HANNAFORD: More railways, fewer cars... is that what's coming?

Stephenson’s Rocket started moving passengers around northern England nearly 200 years ago. The initial reaction was sceptical and not helped by the death of a Member of Parliament who found that unlike the horses that drew his carriage, there was no ‘give’ in an iron locomotive should a human body interrupt its passage.However, once people found that on a train they could make in one hour the journey that took five hours in a stage coach over England’s famously rutted roads, there was no turning back. Unless one really liked rutted roads and had all the time in the world, there was simply no alternative..Alternatives... hold that thought.Anyway, by 1850, British communities were connected by more than 12,000 kilometres of rail. A hundred years later, there was more than double that.I am sentimental about railways and things in general, that move and get dirty. And, for a few brief shining months in 1959, I was able with some effort to include a steam-driven train for part of my journey home from school.However, here's the connection to Alberta today. British Railways couldn’t live on sentiment and the pocket money of small boys. The explosion of British car ownership in the 1950s and the improved bus transportation available since the 1920s, was already killing the local railways in England, and a third of the British rail network carried a mere one per cent of the traffic.That one could drive to one’s door, rather than hoof it with your groceries the last half mile from the station, was as much an improvement in personal travel as the railways themselves had been a century before. The now-rebranded British Rail maintained mostly inter-city routes but even so, if the ‘target door’ wasn’t handy for the main railway station, people chose to drive anyway.And so we come to consider the Government of Alberta’s dream of a renaissance in rail travel around Alberta. As my friend and colleague Shaun Polczer reports, Premier Danielle Smith announced earlier today that her government would undertake “a master rail plan that will look forward decades and identify concrete actions that can be taken now as well, as in the future, to assess the feasibility of passenger rail in the province.”And, not just the regional (inter-city) routes. The plan is to include regional (inter-city), commuter and high-speed services.”The small boy in me wants to believe.But the jaded old hack in whose body that young soul has come to rest knows that a service that takes me from downtown Calgary to downtown Edmonton in an hour — were such despatch possible — does not complete the journey unless my business in Edmonton is comfortably close to the railway station there. If it is not, or if there is more than one stop on my trapline, I will want a car. In which case, I might as well take my own.That’s the regional (inter-city) case. What about commuter services? Would connecting Sherwood Park to Edmonton, or Airdrie, Cochrane and Okotoks to Calgary make sense? Perhaps. Presumably this is what Smith’s study is to determine. Intuitively, one suspects that extending Calgary’s C-train to the airport would be economically smart, as would a tourist service connecting the airport to Banff. Great!And yet, the British experience of railways suggests two things.First, if railways are to be the default commuter option, you need a high population density. Higher that is, than what Alberta has now. Maybe like Japan? Premier Smith recently suggested that Alberta would be home to 5 million people by 2050. I will be surprised if the study concludes this will be sufficient to support a province-wide railway network.Second, if the personal car is an option, people who can afford it will choose it.The question therefore, is what assumptions the planners will be asked to make about the future of car transportation for Alberta. It's a good question. The Trudeau Liberals mean to eliminate new gasoline-powered cars by 2035. Meanwhile, upon present indications, it is by no means assured that efforts will be successful to generate and deliver enough electricity to support the number of electric cars that Alberta's growing population will need. Maybe that should be the first question studied.Meanwhile, what alternatives does the Government of Alberta foresee?What exactly is going on here?

HANNAFORD: More railways, fewer cars... is that what's coming?

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