Rail plan not up to speed

By PAUL BERTON

Last Updated: 1st June 2009, 4:46am

High-speed rail may sound like a fantasy, a pipe dream on a continent in love with the automobile, but it's coming to a city near you. The only question is when?

In his last federal budget, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced $400 million for Via Rail, to (among other things) reduce the train travel time between Toronto and Montreal to four hours. The irony, of course, is that's exactly how long the same trip took in 1975. In Canada, we're going backward, while much of the rest of the world goes forward.

While passenger travel between such cities as Calgary and Edmonton ended years ago, it has exploded across Europe and Asia. Trains in France and Japan, which have been at this since the 1970s, exceed speeds of 300 km/h. High-speed railways are being built across Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, China . . .

They are changing the nature of these economies, of cities, of regions, of the environment. They are transforming lifestyles, working and living habits.

These trains are safer, faster, easier, more comfortable, more environmentally friendly, and less expensive than travel by automobile or airplane. You needn't have experienced the misery of commercial airline travel or rush-hour traffic to know this.

"It's being done; it's just not being done here," said U.S. President Barack Obama in a historic speech last month in which he committed $8 billion US plus another $5 billion over five years to speeding up rail travel in the U.S.

It's just a start, but Obama has championed high-speed rail. We need someone in Canada to do the same. And if not high-speed rail, at least higher-speed rail, something attractive enough to take the pressure off our roads and airways -- let alone the atmosphere.

A Quebec City to Windsor project has long been discussed, as has one between Calgary and Edmonton. Other cities across the country need faster trains to connect with each other.

This will create jobs, save the environment, and save billions otherwise spent on roads and air corridors.

We simply cannot wait any longer.