The Interactive Megalopolis: A New Approach in Evaluating the Economic Benefits of High-Speed Ground Transportation Linkages

Ever since the emergence of High-Speed Ground Transportation (HSGT) in Japan and later, in Europe, the rationalization has focused on congestion relief requiring promoters to rely on modal diversions from aviation and road transport to justify the capital costs of building the new transportation mode. In North America, this approach has constrained government policies to pursue the most modest transportation technology improvements, if any at all. This paper presents an alternative view of HSGT, adapted for the evolving spatial distribution of people and employment in urban North America. Instead of focusing on attracting current intercity travelers to leave their vehicles at home or abandon air travel, we should be researching how these technologies can be adapted for a new, longer reaching urban mass transit system capable of fusing clustered metropolitan labour markets. There is one major challenge however: there are very few commuters today who travel between cities in Canada. So how do we project the potential ridership, estimate the revenue streams, and conduct the economic benefit cost analyses to justify such an expenditure? These pages will describe how the process of urbanization is creating an opportunity for a new mass transit transportation system that can merge the safety, reliability, cost, capacity, and convenience attributes of mass transit with the speed of HSGT technologies. A mass transit HSGT service will present urban planners with more options to address the urbanization paradox in the New Economy: whereas population growth is essential to a prosperous urban economy, a continuing influx of people challenges the ability of urban and transportation planners to accommodate these arriving workers and their families while maintaining an acceptable quality of life for all citizens. A new urban form for North America is presented: The Interactive Megalopolis. This concept features an “Accessibility” infrastructure composed of telecommunications and transportation to create a location neutral labour force in urban corridors. The benefits of a fused megalopolitan labour market in the Greater Toronto–Ottawa/Gatineau–Montréal triangle (TOM), could generate tens of billions of dollars every year in labour productivity improvements, a sum that may be sufficiently large to finance the capital cost for HSGT. A research program is proposed, and the Randstad conurbation is highlighted as a possible model for Canada to emulate.