Western Standard - May 01, 2024


Alberta explores future of rail for 22nd Century


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

205.88235

Word count

1,771

Sentence count

173

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Premier Rachel Notley wants to build a high-speed rail line between Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta. I don t think this is an idea Alberta should be pursuing. High-speed trains are expensive and don t work in most places.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 almost not surprised but appalled, to see Premier Smith get up and start talking about high-speed
00:00:06.940 rail in Alberta. This is an idea that there are train fetishists out there. That's really what
00:00:12.620 they are. They've got a thing for trains. They love trains. They think they're great. Good for
00:00:17.360 you. You love those things. But it doesn't mean they're economically feasible. And they certainly
00:00:23.380 aren't economically feasible everywhere. Premier Smith's always loved trains. She even had a
00:00:28.760 restaurant in a train car for a while. But this is reeking of a pet project. This got studied,
00:00:35.660 I don't know, 12 years ago. We spent a bunch of money. We did a big study on it. And we found that
00:00:41.300 high-speed rail won't work in Alberta. It doesn't work. We would need, it felt at that time, a
00:00:47.180 population of about 10 million people. And the ticket prices, again, if you're guessing on it,
00:00:52.260 if it got built, might be in the range of $200 to get Calgary to Edmonton. It just doesn't work.
00:00:57.120 People keep talking about, and I've been debating them online. I don't believe in blindly following
00:01:02.260 things. You see, that's where people got so upset with me, because I was critiquing Daniel Smith.
00:01:06.660 Well, I love a lot of what Premier Smith is doing. I've been very supportive of it. But this one's a
00:01:10.940 stinker, guys. This is bad news. Do not start moving towards this. We studied it. They said it was
00:01:16.500 crap. Leave it alone. But she won't. And when they did the way they were talking so gushingly and
00:01:21.680 everything, they said, we're just studying it. No, they're starting the groundwork to move towards this.
00:01:25.540 I get other people saying, oh, but look at how it works in Japan. Look at how it works in
00:01:29.440 France. Yeah, well, let's look at that. Japan has what, 120 million people in an area that's only
00:01:36.460 a little bit bigger than half the size of Alberta. That's a rather big difference. We have four and
00:01:42.600 some million, maybe getting more towards five. Not even close, guys. Meanwhile, France, same sort of
00:01:49.580 thing. I think they have 60 million and far, far more dense. High-speed rail doesn't work for that.
00:01:56.540 Think of it. What if building that between Calgary and Edmonton? Okay. And let's say it
00:02:02.000 costs $10 billion. That means out of your pocket, right off the bat, and trust me, it'll cost more
00:02:06.920 than that. Think of expropriating all the land required. Think of all of the battles that'll
00:02:12.800 have to go on. The court challenges the rest. So let's say you got that right of way going. Then you
00:02:17.900 got the stations built. You got all that done. You got that train in. And let's say it was even
00:02:23.600 $10 billion. That means every man, woman, and child in Alberta will be shelling out about
00:02:28.160 $2,000 each just to have it built. That's what the cost would come into. And of course,
00:02:32.960 not everybody pays taxes. So realistically, if you're a middle-class taxpayer, it's more
00:02:37.240 like you're going to be shouldering about $3,000 of that. And then you're going to have to pay
00:02:41.480 a couple hundred to ride this thing. Maybe. Or it'll be subsidized down. So you'll pay all the
00:02:47.480 time whether you ride it or not. And then get a relatively cheaper ticket. We don't need this.
00:02:52.480 It's ridiculous. Get on and people say Highway 2 is so crowded and nasty. Yes, it is. So expand it.
00:02:58.720 Look at the vehicles on Highway 2 in Alberta. Not all of them are going all the way from Calgary to
00:03:04.040 Edmonton. Some of them are going Calgary to Panoka. Some of them are going Panoka to Westlock,
00:03:09.740 you know, and past Edmonton, things like that. And they're people with vehicles. They're people
00:03:12.980 with families. They're people with luggage. You really want to go through, OK, I'm going to go
00:03:16.760 from Calgary to Edmonton to visit Aunt Edna there. And I'll take the two kids. So they'll say it's a
00:03:22.320 family of four. OK, we're going to take an Uber and pay that price. Or we'll drive to this train
00:03:27.200 station and pay for parking. You know, check in, check our luggage, spend $100 a head. So it's $400
00:03:33.320 one way to get the family up there without including the Uber and parking costs. And you get to the
00:03:38.360 other side in Edmonton, maybe half an hour earlier than you would have. You just bloody drove, even
00:03:43.440 if it's a high speed train, because you had to stop Red Deer. And then you got to get an Uber,
00:03:48.640 get in that, go all the way to Aunt Edna's. And then you're stuck without a vehicle for your visit.
00:03:52.140 You know, you got to listen to her in terminal stories about her bad hip and things. And you 0.99
00:03:56.120 can't even make an excuse saying, I'm going to hop in the car and go to the liquor store because
00:04:00.560 you took the train. Look, guys, it's going to be a very limited market. And then I've had others
00:04:06.940 talk about it. Look at Via Rail in Canada. It's a catastrophe. It's heavily, heavily subsidized.
00:04:13.200 And it's terrible service. And then there's other people saying, well, that's because they
00:04:17.140 have to share the tracks with CP and they don't get priority routing and things like that. Well,
00:04:21.940 okay. But then when we want to start talking about costs, when you're talking about, say,
00:04:27.460 some people saying, well, we would just do Banff to Calgary on a conventional rail. Okay.
00:04:32.680 Well, then you got to share the track. So it'll have the same problem as Via.
00:04:37.880 So you're dealing with CP because they own that track or, or you build another track. And again,
00:04:43.800 for people not familiar with Alberta, drive between Calgary and Banff. What have you got
00:04:48.700 going on there? For one, there's a whole bunch of mountains you're going to have to blast once you
00:04:51.660 get into the Canmore-Ekshaw region to get that track in there. The other part is you're going
00:04:57.160 through the Stony Reserve. Yes. A great big first nation you have to get through and it's their
00:05:02.500 land and they have every right to negotiate the best deal they can. And again, if you're familiar
00:05:06.940 with Calgary, we had a ring road that went through the Sutina Reserve. It took 40 years to negotiate
00:05:12.820 that. 40 years. It cost billions. And that's just a chunk of ring road. How much do you think the
00:05:18.980 Stony is going to want to have a railroad track doubled through their reserve? It ain't going to come
00:05:25.320 cheap. Look, we don't want to rule out other areas of transportation. We could talk about extending
00:05:30.280 the LRT in Calgary. It's not a real long shot anymore from the Northeast to get it to the airport
00:05:35.600 perhaps. And people have talked about, well, what about to Cochrane? Well, again, it's already moving
00:05:40.080 up that way up Crowchild. Keep creeping it up that way if you've got the demand and eventually you will
00:05:44.120 have train transit going those ways. But look in Calgary as well. We've got the green line they're
00:05:47.960 talking about. The green line. We've been talking about it for years. And they've been ripping up
00:05:52.700 downtown Calgary doing utility working crap on it for years. And it keeps, you know, they won't make
00:05:57.440 the budget bigger, which is five and some billion. But what they keep doing is making the green line
00:06:00.700 smaller. So, I mean, eventually this thing's only going to be one station at the rate they're going
00:06:05.220 and taxpayers are on the hook. We've got to remember the world's changing too. Part of the problem with
00:06:10.200 the green line, people don't work downtown like they used to. The office buildings in Calgary are still
00:06:14.660 nearly empty all over the place. We've got 30% vacancy going on down here. We've got another
00:06:19.240 boondoggle going on that showed with Gondek a little while ago, where they were converting an old 0.75
00:06:25.460 office building into residential units. And it turns out that the contractors aren't getting paid now and
00:06:31.520 it's getting stalled. And there's a big problem. Of course, the taxpayers are pumping millions into that
00:06:35.580 as well. Guys, people don't need to live downtown anymore. We haven't had to since the fax machine. That was
00:06:41.380 kind of the beginning of the end. You don't see the bike couriers running around with maps and documents
00:06:45.680 from oil company building to oil company building. In fact, a lot of people, that's one thing COVID
00:06:50.520 changed all around, was people realizing, I don't have to be down there all the time. I can work from
00:06:56.280 home. I can do a whole bunch of the stuff that I did at downtown on a laptop or on a computer in my
00:07:02.320 house. And they're doing that. Maybe not full-time, but part-time. So, why are we building more
00:07:06.840 infrastructure to suck everybody into a centralized city? The reality is we're growing out. Let's build to
00:07:13.020 accommodate that. Let's get realistic. Let's look at, here's where, okay, to be fair, where some of
00:07:19.640 the right can go a little wild at times. Let's look at complete communities, I think is the term
00:07:24.600 they often use. You know, a new development that'll be on the outside of a city, but it's higher density.
00:07:28.440 And it also has a lot of the services built in for that because that way people don't have to
00:07:32.600 commute into the center. So, make sure there's a school there, a medical facility there, retail space
00:07:37.540 there, all of those things so they don't have to move as far. Good stuff. It's just good planning.
00:07:42.200 And it could sell, but we got to go out, not in, not up. Again, the people, if you care about
00:07:49.660 affordable housing, high density stinks. Look to every high density city in North America. It's easy.
00:07:56.400 It's great. You can study these things online. Look at the heavyweight high density cities. Look at
00:08:00.780 Manhattan. Look at San Francisco. Look at Seattle. High density. Also expensive as all hell for renters and
00:08:11.780 homeowners. It's not kind of contrary, but they've built up. Yes. So it doesn't matter because the
00:08:17.780 areas where you can get affordables, where you build out, you want to be affordable, Las Vegas,
00:08:22.540 Phoenix, Houston, even Tennessee is getting really good out there. You know, these areas where they're
00:08:27.320 not fixated on this anti-suburban lunacy. They're just letting people build where they want to go.
00:08:34.220 Let people choose where they want to go.