commuter systems, which would be something like 94 million passengers per year. Your point stands though, that number is still a lot lower than what they have in Denmark.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kool maudit
As said above, though, Canada isn't Europe and like I said to my travel companion, Sweden is far from perfect and we could fit it into Manitoba with room left over for Denmark anyway so shut up.
This was after a beer or two.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by whatnext
Anyone used to European train travel is going to find Canadian train travel backwards. There’s too much geography and not enough people to ever make intercity really succeed now that cars and planes are available.
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Canadians love to say this kind of thing but it's not really relevant to the Windsor-Quebec corridor, which has roughly the same population as Scandinavia in a much smaller area.
Maybe that's the answer. Canadians love to come up with excuses like population density and weather and car culture and "we're not Europe", when all of these things have been dealt with successfully by other countries. Maybe the culture of excuses is part of what's holding us back. We can't have nice things, so why try?
Quote:
Originally Posted by acottawa
I think it is less the average density of the region that matters than the density of the cities along the route. Montreal and Toronto have about 1/6 the density of Paris for example.
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Copenhagen (urban area) has only 2/3 the population density of Toronto. Malmo has the same density as Ottawa. Oslo is less dense still. Stockholm, to be fair, is denser than any Canadian urban area - roughly 4000/sq km to Toronto's 3000. But clearly Paris levels of density are totally unnecessary for the kind of system kool maudit is talking about.
A lot more people in Canada would ride trains if we hadn't spent the last several decades hacking apart the system. Via Rail, for all its bizarre practices, is doing what it can with what limited resources it has. Trains between Toronto and Ottawa now run almost hourly, which is driving up ridership despite the strange boarding practices and abysmal on time performance. And the HFR project is apparently still inching its way through the political grind.