The first thing I noticed about the Japanese train schedule was that the arrival times included the seconds. While looking to grab a train from the airport to my hotel in Akihabara, I checked the app and was astonished to find that it didn’t tell me that the next train was set to arrive in four minutes, it told me the next train was set to arrive in four minutes and 15 seconds.
Sure enough, exactly four minutes and 15 seconds later, a train came to a stop in front of me. The precision of the Japanese train system is almost unsettling. Especially coming from Canada, where the train schedule is more, let’s say, aspirational, than anything else. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a VIA train, a GO train, or the dreaded O-Train in Ottawa, the one thing you can be sure of is that if a train is listed to arrive in four minutes, you’ve got at least 10 minutes before you should even consider heading to the platform to wait another five.
So whenever I see local politicians banging on about GO Train service to Niagara, I can’t help but ask myself: why?
Why would we want this? Why would anyone use this? Why throw more tax dollars at such a busted system?
In early February, the government announced that two-way, all-day GO Train service was expanding to Mississauga and Milton. This announcement was immediately met with whinging from Niagara’s NDP MPPs who collectively put out a “what about us” press release. "Without a confirmed timeline, the municipalities of the Niagara Region cannot make plans to take full advantage of the economic benefits GO service expansion will provide,” said NDP MPP Jennie Stevens.
Sure, a “confirmed timeline” would be nice, but y'know what I’d like to see? A “confirmed” business case for these alleged “economic benefits” of GO service expansion into Niagara.
From what I can tell, the only concrete economic impact GO service has had is that every community which has received expanded GO service has seen their housing prices go through the roof. That’s just what Niagara needs rights now. Houses are just too damn affordable here.
We need GO service connecting us to the GTA so that even more Toronto people can set up shop here and drive housing prices higher.
The other thing they’re always prattling on about is how expanded GO service will provide some massive boost to our tourism sector. But that doesn’t really make any sense unless we’re going to build new train tracks right out to the wineries or the casinos or to a certain race track in Fort Erie.
But we’re not going to do that. So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of this hypothetical GTA tourist who is inexplicably using GO Train service to Niagara. You’ve taken the $45 train down here, you’ve made it to the weirdly semi-abandoned train station in a sketchy part of Niagara Falls. Now what? How do you get around? Bus service is dismal and unreliable. You could take a taxi or an Uber, but due to Niagara being geographically vast and spread out, you’d spend a fortune trying to get anywhere.
The logistics of using a GO Train for tourism purposes to Niagara simply don’t make sense, financial or otherwise.
If you ask me, every single dollar spent on trains in this country is a dollar wasted. Because we’re not going to build the Shinkansen. We don’t have the engineering know-how or the money. And even when we do throw billions at train projects, they still end in failure.
At last tally, Ottawa’s light rail transit project has cost $9 billion and it’s a complete disaster. The O-Train barely works. Trains break down if you look at them the wrong way.
The only transportation project worse than trains is that cockamamie plan to run hovercraft between Toronto and Niagara. That idea is best left in the same place the hovercraft will end up during one of our notorious wind storms: at the bottom of Lake Ontario.
James Culic wants to blend the two transit projects together and make hover-trains. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of the page, or precisely schedule a letter to the editor here.
