Countries such as Canada, the UK, and Australia often struggle to build transit projects cost effectively, and a big part of this is a lack of in-house expertise at transit agencies. If a transit agency doesn’t have someone on hand who can draw up a plan or advise on a technical issue, they will typically hire an outside consultant, this is not only expensive, but it also probably doesn’t help build internal capability, so reliance on outsiders is maintained.
Now, sometimes consultants might make sense — there are some things that any organization might only have to do very infrequently and for which it doesn’t make sense to have someone on staff, but transit systems (at least in big cities) shouldn’t be doing any of the following infrequently.
- Building and maintaining electrification
- Upgrading signalling
- Rebuilding stations
- Expanding capacity on busy lines / services
Unfortunately though, even when a big city manages to figure things out, there is no guarantee that smaller cities will, or even other big cities.
In the Canadian case, a great example of this is GO Transit in Toronto — who has managed to buy up a ton of the network it operates across, and get most lines running an all-day hourly service or better (this is huge in the context of North America where most suburban rail runs a number of trips per day that can be counted on my hands). By comparison, the once fairly similar “EXO” commuter train network in Montreal has not been able to similarly buy up track space and expand service, which is obviously bad for Montreal and the country as a whole. The ideal situation would be EXO and GO pulling from the same team of experts who can apply solutions they find in one city to the other quite easily given the stakeholders, technical standards and the like are broadly similar. And of course, something similar could be said for VIA rail, which likely has some specialized expertise in things like maintaining aging rolling stock, but does not run nearly the same level of service as GO or manage building the same type of capital projects at similar frequency — such as new stations, as well as grade separations. And this is all on top of Ottawa, which has built a modern mainline railway with its O-Train Line 2!
The reality is that a number of different organizations in Canada (and other countries) are often trying to do the same things in parallel, and while they can share knowledge and communicate amongst themselves, having a more unified organization would likely be useful. I think this is a big part of the benefit of having an infrastructure owner-operator model as in the EU, because no matter where you are in France, or Germany, or Sweden, you will more or less build railways the same way. If other countries were to have the type of transportation systems seen in these European countries, we need to stop reinventing the wheel… several times over. There should probably be a national entity in a country like Canada or the US that can come up with solutions to transit problems or opportunities presented by cities, states, and provinces, drawing from experience on projects nationwide.
It’s been fairly well reported that in for, example, France, the RATP act as consultants for cities across the country when they are looking to build new transit. This not only makes building transit projects more efficient and cost effective, but it helps get projects that might not otherwise be financially viable over the line.
And you can see how this would make sense in cities across places like North America. A smaller city like Victoria or even Calgary probably doesn’t have the fiscal resources to go through the motions that Toronto has with GO Transit to figure out how to turn it into a modern railway (we have spent an enormous amount with… less impressive results than I’d like), but once Toronto figures it out, they could certainly emulate and build to the same standards.
So, I think the direction we need to move in is one where technical expertise and resources are shared at the widest applicable level, especially when good railways and transit should be a federal priority; regulating railways is a federal responsibility, and the federal government always contributes a large portion of the funds for new transit projects. It simply doesn’t make sense for those building and operating rail in Canada — namely Metrolinx — to be so far removed from those outlining the regulations and technical standards.
And the idea of setting national technical standards makes a lot of sense, and not just in Canada. From the Ontario Line, to the REM, to Sydney Metro and Melbourne’s suburban rail loop, similar projects with similar technical needs within a single country should adopt similar standards to increase the potential economies of scale that can be delivered in future maintenance and equipment orders. That would truly be a national approach to transit.
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