Yes, I'm all set to go.
Does everybody have their handout, with the little pictures? I'm more of a visual person. Sorry, I don't have a big paper to hand to you, but I figure you'll remember most of the details in-between, if you have some visual cues.
First of all, Alstom, as some of you know and some of you don't, has the largest fleet of high-speed trains in the world. We have the land speed record of steel-wheel rail vehicles, at close to 575 kilometres an hour, or almost 360 miles an hour.
Some of the other companies you know better. Bombardier, which people generally think of as primarily a Canadian company, has a rail transportation division that is German; they're based in Berlin. Siemens is also based out of Germany, in Nuremberg. And we're based out of Paris.
The transportation industry is focused out of Europe because somewhere close to 70% of the world market is in Europe. So the technology is driven from a European perspective and the way Europe functions.
In terms of us in Canada, most of our employees are in the Montreal area, somewhere around 1,000 people, I believe. We have two groups: power and transportation. By “transportation”, we mean rail transportation. And within rail transportation, we also have an information systems group, which essentially supports the rail industry. That's a global export business for us. Montreal is the global headquarters for that business, and we do passenger information and security systems globally out of there. We have about 2,500 employees in upstate New York, with the primary focus on the New York City market, because they buy a lot of subway cars and we supply a lot.
So I think that gives you a rough idea of who we are in Canada and North America.
If you turn to the slide that says “Why High Speed Rail?”, I think this really shows the driving force behind why people have chosen high-speed rail. If you look at the two maps I have there, you have a green map, which is just a plain geographic representation of France, and then a red map, which is how the geography has been transformed because of high-speed trains. You could say, “Oh, well, we can do this on airplanes”, but airplanes, really, are too expensive, and frankly they can't provide the medium-distance connections provided by rail. If you want to go within a 400- to 500-kilometre range, you're far better off moving people by train. The speeds from the starting to the end point, door to door, are faster.
Then, if you look at the other advantages, which are on the next slide, it's a question of safety. If you're moving people in the wintertime, do you want to have people moving essentially on dangerous roads, on which there are huge numbers of deaths per year? I don't know the statistics in Canada; perhaps you are more acquainted with them than I am. But when you consider the TGVs in France, no one has ever died on one of these trains. So from a pure safety perspective, this is the safest way to move people.
In terms of the envelope, or how much land you absorb, such as whether you need another Highway 401 to meet the future needs of demand in the Montreal to Toronto corridor, if you put in a rail system, you're going to use half of that footprint; and the greenhouse gas emissions and the carbon usage of high-speed rail are only going to be a fraction.
As Mario pointed out, the only really logical way to go forward with this is to go electric. The reason is that the operating costs of even a diesel-fuelled train relative to an electric train are about four to five times as much. Right now that doesn't seem to be such a big deal, but if Jeff Rubin is right and we see oil prices go back to $120 to $140 a barrel, and then move up from there.... It's not going to happen overnight, as we're in a recession, which has given us a bit of a breathing space, but I think within a decade we could be, in real terms, in that range again. If we are, then the demand for transportation will be suppressed because of the fact that it will be costing so much to move people.
I think those are some of the main reasons why the Europeans.... If you look at the next page, you can see the evolution in Europe to 2010. Their whole network has changed and developed from 2001. Essentially, they started off with a few small links between major cities. Then they kept on expanding them. By 2010, which is just around the corner, they'll have major linkages between almost all European countries.
Even Russia has linkages from Moscow to Helsinki through St. Petersburg. Siemens has one leg of that, from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and we have from St. Petersburg to Helsinki. It just depended on the orders that the government placed.
If you look into the future, that network is being expanded, and expanded again. You have to ask, why is it so attractive over there, even in Russia, and we haven't moved here? I think there are some historical reasons for that.
When we essentially privatized CN, instead of doing what Europeans do--namely, they keep all of the rail infrastructure as part of government property and then give operating licences--we did the opposite. We gave away all the property. Then we gave an operating licence to the passenger service, which means passenger service is dependent completely on CN and CP for access and therefore gets second priority.
In Europe, the first priority is passengers. The second priority is freight. As a result, you see quite a different operational scenario. You see much better technology for signalling and train control throughout the entire system. You also see track that is of much better quality, because it's government property. It's just like the highway system. They don't differentiate between the two.
Those are some of the fundamental reasons why they have a different set-up than we do. I'm not judging the way we do it here versus there, but those are what drove different sets of decisions.
If we want to have high-speed lines, we can operate in mixed traffic with freight, but that will mean either having lower speeds or controlling the quality of the train tracks. You will also have to do more grade separation, and grade separation really becomes the big driving cost.
Some people ask how much it would cost to electrify the whole line. Well, that's really nothing. For vehicles, electrification is small potatoes. The big cost is the land and then the grade separation. It's really a question of constructing bridges so that roads can go over the tracks and people won't be wandering into the right-of-way. These trains move so fast, you don't see them coming. You don't hear them coming. They're just on you. If you're going 300 kilometres an hour, you have no time to stop.
So if you're going to operate on the same corridors as CN between Montreal and Ottawa, you're going to have to dedicate part of that right-of-way just for high-speed trains. Otherwise, you're going to keep bumping into the freight trains or slowing down.
How long does it take to build the system? Well, from the time you make a decision to actually anything happening, it's usually about a year to a year and a half of design activity. After that, construction would take in the range of five to six years at a reasonable time speed. Before that, you actually have to figure out how you're going to tender the contract. You have to acquire the right-of-way. So you're really more or less in a ten-year program to do this.
If you're looking forward and saying we should have a contingency plan in place just in case oil prices double, or in case they triple, then you need to have a lot of these fundamental things done in the meantime. Even if you want to build a highway, you need to make sure that you have that space. It's kind of good to get the corridor defined, acquired, locked down, and then have all the designs in place. It costs very little to do that.
If oil prices never go up and people stop driving cars, then you're okay. If people keep driving cars and our population keeps growing, well, the highways will get jammed up and the death rate will go up. Oil prices look like they will go up as well.
So it makes sense to have some vision and think ahead a little bit. I summed this up with a little bit of Alstom experience. We actually did the Acela program with Bombardier. It was a joint project and it's been very successful; in the northeast corridor, the numbers keep going up. Each year they keep investing more, and I think that's a precursor to the whole transportation strategy of President Obama, where he's defined different quarters in the U.S. George mentioned it briefly. I think the Americans are seeing this as a future vision. And I think it's a vision we should be sharing, not everywhere in Canada but in certain defined corridors where it appears that there is the passenger volume to support it. I think this would be a good thing to do.
I've just added onto the back a little bit of information about the Helsinki to St. Petersburg corridor so you could get a sense of what would be involved if we did have high-speed trains. This kind of reflects a similar kind of situation. I think St. Petersburg and Helsinki are actually smaller cities than Toronto and Montreal, so if they can justify doing it there, then I think there's justification for Canada as well.
That's it.