Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for giving us this wonderful opportunity to come to talk to you.
Our company, Alberta High-Speed Rail, is a privately owned company funded by western Canadian investors. Our ultimate purpose is to be the operator of the train system. Our management group consists of me.... I was with a Canadian bank for 29 years and was in commercial banking for 17 years. I seem to know a little bit about money and adding up sums.
We have three engineers on our staff. John Chaput has had about 29 years' experience with Calgary transit, working on the LRT system. He's a mechanical engineer. Ralph Garrett is an infrastructure engineer who has worked in Australia and Labrador. He worked on the Calgary transit LRT projects and ran operations. Frank Der is an electrical engineer who has extensive experience in the LRT and electrical engineering in all types of supplies.
Our vision is to create an economic unit of about 2.6 million people today, and as we're building a project for the next 50 to 100 years, this will rise to five million to ten million people in future generations. We think the point is to build ahead of the curve not behind the curve, and we have the opportunity to build this while it is not too difficult to get through the countryside and the cities.
Our view is that we are going to build this project once and build it right. That means we will go straight to a double-track, electrified, 300-kilometre-per-hour train, on a dedicated passenger highway, fully fenced in the countryside, with all grid crossings separated in the countryside. Within the cities, where we'll be travelling at lower speeds, we will have four gates on all crossings, and there will be fences to stop people from taking a fast trip across the tracks as a train approaches. Safety is paramount in the whole system.
We're going to start in Calgary along Ninth Avenue, where we'll have one or two station locations to pick up the downtown traffic. We will be running in the cities on CP land but not on their tracks. They are quite comfortable with this. So 19% of the route will be on that land. We will follow the CP tracks to the northern end of the city, where we will have a suburban station to pick up the traffic there. We will continue north past Airdrie, where we will climb over the CP tracks, move east, and run up the quarter section lying about one mile west of Highway 2. We will stop at Red Deer--which currently has 100,000 people and is looking to grow to 400,000--for one minute to offload and load passengers.
Continuing north we will go down the west side of Edmonton International Airport, climb over Highway 2 again, and rejoin the Canadian Pacific tracks at the south end of the city. With stations at the south end, we will then cross a high-level bridge to just beside the legislature building. That will connect to the LRT in Edmonton. At the south end we will also connect to the LRT with intermodal connections within a few hundred yards. We'd like to get through to the CN station in the centre of Edmonton so if in future years you wanted to expand it north or south you could do it. We want to build the spine, and future generations can add the legs.
We are looking at solving an Alberta challenge with an Alberta solution. The challenge is that whether you travel by air or car, it takes you three hours to get from Edmonton to Calgary. We have made a fair number of trips up the highway, and our day consists of six hours of driving and three hours of conductive time in Edmonton. If you can take a high-speed train that will get you from downtown Calgary to downtown Edmonton in 84 minutes, your day will consist of six hours of productive time and three hours of travelling. Whether you use that productive time to do more work, jog, play golf, or go home to see your family, you will improve the quality of your life and your productivity. We're looking to build a system that will serve Alberta and Canada for the next 100 years.
When you look at the two cities of Edmonton and Calgary, they're comparable; they complement each other. Edmonton is the legislative and government head of the province, the industrial heartland services the oil and gas industry and the Arctic, and all of the industrial and practical work for the tar sands is serviced from Edmonton.
Red Deer, in the middle, is servicing the industrial oil and gas divisions and the rural farming communities.
Calgary is the home of nearly every head office of the oil companies in Canada. All the major banks have their head offices there, and all the legal and other supports are in Calgary. It has also become a major transportation hub for the major box stores, and there is a considerable amount of IT work being done. Edmonton also has a tremendous amount of research.
By linking these two cities in 84 minutes, you are creating a virtual city. We've met, for instance, a university professor who's teaching at the U of A and who thinks he could teach there in the morning, leave the university, catch the train down to Calgary, have his lunch on the train, be at the U of C by about two o'clock, teach there in the afternoon and still be back home with his family by shortly after six o'clock. You cannot do that today.
Grandmothers I know would love to go up to their grandchildren's Christmas parties or their birthdays. They are not going to drive for six hours, however much they love them; it's just too much. But they will jump on a train and drive up for the afternoon and come back down.
If you look at the growth of the two cities, the Government of Alberta's projections indicate they are both going to grow to about 1.5-million plus people by 2050, and the metropolitan areas they're going to cover are going to get huge.
The main connection, of course, is the Queen Elizabeth II Highway, the QE2, or Highway 2, as it used to be called, a highway that was built in the 1960s. It has four lanes. It's very straight and very fast, but everybody we talk to finds that it's getting congested, just as we do.
To cope with this growth, the market assessment study put out by the Government of Alberta in July—and the press missed this particular part—looked at the growth of the alternative modes: air, bus, and highway. The highway mode was the one with the major traffic. Currently, when they surveyed the traffic on Highway 2, there were 47 million trips by automobile on that highway every year. That means people like us who drive the entire 300 kilometres, or someone who's commuting three miles to get to work and just uses Highway 2 for a short distance. They project that in 25 years, it will rise to 100 million, and by 2050 it will be close to 150 million trips on what is today a four-lane highway. Obviously, tremendous amounts of money will need to be spent to add up to four, six, or eight lanes.
When we were in Edmonton on one trip, someone suggested putting a highway down the median--that is, in the middle. Ralph Garrett and I looked at each other and smiled and we went and counted the overpasses on Highway 2. Between Edmonton and Red Deer, a 150 kilometre distance, there are 35 overpasses that cannot be expanded to six lanes, meaning they would all need to be expanded, at a going cost of $30 million to $35 million per interchange. At a mile per lane kilometre, to add 600 kilometres, you would be expending somewhere north of $1.5 billion, and it would still take you three hours to go from Calgary to Edmonton. In the wintertime, it will still be a stimulating experience—if that's the way you wish to describe a snowstorm on the prairies.
How does the high-speed rail accommodate growth? If we build a double-track electrified system—and it's a one-time-only expenditure—and run eight-car trains at 300 kilometres an hour, every hour, 14 hours a day, and run them five minutes apart.... And here, you shouldn't get concerned about tailgating on a railway, because as John tells me, you're doing five kilometres a minute, so at five minutes apart, the trains are 25 kilometres apart. I'm never 25 kilometres from the car in front of me on Highway 2, for certain. It might be 25 metres, John says. You can carry 50 million passengers on that system. The expansion and the added capacity will be paid for by the private sector that buys the trains. We can add more and longer trains and have more or less infinite capacity for growth on the railway without any more capital expenditure.
We are often told, Alberta doesn't have enough population. Denmark, Ireland, Finland, and Norway all have populations of less than 5.5 million people, and they're all building high-speed trains. What do they know that North America doesn't know? They know that trains are efficient people-movers, that trains are relaxing people-movers, that trains run on time, they don't get stuck in traffic, and they don't slide off the road in winter.
Norway is aiming to have high-speed trains replace internal air traffic. That is the carbon dioxide benefit they're looking for.
We, of course, have been talking to the Government of Alberta over the years. At one time, we sat down with 70 of the 83 MLAs and had a one-on-one conversation with them, telling them what I'm telling you today. At the end I asked if they were willing to support the investigation into high-speed rail with a view to having it implemented and built. One MLA, who's since retired, I believe is still thinking about it, and all the rest said yes.
Three polls in my file complement what Frank told you today. The vast majority of people think this should be done.
The question we get most often when we make presentations, and we've probably done 150 to groups, is why haven't we done it? It's not the question of why will it work, how will it do it, it's why do we not have it?
A question I often ask groups when I start is, how many people have travelled on a high-speed train? Forty-five percent put up their hands. How did you enjoy the experience? Great. Why can't we get it going in North America?
We're looking at an 84-minute travel time to create a virtual city of the three cities. I think it was you who said today that the average travel time in Toronto is 87 minutes of commute on a daily basis.
Sorry, was it seven minutes faster?