It was about seven minutes more than 84 minutes, the average commute in Toronto. We're saying you can commute from Edmonton to Calgary, 300 kilometres, in 84 minutes. That has to be a tremendous advantage to any economy, to any country.
I have in my files a study done by Ernest and Young, international chartered accountants. They are asked every two years by the European community to canvas some 800 corporations around the world--North America, Europe, and Asia. They asked them to rank, in order of importance, what is the first thing they look for when they relocate to a new area. Number one out of 16 options is transportation and infrastructure. We're talking about transportation and infrastructure here tonight.
The Japanese have their system. It's been running for 40 years. In that time they have carried seven billion passengers. They have had zero fatalities. The French system has carried quite a number of billions--I don't know how many. They have also had zero fatalities on their rail system. There is no highway that can give you that level of safety, and do it whether it's snowing, raining, foggy, or everybody's falling off the road because it's far too icy.
Japan also tracked how a high-speed rail corridor attracts business. The average Japanese non-high-speed-rail corridors are 20% lower than the high-speed corridors in attracting business. In Alberta, if we could attract 10% more business by having this kind of communication, whereby we are attractive to industries around the world, you'd increase the tax base, both at the provincial and the federal levels.
What are the benefits of high-speed rail? You cut the travel time in half. We can do it for an average of $80 one way. At the present moment, Red Arrow is charging $69 for three hours on the highway. I think if I can get there in half the time for $11 more, I'll be paying the extra money. It increases productivity. We're going to save somewhere around two million hours in travel time a year if we carry the number of passengers we're projecting. We'd use one-third of the land of a four-lane highway. We can reduce greenhouse gases by about 200,000 tonnes. We're a safer form of travel and we're an all-weather travel mode; we've already talked about those.
We're running a service, so the trains will start at six o'clock in the morning and the last train will leave at nine, or it might be ten, depending on the traffic. We're looking to serve the public, not to run the trains when we think they might be full. We're providing a service. The customer is number one. Safety is number one, ahead of customers. We want to have a good service for the general public, for our investors, for Alberta, and for Canada. We are looking to be the travel mode of choice. Taking the car, using the airport, will be second choice and a hardship, if I say it that badly.
There are two challenges in moving high-speed rail forward. When I first joined this project 10 years ago the fellow who preceded me as president said he talked to someone and nobody understood what he was trying to get at. It occurred to me there and then that the definition of real estate decisions is location, location, location. The definition of high-speed rail is education, education, education.
I still get e-mails from people telling me it will never work, it's no good, you'll overload the electricity supply, you'll kill all the animals. I even had a phone call to say, “Well, are you going to put a fence up?” Yes, we're putting a fence up, all the way down, the same as through the Banff National Park--ten feet high, to keep all large animals and people off the track. You'll have grades separated all the way up, too.
The second one is government will. I recognized a while ago that with health, education, and infrastructure for highways, the day is never going to dawn in my lifetime when these three parts of government do not have a wish list as long as my arm or as long as any of your arms here. So to expect that to go away one day.... Even when we had all our surpluses in Alberta, you could say, “Well, we have an $8 billion surplus, surely we can build a railway”, but no, there's always precedence.
It gets down to what I thought when we started with this project. Governments, if I phone them and say I want to build a highway, build a school, do whatever, they can probably pull out the specs and the rules and regulations and send them to me by return e-mail. But if I phone them up and say I want to build a railway, well, they probably won't be able to answer me at all, because governments aren't very good at building railways, since they've never been asked to do so. It's foreign territory. And North America lives and dies by the automobile; that's the thinking.
We've been endeavouring to educate government. We go to them, talk to them, and we make suggestions. The suggestions, of course, got them to do the market assessment study, which is a ridership study. When it came in, it came in very much higher than our conservative view of the ridership and we were very pleased with that. It also said that over a 40-year life at a 300 kilometre an hour speed, it would give a $19 billion boost to the Alberta economy.
They also passed Bill 19 this year, which is the Land Assembly Project Area Act. It allows them to identify a project and then go and expropriate land for it. At the moment, we would like to see the government get this process of buying the land going. They have bought land in Calgary and in Edmonton for stations and these are already in place, but we need them to move ahead, because every year that passes, somebody will build a house in the way of our railway.
We need the shortest route for the fastest time and for the most benefit to the travellers, etc., but the government will is a difficult one, because there is no custom-built high-speed rail project in North America. The Acela is a compromise. No one has done what we're proposing to do, build a Greenfield Route specifically for high-speed rail. It is going to be a big decision for a government to make, but it will be a bold decision and it will be one on which they'll get congratulated, because they will be forward thinking, they will be building for the future, and they will be making Alberta and Canada a better place.
Basically, in listening to all the people at the Railway Association conference this week trying to build one in the Ontario corridor, you would have the Ontario and Quebec governments and the federal government and countless municipalities along that corridor. In Alberta, we have a very simple, straightforward job. We have one government, three cities, and a nice, flat, rolling prairie landscape to build on. There are no huge technical obstacles of any sort in our way.
If we can move this project ahead, it could become the template for how to build a high-speed rail once, and build it right, at a reasonable cost. With all of the expertise we have in mechanical infrastructure and electrical engineering, we've spent a considerable amount of time analyzing every part of this project, how the services would run, how the two stations would run, what we'd do for food services, and what all the equipment and capital costs are. Our assumptions and our estimates say that today $3 billion would get you this project running and going. As for the land assembly, it's difficult to say, but if we get down to the bottom line, we're talking about $50 million.
How are we moving ahead with the Government of Alberta presently saying we're on the wrong side of the ledger with all this red ink? We're continuing to move forward. In fact, tomorrow we are to meet with people in the private sector, because we think there are great opportunities for the private sector to create a consortium of corporations in all the fields that we require, to bring them all together to put the proposal to make this thing work.
The federal government can have a role to play. If you wish to send me a cheque, I'm a good Scotsman and I'll find a way to cash it.
Thank you very much.