Canada is a country that relies a fair amount on air transportation sure sometimes you can take a train or a bus but with a trip from Halifax to Windsor Edmonton to Ottawa or Vancouver to Winnipeg all taking several days most people fly Calgary one of Canada's largest cities features zero Inter City rail service so in that case the choice has basically been made for you so then how are the airport Rail options in Canada's business-friendly province let's take a look this is RM Transit a Channel
about trains and sometimes also airports often bringing the two together now obviously Canada needs more and better Inter City rail including fast rail on the Quebec City Windsor Corridor daily cross country service from Toronto West and Montreal East ideally with trains built this century and ideally some form of Passenger rail service between Edmund Calgary and other Prairie cities but in the meantime Canada has gradually been connecting its airports up with rail first we got Vancouver then we
got Toronto and Montreal and Ottawa both have their own airport rail connections under construction in fact Toronto is even edging towards a second air Rail Link with the Eglington Cross Town West extension take that Melbourne Melbourne currently still doesn't have an airport train I feel bad for making fun of Melbourne for this good job on the Metro tunnel Melbourne better luck next time with the airport link airport rail links can be really good projects they often get dismissed as airport sh
uttles for the wealthy but that seems like the projection of someone who's only ever experienced the heo express which is an airport shuttle that doesn't go downtown for the wey of course the real good airport rail links are projects like the Reb or the Picadilly line or Vancouver's Canada Line these are all projects which provide really convenient links for people traveling from and to the airport with the city but also for workers who work at the airport to get to their job the reality is that
airports are centralized Suburban locations with tons of direct employment which makes them natural places to serve with high capacity Rapid Transit that crucially gets cars off the road but also really importantly helps bring down the carbon intensity of this very carbon intensive industry and of course yes these Services can be great for business and tourism and if your city is going to have tons of people visiting why not get them on public transit as opposed to on the roads in a taxi or ren
tal car it's good for everyone now it's fairly well known that albertan cities have quite substantial and very well-used light rail systems Calgary system for example more or less Remains the most used such system on the continent even while La Denver and Dallas all have bigger systems in bigger cities Calgary still moves more people these systems are Real Canadian success story that really makes me raise my eyebrows when people say Alberta is just like Texas and and what's exciting is that both
cities are doing big expansions okay mostly just Edmonton but both cities are doing some projects so you'd assume there are comprehensive trains to planes plans but there aren't airport trains in either of Alberta's big cities and as it turns out even while Montreal and Ottawa are building such Services neither of Alberta's big cities are so what's going on today and what should they do in Edmonton there is a semi decent excuse for the lack of an airport train which is that the airport is just
really far from the City Center Vancouver airport is about 10 km from the city center Toronto Pearson is about 20 Montreal is 15 Ottawa is about 10 but Edmonton's airport is 25 km south of the city center now on one hand I actually think it's kind of nice that at least one big Canadian city has an airport that's far from the city center which is nice because it means that large parts of Edmonton don't have low flying planes landing at the airport but it also means that getting to the airport pro
bably means getting in a car there is an airport bus and they even copied Montreal and called it the 747 but it runs once an hour for most of the day and only once every half hour during Peak periods that means that if you're unlucky you might have enough time to drive it downtown and back before the bus actually departs the airport at the very least Edmonton should have buses every 15 minutes to the airport to create an option that people actually want to take especially because with shoulder b
us Lings on the highway the buses should be able to fly along at at Rapid Transit speeds maybe you could even do double decker buses like Vancouver or Toronto do with some of their Highway buses clearly at some point there needs to be a rail extension of Edmonton's Capital light rail line down to the airport in fact it's already getting extended south from its current Terminus at Century Park all the way down to Heritage Valley which means the final L town to the airport is just 12 km and it is
in very easy environments near wide highways with lots of space to build which should also make it very cheap at the airport itself there should be a big comfortable up Express in Toronto style station with platform screen doors that keep passengers comfortable and warm while they're waiting for their train and like the Bergen tram system that I covered in a recent video the platform should be right in front of the airport terminal so it's the most obvious option for someone Landing in the city
for the first time ah there's a train I'll take that the situation in Calgary much as with the light rail expansion in that city is somehow worse while Calgary does yes have two city bus routes to the airport which provide a half decent service including the iconic 300 airport express bus route this is pretty bad when you realize that Calgary Airport is kind of going gang busters in 2023 Calgary Airport moved 18 million passengers which is surprisingly close to the number of passengers moved by
both Vancouver and by Montreal the airport is doing really well it opened its nice new international terminal in 2016 WestJet has its new 7 87s which it's using to fly all kinds of interesting International routes and to the detriment of Edmonton it seems like a lot of that air traffic is being sent through Calgary before going everywhere else in the world Calgary is also acting as a huge Logistics Hub not only for Alberta but also kind of for metro Vancouver since as UT talked about in one of h
is previous videos there is very scarce industrial land in the Lower Mainland so Calgary is benefiting a lot from a lot of BC Logistics being outsourced to Alberta and so given all of this and the fact that Calgary tends to be a bit of an overachiever it's really surprising to me that there isn't even a clear plan for an airport Rail Link on the books now there have certainly been proposals but they're just that proposals and at this point by the time anything is actually built to Calgary Intern
ational Airport its passenger numbers per year are going to be in the mid2 million range and yet I see the city sort of heading towards a trap there's been a lot of talk over the years about an airport people mover that would connect across from the green line to the airport and then to the blue line but that's just not the best way of serving the airport while automated people movers are common for connecting multiple terminals at huge airports like Frankfurt or Singapore the best practice for
air ra links is to bring the trains straight to the airport terminal so you don't have to use some intermediate mode of transportation to get to the train station now you might say well look at the us there are tons of airra type systems either at JFK or Oakland or Phoenix where you get on an automated people mover and it takes you to a local train station to head into town and of course that's true but a large part of why these systems exist is that funds previously weren't allowed to extend Tr
ansit directly to airports so there had to be this intermediate mode that was actually allowed to be funded to connect airports to transit systems but these rules have changed and the best airil links in the US are also just the ones that take the train straight to the terminal like the Chicago L going to oare or Marta going to Hartsfield Jackson in Atlanta internationally the biggest and best airports from Dubai to Paris Singapore to London and Hong Kong to Sydney all have direct airport rail l
inks that take the trains directly to the airport terminals no people mover to some station on the outskirts of the airport lands Calgary can and should plan for a similar setup and I see there being a natural three-phased approach which lets you do this Phase 1 takes the blue line to the airport it actually already ends quite close to the airport grounds at saddl toown so with a 6 km extension including through a tunnel under the Eastern Runway that was intelligently already built when the road
tunnel was built you can connect the blue line up to the airport terminals themselves this project should be under construction now and this wouldn't preclude a further extension of the Blue Line North to Redstone since the connection could operate as a shuttle but I would prefer it operate as a branch since you would be able to get a direct downtown to airport connection on the blue line every 15 minutes or so this would provide a frequent and consistent service that provides a one- seat ride
to East West and downtown Calgary in just 40 minutes and it would be a great option for tons of Travelers as well of course the trains wouldn't run at all hours so the 300 bus should be brought back as an overnight service that connects airport workers who might be working very early or very late shifts kind of helping to build caly into a big 24-hour hub airport that is always in action phase two of great transit to Calgary International Airport would be the express airport bamp train I talked
about this project in a previous video but it's really awesome essentially you'd utilize a short rail spur from the CP tracks running just west of the airport to run heavier trains like the Stadler flirt soon to be running in both Ottawa and Dallas on an express route every 15 minutes to downtown Calgary this would be your more premium business and tourist traveler train but it would also be the express to bamp option with a few trains every day extending from downtown Calgary all the way to the
lovely mountains and this wouldn't just be the tourism express it would also be the I don't want to spend an hour parking my car at B Express and this project has been going on for a long time so at this point I really would just like to see some movement the final third phase finishes the connections between Calgary Airport and the Calgary train system with an extension of the green line to the airport this project is probably at least 20 years away since we haven't even started construction o
n the southern leg of the green line yet but it's an important thing to plan for in the future it will provide more service and capacity to the airport as well as direct connections to North Central Calgary the Entertainment District and the new Flames Arena as well as the southeast with a train every 15 minutes or so actually serving the airport with the other trains on the green line continuing further north into the city all of these Transit connections would make Calgary International the be
st served by rail airport in Canada with 12 different trains per hour Fanning out across the city and providing a ton of direct links that would be the type of rail service that this growing city could grow into and best of all these connections could all be built fairly inexpensively no need to get on some people mover where you probably stand it weaves around the airport lands and then eventually you're dropped off at a Suburban sea train station where you need to go down some escalators and w
ait for another train the only other thing that I think is really important is the station design itself Toronto made the mistake of putting its up Express Station in a convenient location but one where adding additional rail connections is very difficult and what that's going to mean is that probably in the long term Toronto's Airport is going to have a bunch of rail connections but in different locations in the airport grounds now that's mostly fine for airport Travelers but it's really inconv
enient for the many people who might want to take a trip that just passes through the airport in Calgary that might be someone traveling from Martin Dale great name to Highland Park via the airport taking the blue line up to the airp airport and then the green line back down without a convenient connection at the airport this trip isn't going to be viable and this person will probably Drive since the buses in Calgary are somehow worse than the light rail expansion plans the airport rail station
in Calgary should be master planned so that all of the three different rail connections can all terminate side by side kind of like a traditional European rail terminal where people can walk out of the airport and choose their poison of three different rail routs to get them to downtown Calgary and the rest of the city the platforms could be right smack in the middle of the airport U with elevated walkways taking people to the terminals and room to add more terminal space around in the future si
nce there would be loads of air rail capacity to handle ridership growth so today Alberta doesn't have airport rail of any kind unless you count the Blackford extension of the Edmonton light rail system but its City should have some of the best airport rail services in North America since it cities already have some of the best light rail in North America oh and if you want to know what I think about a future highspeed rail link between Calgary Edmonton and their airports make sure to subscribe
and stay tuned for a future video thanks for watching
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