I think that's a very valid question. Certainly the speeds that are being proposed for the high-frequency rail, at least as far as I interpret the current plans, which are preliminary, would improve the average speed between Toronto and Montreal to 130 kilometres per hour. It's not slow, and it is certainly much faster than the current service.
However, compared to what we see in European countries that have invested in high-speed rail, it is quite slow. Just to give you some examples, between Paris and Lyon, trains average 202 kilometres per hour. It's dramatically faster over that distance. Between Paris and Marseille, they average 215 kilometres per hour. The difference is key to explaining ridership on the corridor.
When we've looked comparatively at rail systems around the world, what we've found is that there is a dramatic improvement in ridership once the rail service between two cities goes below three hours. What's currently being proposed for the high-frequency rail project is service of about four hours—maybe three and a half hours, if we're lucky—to connect Toronto and Montreal. That is an improvement over the current situation, but it would not provoke a massive mode shift away from cars and flights of the kind that we've seen in corridors where high-speed rail has been integrated.
From my perspective, if we are thinking about the investment in the line as a once-in-a-lifetime investment, we have to be thinking of what it means to be choosing essentially to build a project that will intentionally not attract a large share of people out of cars and out of flights. From a cost-benefit perspective, that means decades of increased carbon emissions, decades of reduced accessibility between Canada's two largest metropolitan areas and decades of congestion in the airports.