Taking Another Look at High Speed Rail

"The cost would be comparable to air travel, unless taxpayers massively subsidize operating expenses."

Author

Aaron Freeman
August 06, 2025

(Photo: Bombardier)

I promise that there will be lots of material in this newsletter that you will love and agree with.

Just not today.

Today I’m going to write about the proposed high-speed rail (HSR) project that would run between Toronto and Quebec City.

Many HSR advocates feel their time has finally come with Prime Minister Carney’s prioritization of “major projects” that have provincial or territorial support. Like those governments, I’m reluctant to say no to a massive cheque for a clean transportation project in Canada’s busiest transportation corridor.

Most environmentalists have long supported the endeavour, since trains are much cleaner than fossil-fuelled air or road travel.

I personally travel from Toronto to Ottawa a dozen times a year, and while I take the train when I can make it work, departure schedules and work demands mean that I generally have to stay an extra night away from my family, so I fly more often than an environmentalist should.

I prefer taking the train, and if a high-speed option existed, I would take it based on the options that are available to me today. But we’re not building HSR for today.

It will take at least 15 years to build it, and likely much longer, despite the prime minister’s desire to build stuff faster. (Just ask our friends in California.) In that time, the Quebec and Ontario grids, which are already more than 90% emissions free, will be very close to 100%.

More on the GHGs in a minute. First, the bigger issue with HSR:

“It will very likely be a grossly expensive, less convenient, massively under-used white elephant.”

Aaron Freeman

The general assumption around high-speed rail is that the main competition will be with air travel. Taking into account commutes and wait times, door to door HSR will take about four hours from Toronto to Ottawa, about an hour faster than air travel. The cost would be comparable to air travel, unless taxpayers massively subsidize operating expenses.

The GHG benefits would be significant over air travel, although many now argue that electric and biofuel options for air travel will be fully deployed for commuter air travel in corridors like Toronto-Quebec City over the next decade. Rail would still be cleaner, but not to the same extent as today.  

But there’s a third option to air and HSR, and it will out-compete in terms of convenience, price, and in the end, even GHG reduction: A fully electric, self-driving car, powered by a net-zero grid, that picks me up and drops me off exactly where and when I need it to, for a third of the ticket cost.

The assumption is that we can seduce people away from polluting airplanes if they have a convenient alternative. But for those who are motivated by convenience (i.e., virtually all air travellers), will it really be a more pleasant option to get in your self-driving uber from home, get out at the train station, wait for your train on someone else’s schedule, and then get off at your destination just to get in another uber to get to your final destination. Doesn’t that sound a little too much like what you’re doing when you fly? From a convenience standpoint, why not just get in the self-driving car exactly when you damn well feel like it, set up your laptop, and arrive exactly where you need to be in one shot?

I know I haven’t won you over on the environmental benefits, but stay with me. Increasing car traffic undoubtedly creates new highway demand and sprawl. But there’s also a foregone opportunity associated with the $80 to $100 billion price tag of high speed rail — money that could do a lot of other things with environmental and social benefit – including the one thing that has the greatest potential to reduce traffic and sprawl.

By far the largest-ever federal investment in public transit was made over the past decade — $30 billion, recently renewed for the next decade for another $30B. What if we took that next tranche of $30 billion and doubled it? If you included operating costs within this investment, as most federal European national governments do in their transit funding, you’d address one of the biggest weaknesses in our transit systems, while immediately winning over mayors across the country.

If that sounds like a pretty good deal, you’ll love what I’m proposing next. Because for what HSR will cost, even after doubling that transit investment over the next decade, we would still have enough to also make transit free in every community that has a transit system across Canada. (See my basis for calculating this below.)

Unlike the far-off and highly speculative prospects of HSR, the transit option would immediately create a massive constituency that benefits from it right away, not 15 to 20 years from now. Unlike HSR’s small constituency of wealthy commuters, free and efficient transit nation-wide would eliminate the cost of getting to work and school – and in many cases the need for a car – for millions of everyday Canadians, especially those struggling to get out of poverty. Making transit a viable, comfortable and free alternative to the daily car commute would also do far more than HSR to limit sprawl and the need for highway investment.

Geographically, it would benefit every large and most small-to-mid-sized communities across Canada, not just a dozen communities concentrated in central Canada. The broader economic spin-offs of shorter commute times alone would be massive. (Just ask the Toronto Board of Trade.)  

From a GHG cost-per-tonne standpoint, there’s no contest. The proponent estimates HSR can shave 39 megatonnes of emissions. And given the above, this almost certainly over- estimates the number of people who would take rail, as well as the GHG impact of the alternatives that will be much cleaner by the time HSR is operational. But even if this estimate is true, at a likely price tag of $100B, the GHG reduction cost would be $5,000 per tonne.  There is literally no serious GHG reduction policy that has a cost that high. Oil and gas methane reduction costs about $11/tonne; building retrofits range from negative cost to about $50/tonne; and carbon direct-air capture schemes are as low as $100/tonne, to take a few examples. Public transit is not the best value from a strict GHG reduction standpoint, but it is still an order of magnitude less expensive than HSR.

Still, High Speed Rail has a romantic, European feel to it. We want to want it. Some enviros will argue that we should do both HSR and get serious about public transit. But as we pause on the eve of fiscal austerity the likes of which we haven’t seen in a generation, we’re going to have to make choices. And on my math, there are better alternatives to HSR.

Sources for the annual cost of free transit:

Based on the above figures and extrapolating for other regions, we can roughly but conservatively estimate that the cost of free transit across Canadian cities would be $7B/yr.

Coming up in the next Newsletter, I’ll look ahead on what to expect in the Fall session of Parliament.

Check out my social venture, Energy Neighbour if you’re thinking about making your home more energy efficient, including heat pumps, battery storage and/or rooftop solar. It’s a no-cost service that makes the process easier and helps get you the best value for your investment.

Some of my go-to independent media links:

You can find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Till next time,
Aaron Freeman

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