From Lagging to Leading: How Rail Can Catapult Canadian Cities into the Future
What's the best way of turning cities into Challenger Cities? Create the infrastructure that ensures lots of them, not just one.
Challenger Cities stand out by defying norms and pushing boundaries, but they don’t do it by sitting alone as islands. It’s hard for a Challenger City to know how to be an actual challenger when it isn’t connected up to others through frequent, convenient and affordable transit. Ideas are shared by going between places and experiencing them, by people being able to live in one place, but go to work or enjoy leisure in another.
This interconnectedness presents a challenge, and opportunity, in Canada. Connecting up our cities so people get to experience the best of each other, and foster a genuine sense of competition.
The Canadian Conundrum
Canada has vast geography, but in the grand scheme of things, Toronto is not very far from Montreal, Ottawa, New York City. An hour hop on a plane or the best part of a working day by car. There are trains, but they’re simply not competitive, in time, cost or passenger experience.
As I write this, if I wanted to go to Montreal from Toronto at the weekend, we’re looking at about $400+ round trip by train, $800+ by plane or 12 hours behind the wheel with a couple of tanks of gas. Not exactly compelling as an option. The result? You don’t go between the cities all too often, you go if you have to, if it can be expensed, you don’t really go on a whim.
The result is Toronto often doesn’t pick up on the best of Montreal, see what it does better, and vice versa. The same for New York, Detroit, Chicago. These cities aren’t really competing with each other to become better Challengers.
VIA Rail is prime example of this struggle. The trains are notoriously slow, typically delayed, because they lack the priority on tracks they a) don’t own, and b) are created for freight. They also have this maddeningly misguided obsession with trying to make the train experience feel like air travel, only slower. Throw in a fare structure that replicates Air Canada, encouraging people to arrive early to line up long before departure, and charging fees if you have more than one bag.
This approach undermines the very strengths of rail travel—spacious seating, the ability to move around, enjoy a beverage or dine with scenic views and a relaxed atmosphere. Instead of competing with airlines on their terms, which is hard as trains aren’t faster, we should be leveraging the unique advantages that trains offer, not installing more airline style seating.
The HFR Line: Progress and Pitfalls
The new High-Frequency Rail (HFR) line promises to revolutionise train travel in Canada, giving passenger traffic a faster, dedicated and higher capacity corridor, however progress is frustratingly slow. We’re still talking about maybe doing it, if the financial case can be made for the funding, not just getting shovels in the ground to make it a reality faster where it will actually have a financial impact.
Now let’s just imagine a Canada where you can travel between its two major cities every 30 minutes, in about 3 and a bit hours, in comfort, at reasonable cost that doesn’t require much advance planning. A Canada where Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and some places in-between work together as a unit, at the same time as competing to one up each other. Now what if we applied that same thing to bits of eastern seaboard as well as mid-west America.
The Trap of Economic Justification by Spreadsheet
Like many large-scale transit projects, it’s entangled in the economic case—a web of made-up numbers and projections trying to quantify the intangible benefits in Microsoft Excel. This focus on economic justification often stifles innovation and overlooks the core value of a great transit experience. Most economists and transit planners still see the act of travel as entirely unproductive time, and often not valuing the demand that infrastructure will induce, instead focused on the data of what has happened in the past.
“The assumption we hold is that everyone on a train is economically useless, treating humans like they are freight, so we focus on speed where we’re hitting on the law of diminishing returns.” - Rory Sutherland
The single biggest waste instead is that this project (and many others like it) ends up bogged down by attempts to predict and quantify everything in a financial value in the absence of imagination. That means what gets created is either a web of speculative and exaggerated figures that claim to show the project's financial viability that is hard to believe in. Worse, they might go conservative in the fear of being wrong and end up sandbagging the whole thing so we can justify not doing it.
“By taking away the pressure to maximise a single metric [like speed, or revenue] and therefore throw away information that doesn’t relate to it, organisations could apply their decision making much more effectively. They could innovate more, design more sustainable solutions…” - Dan Davies
A business case is basically speculative and likely to never be right in the first place. We feel the need for something scientific looking so we feel safe, rather than just knowing that if you connect cities up better then both tend to prosper. Doing the obvious in this case is a career limiting move.
Quantifying the Unquantifiable
The problem with this economic case approach is that it attempts to quantify the unquantifiable. How do you put a price tag on the convenience of avoiding traffic, the comfort of a smooth and scenic ride, or the joy of a stress-free journey? These intangible benefits are the very essence of what makes not just trains appealing, but travel in the first place, yet they are often reduced to mere line items in a spreadsheet, if acknowledged at all. The focus on tangible, immediate returns ignores the long-term, profound impacts that a well-designed transit system can have on a city’s vibrancy, economy and quality of life.
Cities are nicer places to live when they’re well connected to other cities.
I’ve never written a more obvious sentence.
So why don’t we do this?
This fixation on economic metrics stifles innovation. When every decision must be justified by a projected return on investment, there is little room for creative thinking or bold experimentation. Innovative ideas that could significantly enhance the passenger experience may be dismissed if they don’t immediately show a clear financial payoff. This risk-averse mentality leads to safe, conventional solutions that fail to capture the imagination or meet the evolving needs of potential travellers. Better the devil we know, eh?
Overlooking Core Values
By focusing too much on economic justification, we overlook the core values that make great transit systems: comfort, convenience, reliability, speed (to a certain extent) and an enjoyable travel experience. These are the attributes that turn occasional riders into loyal patrons, or frequent fliers into train travellers, and they are often lost in the pursuit of financial efficiency.
Today, getting between Toronto and New York or Toronto and Montreal is a sufficient pain in the arse that unless one is a consultant or a banker on a project across the two cities, you might do it once or twice a year if you really want. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it ten times if less friction like price, time, inconvenience existed.
“On a train, time is something to be savoured, not so much a commodity to be spent.”
A great transit system should be seen as a public good that enhances quality of life, fosters connectivity and supports sustainable urban growth. The true value of a robust transit system lies in its ability to connect people, reduce environmental impact and stimulate economic development in ways that are not always immediately measurable.
A New Approach
To break free from this trap, we need to adopt a new approach to planning and developing transit projects. This approach should recognise the inherent value of a well-designed transit system by prioritising the passenger experience and embrace multiple diverse propositions rather than a single solution designed for the ‘average’ passenger.
Imagine if we approached train travel the way Disney designs theme parks for parents as well as children, Apple creates electronic devices for a tech nerd as well as your mother, IKEA does furniture for students renting and middle class homeowners, Dutch Bros does coffee, LEGO does toys, Inbox makes work pods, or Gordon Ramsay does a new restaurant, Lucid does a car … I could go on. These entities understand that the value of what they offer goes beyond numbers. It's about the experience, the journey and the intangible benefits that make their offerings irresistible for many different types of customer.
(what we might see soon on Polish trains … beyond ubiquitously airline style seating )
Each of these brands would likely think differently to the usual government and transit types when it comes to the ticketing, pricing, fare policies, station experience, seating, catering, loyalty, baggage, onward travel and so on.
That might mean we see trains with video conferencing or meeting pods, maybe we get couches for families, the return of the dining car, stations with podcasting studios, play areas for kids, maker spaces, theatres, actually integrated onward public transit, mini museum exhibits, stations or carriages with customised soundscapes. All things that might not maximise return on a spreadsheet, but appeal to the cares, passions, needs of slightly irrational human beings that don’t neatly fit the model.
To truly transform train travel in Canada we need to focus on creating an experience so compelling that choosing any other mode of travel would seem irrational, especially over those distances that don’t really suit an aeroplane or a car. The journey itself becomes a reason to travel, not just a means to an end. This vision requires a shift in mindset from policymakers, urban planners and transit authorities from the stale blinkered view of the world today. We must move away from rigid economic models and embrace a holistic approach that values the passenger experience above anything else. Do that, and the economic case takes care of itself. To the above point, a bit more Disney or LEGO, a bit less government ministerial bronze.
So what?
If we can shift this mindset, we create the conditions for a network of Challenger Cities connected by trains that are destinations in themselves, fostering a culture of competition between them, not to mention innovation in transit systems that hold them together.
In a country beholden to congested highways and an airline duopoly, perhaps a future lies not in trying to mimic the airline experiences we all hate, but in reimagining what train travel can be, maybe a bit of what it once was, but also with a healthy dose of how people see it differently from the periphery. By treating trains as experiences to be cherished, the engineering challenge of maximising speed diminishes, and for a much lower cost, something more compelling emerges.
That way Toronto isn’t on it’s own little island disconnected from it’s collaborators and competitors in Montreal, Ottawa, New York, Boston, Chicago and beyond.