Quote:
Originally Posted by milomilo
What's the point of a daily rail service? It's useless. Any regional transit line should have a better frequency than that, if we expect people to use it. And if we don't expect people to use it, why build it?
For a Calgary - Edmonton line to be successful, it has to compete with cars, buses, and planes on some metric. Running a train on existing lines won't cut it, it will be worse than all of those in every way. So it needs substantial new infrastructure, which means spending big bucks. Which could be worth it, but stop the idea that running a crappy daily train is in any way a good use of funds is not useful.
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It is not for the major cities, sort of.
Think of it this way, lets say you want to go to the city for business. If you can get a train today, that gets you in today so that you can do business, and then hop on a train today to go home today, that is good, right? Now, what if you have to wait 2, 3 or more days for a train to go one way or the other? Not very practical, is it? Spending a night in a hotel is reasonable, but multiple days? Not very.
Another group of people are the weekend travelers. For me, I live about a 4 hour drive from Toronto. If I could take a train on Friday and come back on the Sunday, that would be great. Having a daily means I could.
These types of people are the ones that are not captured by thee Ocean or the Canadian as they do not come often enough. So what if it takes longer than driving. Not having to deal with traffic or parking is a reason to take the train.
Right now, outside of the the Corridor, the other trains are geared toward tourists or the remote communities. Maybe it needs to change to tourists, remote communities, business people, and weekend travelers.