dave

nice summary of the current state of Canada's Alto high speed rail project: https://www.hsrail.org/blog/the-latest-on-alto-north-americas-third-high-speed-line/

I'm excited that they're going for the japanese model of dedicated, sealed right-of-way as opposed to the european model of shared lines (which is also what the US northeast corridor does, to the detriment of the acela service.)

I highly recommend canadian rail advocates read "dream super express: a cultural history of the world's first bullet train" by jessamyn abel because the problems haven't changed. opposition/concerns about alto are the same as the tokaido shinkansen. landowner issues, farmland divided, cities fighting each other for a station, etc.

The Latest on Alto, North America's Third High-Speed Line | High Speed Rail Alliance

High Speed Rail Alliance
Apr 3 at 2:42pmWeb
Show threaddave1d ago

one thing that the book goes into is station placement. when the tokaido shinkansen was being planned, they had some tough choices to make about stations.

should the line terminate at the existing tokyo station or should they build a new station on the outskirts? the latter would have been much easier, but they ultimately chose the difficult path of acquiring all of the very expensive land and building the necessary elevated structures to get the shinkansen into the existing station.

on the flip side, they did the opposite in yokohama, just outside of tokyo. rather than build in the dense part of yokohama, they built the station in a rice field away from the city center. because the shinkansen was successful as a whole, development sprung up around the station and caused an urban sprawl to encompass it, and soon enough the rice fields were gone.

the lesson I take from this is that it's worth the additional complexity and expense to get the train into the center of the largest cities being served so that it's a convenient service but there is some room for a "build it and they will come" attitude elsewhere, but be aware that you *will* be causing sprawl.

Show threaddave1d ago
as a counterpoint, the least used shinkansen station is okutsugaru-imabetsu in northern aomori, just before the seikan tunnel to hokkaido. the "build it and they will come" approach did not work at all here. the surrounding area is still very rural. it's just too far away from anything for even a shinkansen station to help it grow, I guess.
Show threadKaito23h ago

@dthompson "Buffalo was a quickly-growing city at the time, and it was believed that before long Central Terminal's area would become closer to the center of a sprawling metropolis of 1.5 million people." 😋

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Central_Terminal

Buffalo Central Terminal - Wikipedia

Show threadEllie14h ago

@dthompson "residents believe the east-west line will create a barrier between communities to its north and the south throughout Ontario" – Oh gosh, just like a motorway! But rail remains safer to cross due to the lack of access ramps. And foot/bike tunnels can be done cheaply.

#highspeedrail #onpoli #alto