Evidence of meeting #24 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was high-speed.
A recording is available from Parliament.
3:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Merv Tweed
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to meeting 24 of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are studying high-speed rail in Canada.
Joining us today live at our witness table is Mr. Richard Gilbert, consultant; and through video conference in Calgary, we have Mr. Allan Rowden.
3:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Merv Tweed
Welcome.
We also have Mr. Geoff Meggs, city councillor, City of Vancouver. Welcome.
3:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Merv Tweed
We will have you three people make your presentations. I think we'll start with Mr. Gilbert and go through the list. Then we'll have questions from the committee, if that's okay.
Mr. Gilbert, please begin.
June 9th, 2009 / 3:35 p.m.
Richard Gilbert Consultant, As an Individual
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
My name is Richard Gilbert. I'm an independent consultant. I work mostly on the intersection between transport and energy issues. I have current or recent clients in Europe, Asia, and North America. My main client over the last couple of decades has been the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, in Paris. My most recent assignment, which I just finished last week, was writing the electric vehicle technology roadmap for Canada for Natural Resources Canada and an industry steering committee.
I've been asked to talk to you today, I think--I got a call from your vice-chair--because, with Anthony Perl of Simon Fraser University, I wrote a book that was published at the end of 2007 or the beginning of last year called Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil. It's coming out in Canada in a revised version later this year and will be published by New Society Publishers on Gabriola Island, B.C.
This book looks to a future when oil is going to be scarce or expensive or both. It focuses on the U.S. and China, the most difficult first world country and the most difficult third world country. What we did in the book was propose massive rail expansion in both countries, including some higher-speed service, and we show how this could be achieved. Maybe because of our book or not, much of what we proposed has already begun to be put into effect.
I haven't worked much on rail issues in Canada, but I know them well, and I know Canada quite well. In spite of my accent, I lived in Toronto for 41 years. I've worked or am working or have worked in all 10 provinces. In the 1980s, I was president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, which is a position that gives its fortunate holder probably as good a grassroots view of Canada as any other in the country.
I'm on the side of the growing number of distinguished economists who believe that the immediate cause of the current global recession wasn't the subprime fiasco in the U.S. or the related and unrelated shenanigans on Wall Street. The immediate cause of our economic woes was the collapse of the auto industry in North America and elsewhere, brought on by the run-up in oil prices last year. It really began in 2006-07, but it reached a peak last year. This run-up in oil prices was a response to two things. One was supply constraints, and the other was growing demand, particularly in industrializing countries.
The response to that huge peak in oil prices was the collapse of the auto industry and then relief of the demand pressures on oil and oil products. Prices tumbled as a result, but they're on their way up again. They're on their way up again because the supply constraints, if anything, are worse, because investment in the oil industry has slowed down and has almost stopped. Demand is still pretty much down, but that's the reason the price is going up again.
As The Economist magazine pointed out in May, it's hard to find anybody in the oil industry at the moment who doesn't believe we're headed for an even higher price than we had last year, when the peak was just above $145 a barrel. They call it a giddy leap to that price. When that happens--and really, the question is when rather than whether--what's left of the auto industry will collapse again, and we'll have another recession, which we've always had when oil prices have peaked. In fact, since the Second World War, almost every recession has followed an oil price peak, and every oil price peak has been followed by a recession. They're pretty tightly linked.
My argument is that investing in electrified higher-speed rail is one of the things we can do to break out of this downward spiral, a spiral into what could be economic and social oblivion.
Electrification allows many things: rapid acceleration, regenerative breaking, recapturing some of that energy of movement. Use of renewable energy, like Calgary's light rail system, which is entirely fuelled by wind power, will make for interoperability with the results of the plans in the U.S. for their massive expansion of higher-speed rail. I say “higher speed” rather than “high speed” because even with efficient electrified rail there is a major penalty for high speed. Other things being equal, if you have a train that's moving at 320 kilometres an hour, which is the typical cruising speed in much of Europe for a high-speed train, it uses twice as much electrical energy as a train travelling at 225 kilometres an hour, which is the typical speed in northern Europe, in Scandinavia, and in some other countries.
As we move into an energy-constrained world, that huge energy difference will be important. Because you have a reduced higher speed, you don't have reduced travel times to the same degree. For example, if you had a service from Toronto to Montreal and there were three stops on the way, it would take two and a half hours to travel at 225 kilometres an hour at cruising speed, but it would take two hours at 320 kilometres an hour. Toronto to Ottawa would be two hours and one and a half hours. Calgary to Edmonton would take one and a half hours and a little over an hour. So the difference in time is much less than the difference in speed.
Higher speed rather than high speed means reduced capital costs, not by very much, but some reduced capital costs, certainly less noise for people near the tracks, and reduced environmental impacts.
More important for travellers than the higher speed are frequency, reliability, quality of ride, and other aspects of service. It's more important for them to know there's a train every 30 or 60 minutes for most hours of the day on each of these three routes, and many trains on many other routes.
The idea is that you can just turn up and travel. You can reserve a seat if you want to be sure of one. You can eat and sleep and work well on the train. You'll be part of binding the country together and you'll be helping to break the oil recession cycle that I mentioned earlier. You'll be helping to ensure that Canada functions when we do break the cycle and the prices of gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet kerosene stabilize at two or three times their present levels.
What about the costs of higher-speed rail? If you look at the Van Horne Institute study of the Calgary-Edmonton line, done in 2004, you'll see that electrified high-speed rail between Calgary and Edmonton would cost about $11.6 million per kilometre of two-way track, including the train sets. That's probably about $13.5 million a kilometre in today's dollars.
If you look at what's going on in the rest of the world, you will see that's really a very low estimate. The International Union of Railways looked at numerous actual and potential projects and identified a range in Canadian dollars of $17 million to $53 million a kilometre. The best North American equivalent is what is being proposed in California, which is a 1,300-kilometre line from Sacramento to San Diego, and that line works out at about $40 million per kilometre. We think that's the best guide. Indeed, in our book, Anthony Perl and I use $40 million U.S. as our working price per kilometre.
So those three routes that I mentioned--Toronto-Ottawa, Toronto-Montreal, and Calgary-Edmonton--would cost $50 billion at that price. Looked at another way, if you are borrowing at 5% over 30 years it would be $3.3 billion a year.
If you look at the finances of high-speed rail or higher-speed rail, you find that capital costs are usually three-quarters or more of total costs. So you wrap up all the operating costs and all the capital costs over a 30-year period and the costs of borrowing, and you find the capital costs are usually more than three-quarters of the total. They are a huge part of it. One of the exceptions is the Calgary-Edmonton study, but I think they underestimated capital costs there.
So using those numbers I've just given, you can figure out pretty easily that you need $10,000 per kilometre per day to cover your costs. I can do the math. You'll see my presentation; it's in there.
What does that translate to? Looking at your Treasury Board guideline for travelling, it is 50¢ a kilometre. It's not a bad guideline for looking at this. So that means you need 20,000 paying passengers passing each kilometre of track that you build in order to break even. And this may be a new concept, the idea of breaking even. But you can indeed break even on high-speed rail, if you figure it out. If you don't want to break even or if you don't want to have too many passengers on there, you can of course subsidize either the capital or the operating costs, or both.
Let's look at that 20,000 passengers per kilometre in context. VIA Rail presently carries, on its whole system, 13,000 passengers a day. That's well below the numbers we're talking about. As I said, you've got to have 20,000 per day passing each kilometre to cover its costs. But the scope for expansion of VIA or any other rail system is generally huge.
The only one of these three corridors we have good estimates for, or I should say good publicly available estimates for, in terms of traffic is the Calgary-Edmonton corridor. You can figure out that, on average, about 25,000 people move between Calgary and Edmonton--or more precisely, Calgary and Red Deer or Edmonton--and vice versa every day. That's 25,000. What you have to do is capture 20,000 of those to ride on the train. Now, of those 25,000, about 93% are going by car. A few are going by bus and some are going by air. The numbers would be a little bit different for Toronto-Ottawa and Toronto-Montreal, but not greatly different.
What would be the break-even point for gasoline? I did some calculations. I presented material at a conference in Red Deer in 2006 on this very topic. I did some calculations and concluded that gasoline would have to reach $1.60 a litre--and there would have to be a train--for most people to want to go by high-speed train, most people who were travelling from Calgary-Edmonton, Calgary-Red Deer, Red Deer-Edmonton, and vice versa.
So $1.60 for gasoline? In Calgary, and indeed in other places in Canada, gasoline touched $1.30 last summer. If you read Jeffrey Rubin's new book, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, you'll see where he says that we can expect $2 per litre for gasoline “in the near future”. And I think he means by about 2012. That's the price at which you have enough passengers on the Calgary-Edmonton line to cover not only its operating costs but also its capital costs over 30 years. If those numbers apply--and they probably do, but some are up and some are down--in terms of Toronto-Ottawa and Toronto-Montreal, then that would be about the break-even price for travel along those particular routes.
Your committee’s researcher asked that I add a few words about links between high-speed rail or higher-speed rail and local traffic at the ends of the line, or at the stations. And I have two rather contradictory thoughts on this matter.
The first is that high- or higher-speed rail is no different from any other rail service. It's better to have your terminals in city centres, as is the case in Montreal and Toronto and indeed everywhere else in the world where there is good rail service, rather than away from the city centre, as is the case in Ottawa or in Vancouver. You just make your station a transit hub. In Toronto I sit on the advisory committee for Union Station, where we're very much reinforcing Union Station as a transit hub. It's not well known that already many more people use Union Station every day than use Pearson Airport.
The other thought is that nevertheless, even though airports are at the edge of cities, high-speed rail links with major airports should be encouraged, as indeed they are in other countries, and there are two reasons for doing this. Aviation, more than any other mode, is going to be affected by the rises in oil prices that I talked about earlier. It's the most sensitive to the price of fuel, and we could see last year that the airlines were collapsing because of high fuel prices. Those went above the price of labour in 2007. We can see this year that they're collapsing because the economy is down, but also because the fuel price is going up again.
In our book, Anthony Perl and I examined this issue quite carefully, and we concluded--and remember we were focusing on the U.S. and China--that in the U.S. the number of airports with scheduled services would decline from approximately 330, where it is now, down to below 50 over the next couple of decades for the reasons that I've just given.
High-speed rail or higher-speed rail to airport sites will be very important. It will be important first to consolidate passengers at fewer and fewer airports, so as either Pearson Airport or Trudeau Airport closes down and international flights are only at the other one, then having high-speed connection between the two will facilitate that. But then as the airports are more and more commissioned, you're going to see, as we suggest in our book, that airports will become transportation hubs for people and, very importantly, for freight. I can expand on that during questions, Mr. Chairman, if you would like.
Thank you.
3:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Merv Tweed
Thank you very much.
Mr. Rowden, if you can hear me, we'll ask you to present.
3:50 p.m.
Consultant, As an Individual
Very good.
First of all, I'd like to thank you very much for having Mr. Gilbert speak first. He brought up a tremendous amount of points and made me very much aware of how much more I have to learn about railway and about high-speed rail.
My background is the resource industry, mining and geology and petroleum, and I've had a lifelong interest in railway. Like Mr. Gilbert, I've gone over the report for high-speed rail and its impact, and the suggestion on how it would help transportation in the corridor between Calgary and Edmonton.
I'm looking at his points on the price of oil. There were some discussions even earlier today that the efficient use of oil and electricity has a tremendous bearing on the cost of those two resources. I tend to agree, to a certain point, that the cost of fuel is really what's driving all the changes that we're concerned about in the economy and in transportation. By the same token, it becomes very much a dispute and a discussion--not an argument, but a discussion--in terms of what would be the cause of the present recession.
I have to turn around and defer to Mr. Gilbert there; he certainly has an awful lot more experience and has made a lot more effort in terms of study. I look forward to reading his books and his notes on where the premise comes from in terms of what the existing economic situation is.
For my part, my concern and interest comes from the point of view of the resource and the impact on the environment. I know from the previous notes that there were presentations by leading manufacturers on what works in Europe and how it's going to work here in Canada.
Like Mr. Gilbert, I have covered the country. I was born in Toronto. The only area in Canada that I have not worked in is the Maritimes. I've covered the whole of the Arctic and I've covered all of western Canada from both a mining and a petroleum side. As recently as the past year and a half, I was working on a project in Sudbury that was very much focused on the mining industry. When the whole commodities market collapsed, I ended up back in Calgary.
At this point in time, I'm very much on a learning curve. I don't want to tie up the committee while I try to explain where my interest is coming from, but it's very much focused on the interface of any of the methods that we are speaking of with what is already established infrastructure.
As early as this morning, we had another fatality outside of Calgary when a local train hit a car that was trying to go through the crossing. Our LRT, which we spoke of earlier, is solely powered by wind; it would be debatable as to what the source of the wind is. By the same token, it's being redesigned right now, because the major interfacing with the infrastructure is causing major problems. Locally we're developing a very sophisticated +15 level, but the focus is to turn around and put that same very efficient LRT system below the ground.
So I'm more concerned, from an engineering point of view, when we look at the system we are talking about, which is going to have an impact all across Canada, that it becomes very much something that is designed and fit for a purpose rather than an adaptation afterwards. The group I am working with is very experienced in rapid trains and rapid rail, and they also have concerns in being able to take systems that we are adapting to Canada as opposed to designing a system that would really enable everybody across the country to use it. The ideal situation we're faced with locally is still the amount of traffic that goes between Calgary and Edmonton. I agree that there is a very good situation for it, but whether or not a grounded system is part of what would fit for it, we're not quite sure.
Right now we're trying to make sure that the whole concept of what is the most efficient people mover is what we're working on. There are very many concerns about the efficiency of energy. There are a lot more experienced people than me who know that we lose a tremendous amount of energy in how we transport electricity and there is a huge consumption of energy when we produce oil. Just the way we use the oil lends itself to a great inefficiency. Those are the things that initially my comments would want to address: from an environmental side, we would give a lot of thought, not just a cursory thought but a lot of thought, to how any new system of any size is going to interface with the existing infrastructure.
I agree very much that the connection with the city centres is the most important part of any new system. When you look at the heavily populated areas of eastern Canada, there doesn't seem to be the same concern for the amount of land. I believe there were previous notes that suggested there would be a third corridor—you'd have a free corridor and a high-speed rail corridor and a traffic corridor. You are basically creating a third corridor to have a high-speed rail system. In western Canada, the use of land is very critical and, for lack of a description, it becomes very protected. So just how much land would be taken up by any one particular new system is part of the big concern. How it gets incorporated visually into the landscape is the other part of that issue.
As far as my comments would go, putting those on record right now would probably be my biggest concern. There is a tremendous amount of information that Mr. Gilbert went over that our group recognizes to a certain extent, and there are some other points we would probably have a varying opinion on. But as far as that goes, I think that would be sufficient for the time being.
I appreciate very much the invitation. Thank you for allowing me to have this opportunity to chat with you and join in with the group.
4 p.m.
City Councillor, City of Vancouver
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I also really appreciate the opportunity to appear today.
I'm not a rail expert, but I'd like to report to you briefly on a trip that I took on May 28 and May 29 with Mayor Gregor Robertson to Seattle and Portland to join Cascadia Rail Week, which is a joint project of a number of communities along the Amtrak rail corridor from Eugene, Oregon, to Vancouver, B.C. These communities see President Obama's $8 billion stimulus investment in high-speed rail as an unprecedented opportunity to realize their long-standing dream of high-speed or higher-speed passenger rail services all the way from Eugene to Vancouver.
State governments have already invested $800 million to $900 million along the corridor in the last 15 years. They've been rewarded with major gains in ridership, particularly between Seattle and Portland. On the trip that we participated in, municipal leaders as well as political leaders from the congressional level and from state legislatures travelled on that train to meet and talk about the possibilities.
During our meetings there were several important developments. One was that U.S. federal officials arrived to brief the Washington State Department of Transportation on how to structure their funding application for up to $800 million of this stimulus investment. The application has to be filed by June 17. Mayor Robertson signed a memorandum of agreement with Portland Mayor Sam Adams to promote passenger rail along the corridor with a view to laying the foundation for real high-speed rail. This memorandum is now being circulated to municipal leaders along the corridor for endorsement.
Finally, I think your committee's meetings and your hearings into the high-speed rail issue have really highlighted the opportunities there, but up to now, unless I'm mistaken, there hasn't been a lot of focus on the west coast potential. The Cascadia project has a very real prospect of success, and the potential economic and environmental benefits to Canada are obvious. We're talking about benefits that would flow long before the development of a true high-speed rail system.
However, Canada has so far refused to step up in the most basic way. Amtrak is looking to add a second train each day between Seattle and Vancouver. Ottawa has insisted that Amtrak pay the cost of customs and immigration clearance to bring that train across the border, so for the sake of about $1,500 a day, we're placing a huge question mark over Canada's interest in expanded tourism and business trade with the Pacific Northwest through the expansion of passenger rail.
So far, Minister of Public Safety Peter Van Loan has relented slightly, but only to the extent that he will waive the fees during the 2010 Olympic Games. The cost to Amtrak will be about half a million dollars per year, and the Washington State Department of Transportation estimates that the benefits to the Canadian economy from the expanded service could be up to $17 million annually. One estimate puts it even higher.
I'm going to be very brief. I have a number of very simple recommendations. I think they're cheap and cost-effective steps that would allow Canada to step up in the very short window that's left before they file their application and indicate our commitment to opening the door to expanded passenger rail, higher-speed rail, and even high-speed rail traffic to Vancouver.
The first recommendation is that the committee agree to urge Minister Van Loan to reconsider and waive the border fees for Amtrak. As The Vancouver Sun put it in a recent editorial, “These trains could have been rolling nine months ago. Further delay is foolish and continuing to insist on recovering direct costs is simply shortsighted.” It's quite an embarrassment as a Canadian to visit with Americans and have the fee held up as an obstacle to their efforts to achieve investments on their side of the line that would have direct Canadian benefits.
Second, past this improvement, I hope we can agree to urge the federal government to work with U.S. authorities to further streamline customs and immigration clearances on both sides of the border. The American situation is not perfect, and this streamlining would have the effect of reducing travel time between Seattle and Vancouver.
Third, I hope your committee will endorse the high-speed rail concept for the Cascadia corridor, which has been talked about and under development for almost 20 years, and call for Ottawa to support a coordinated strategy involving all B.C. stakeholders, including especially and very importantly our freight rail carriers, so that we can support the expansion of passenger rail without negatively impacting goods movement.
Finally, I think we should see if we can find agreement to recommend action by Ottawa as soon as possible, in cooperation with the Province of British Columbia, the involved railways, and municipalities, to confront the long-standing need for new investment in B.C. rail infrastructure on the north-south alignment. New investment is especially important for the 105-year-old Fraser River swing bridge crossing, which reduces the trains to 10 miles per hour, or something like 15 kilometres per hour, to get across the Fraser River. It's a major bottleneck, but it is now required for goods movement.
I'm not an expert in rail. I'd be happy to answer any questions about some of the other measures the Americans proposed that would be cheap and very cost-effective, would lead to an improvement in traffic, and, we believe, would lay the groundwork for much bigger investment down the road.
I thank you again for inviting me today.
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
Sukh Dhaliwal Liberal Newton—North Delta, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the panel members.
I would like to put my question to Mr. Meggs in particular, but first I would like to thank you, Councillor Meggs and Mayor Robertson, for taking a leadership role in this particular issue of the Amtrak railway.
You mentioned that we would like to reduce the travel time between Seattle and Vancouver. It's my understanding that the Conservative government committed some money earlier to upgrade the Delta part of the tracks. The provincial government has put $4.5 million into the construction of a new rail siding near Colebrook Road in Delta, with the Americans sharing the balance of the cost. What improvements do you see that can be made to reduce travel time using the existing fleet of trains?
4:05 p.m.
City Councillor, City of Vancouver
The Americans were very specific on this. Their goal, first of all, and I think it was reflected in Mr. Gilbert's comments, is to increase the frequency so that they would double the service between Vancouver and Seattle. Their application for a high-speed corridor lacks some coherence without the willingness on our part to facilitate the extra train.
The second thing is to improve on-time performance, but there are 10 to 15 minutes of savings available just by streamlining customs clearance. If passengers were able to check in and go through customs and immigration before they got on the train, as they would on an airplane, that would help. I'm told that on the American side the U.S. authorities still stop the train and go through to check on their side as the train proceeds into the United States. So if we opened the door on our side, they could perhaps change their security arrangements, not to reduce them but to streamline them a bit, and we would save quite a bit of time simply on that measure.
We carpooled down for this trip. We were about three hours. The train trip now is about four. So simply making those changes, without too many more investments, would start to bring the travel time close to what you experience with a regular border delay.
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
Sukh Dhaliwal Liberal Newton—North Delta, BC
You mentioned increasing the frequency to two trains and that the government is going to charge $1,500 in additional money. Does the Government of Canada charge operators for customs services at the airport or on the existing Vancouver-Seattle line?
4:05 p.m.
City Councillor, City of Vancouver
I'm not familiar with the precise details. My understanding is that it's rare to charge for the extra service. I think the argument in this case would be that they do not have people there at those times of day at the moment and would have to deploy them there. My argument would be that if that's the case, that's a reasonable investment to make to encourage this traffic.
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
Sukh Dhaliwal Liberal Newton—North Delta, BC
When I'm talking to my constituents of Newton--North Delta, the Surrey-Delta area, they're excited about this development of having two trains in there and, as you mentioned, bringing $17 million in investment a year into the Lower Mainland. In your feeling, how do the people in Vancouver and generally in the Lower Mainland feel about this economic opportunity that we will have?
4:05 p.m.
City Councillor, City of Vancouver
Well, all of the commentary in the newspapers has been universally positive and quite critical of the federal government for not responding in a more comprehensive way to the situation we see in front of us right now.
I think there are some rail experts who have raised some really important questions that have to be resolved before we could talk about getting to high-speed rail, but we could certainly improve the speeds on the current alignment, and that would have a big economic benefit. But we don't want to do anything that would upset the ability of our goods traffic to move back and forth correctly.
What's surprising to me as a relative newcomer is the lack of a coordinated approach, at any level, to the opportunities we see north and south. We've talked quite a bit about east and west with the gateway, but not the north-south option.
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
Sukh Dhaliwal Liberal Newton—North Delta, BC
So you strongly feel that this fee of $1,500 a day should be borne by this government to create a regional opportunity? How does the tourism industry feel about this $1,500?
4:10 p.m.
City Councillor, City of Vancouver
They're very much in favour of the investment, obviously, and they question why it hasn't happened already.
As I say, I really haven't seen anyone step forward and defend the decision not to invest money, particularly once the minister was prepared to find it for the Olympics. But it's very difficult for our friends in Washington State to make a strong pitch to Washington, D.C., if we're not even prepared or we're trying to charge people for the privilege of visiting Canada using a regular train. It just doesn't work. And there's a credibility problem for the Washington State officials, who will simply have to focus on the traffic down to Portland and Eugene and forget about us if we don't find some fairly quick resolution on our side.
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
Sukh Dhaliwal Liberal Newton—North Delta, BC
How do you see the American counterparts opening up to this idea, compared to how we are sitting here in Canada? We have a very small portion of that track, and it's only $1,500 a day additional money that we're talking about. Are the American counterparts willing to work with us even if the present government is not a partner in this particular project?
4:10 p.m.
City Councillor, City of Vancouver
Frankly, they're imploring us to work with them, and they were very excited to have Mayor Robertson there. Mayor Robertson is now hoping to take the issue before the TransLink council of mayors, which represents all the municipalities in the region. They've been working on this for a long time. Former Premier Mike Harcourt worked on possible new alignments for a high-speed train as long ago as the mid-1990s.
The work has gone ahead very slowly but steadily in the United States and has stalled here in Canada. The Fraser River bridge is one problem, and we have other difficulties to confront. They're hopeful, and so am I, that we'll find a way to coordinate our efforts and respond.
4:10 p.m.
Bloc
Mario Laframboise Bloc Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Gilbert, if I understand correctly, you expect that rising oil prices will put some pressure on the air transportation industry. You mentioned at the close of your presentation that in the United States, the number of major airports would shrink from 330 to 50. You also said that higher prices would have the same impact in Canada.
Did you in fact say that Montreal's Trudeau airport would no longer be a major airport, and that everything would be concentrated in Toronto?
4:10 p.m.
Consultant, As an Individual
I think I was even-handed and said that it could be one or the other, but I think that's quite far in the future. I think as far as looking at the success of high-speed rail goes, it is not so much the competition with air that you have to consider but the competition with the car. That's where the majority of your passengers are going to come from, at least on the shortest routes, because that's how people drive.
I mentioned the figures for Calgary-Edmonton. It's about 93% by car. That's where you have to think of attracting the passengers. Just trying to knock the airport industry is not very helpful. I raised the matter only because I was asked by the analyst to talk about how you would link with local traffic. This business of having connections to airports is part of that, and it does have benefits.
I would say that there is an issue in the northwest as well. Vancouver eventually is going to be competing with Seattle in particular, but also with other places, for a viable airport, and if it has good rail service, that could make all the difference.
4:15 p.m.
Bloc
Mario Laframboise Bloc Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC
I agree with you. Airports must become a hub for all travellers. I think that is the right approach to take, that is linking airports with high-speed rail service. You peg the cost of network electrification at $40 million per kilometre. You feel that the studies you consulted underestimated the costs in Canada. Is that correct?