Thank you, Mr. Chair. As a visitor to the committee, I appreciate the opportunity to ask a couple of questions.
It's good to see you again, Ms. Borges.
I've had a chance as well to travel to Japan, and the Shinkansen, the bullet train, is phenomenal technology. Obviously the density of population that Mr. Volpe alluded to—the corridor, the demographic, and the geographic area—is what we're studying. I grew up in Alberta, and the Edmonton-Calgary corridor has been studied, but nobody has come up with a viable economic or business case to date, even with that kind of concentrated population.
So I have a couple of questions. One is that we're looking at the ridership of rail versus all the other modes of transportation and at the expediency demanded by society: we need to get from point A to point B quickly. Is rail ridership on the increase?