EDMONTON — The province is again studying a high-speed passenger rail link between Calgary and Edmonton, reports the Calgary Sun.
“They will look at the financial viability and if the ridership would be there,” Alberta Transportation spokesman Trent Bancarz said of a study group invited by the provincial government to take the job.
“We could be looking at some results later this year.”
Alberta Transportation and Alberta Economic Development got together to commission a $50,000 study from the Van Horne Institute for International Transportation and Regulatory Issues about a month ago, Bancarz said.
“They’ve asked us for essentially a pre-feasibility study,” said Peter Wallis, president of the Calgary-based institute, associated with SAIT and the Universities of Alberta and Calgary.
“This is going to include a lot of parameters that we are trying right now to get our arms around.”
The recurring idea of a high-speed link got a boost last week after federal Health Minister Anne McLellan, an Edmonton MP, told the Sun it could fit the criteria for cash under a special $2-billion federal fund.
“All I’m saying is I think that is the kind of big quantum leap forward that we would like to support,” McLellan said.
The study timing is coincidental, Bancarz said.
“There’s nothing specific really driving it at this point. We monitor transportation issues and do things like this when it’s appropriate.”
Past studies, including two by the province, have derailed the idea.
“The last (provincial) one was in 1995, and it concluded it just wasn’t financially viable because there wouldn’t be enough passengers,” said Bancarz.
That study estimated the cost of a downtown-to-downtown link, with additional stops in south Edmonton and north Calgary, at $3 billion. The idea was also considered in the late 1990s by a Calgary business group that pegged its cost at $1 billion to $2 billion.
“That’s a very rough estimate,” said study group member Jerry Joynt, recruited by the late Bill Pratt, chief organizer of the 1988 Winter Olympics.
The unfinished effort was halted when Pratt died, but Joynt thinks such a link is inevitable, eventually.
“The writing is on the wall, with the growth between the cities. It was appropriate to start thinking about it because it could take 25 years to develop.”
Edmonton airports, which could lose passengers to such a link, also studied it in the late 1990s, concluding it would be financially viable 30 to 50 years from now.
So-called bullet trains run anywhere from 250 km/h to over 500 km/h.